With a career defined by personal and creative transformations, AndréKertész (1894–1985) created a highly diverse oeuvre in terms of subject matter and style. His first inspiration came from his native Budapest, and he subsequently produced significant bodies of work in France and the United States. Throughout his life he maintained an ability to make the ordinary seem remarkable: “My work is inspired by my life. I express myself through my photographs. Everything that surrounds me provokes my feelings.”1 While still young, he was determined to become a photographer, and purchased an ICA box camera with 4.5 x 6 cm plates in 1912. During the first phase of his career, he documented the events of his daily life, ranging from everyday street scenes to a friend sleeping in a restaurant. While he thought he was simply capturing what he saw and felt, he turned out to be a pioneering photojournalist.
The Kertész portfolio in the Solari Foundation Collection was published in 1982 and consists of ten gelatin silver prints. They range in date from 1926 until 1939. All but one are images originally made in France (eight were from Paris), and the last, a single image from New York. These small prints represent a summary of his years in Paris.
Kertész enjoyed a comfortable upbringing, and his family expected him to go into business, but photography was his passion. During his Hungarian years, Kertész recorded everyday events, and while serving in the infantry of the Austro-Hungarian Army in eastern and central Europe during World War I, he still managed to photograph during rare moments of peace and normalcy. After an injury took him out of the front lines, he used his period
of recovery to develop some of the negatives he had made. At a time when many photographers preferred to work in the studio, the photographs he made as he traveled throughout Budapest reveal his deep appreciation for the ordinary residents of the city and the surrounding countryside. He continued to photograph for the next decade but had little financial success, as his work was not what commercial publishers wanted.
He moved to Paris in 1925, and relished the international community of artists he found there, which included many fellow Hungarians. Among his new friends were architect Adolf Loos and Dadaist Tristan Tzara. Kertész eagerly responded both to the photogenic nature of his new home, as well as to the developing modernist aesthetic. In 1928, he switched to a Leica,
a hand-held camera that gave him the freedom of movement to quickly capture the spontaneous scenes that continued to fascinate him. With his new equipment, he could now be far more productive than he could be with the glass plates he had used up until then.
Many of his most famous works were taken during his French years, and several are in the Solari Foundation Collection portfolio. His friendship with Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, a friend from the Café du Dôme, is celebrated in two prints. Chez Mondrian (1926) was made at the artist’s studio and its austere formality is enlivened by the curve of the artist’s hat hung on a peg on the wall, the vase with a single flower, and the elegant banister, in contrast to the rigid geometry of his paintings. The artist carefully arranged a series of circles in his 1926 image of Mondrian’s glasses and pipe, engaged by the utter simplicity of these ordinary objects. Both photographs reference the clarity and precision of Mondrian’s work. Kertész delighted in the vignettes he discovered as he roamed the city and its environs, creating unusual views of famous places, often with unorthodox angles as in Eiffel Tower (1929). Modernist fragmentation and fascination with shadow and pattern may be seen in both Stairs of Montmartre (1925) and Carrefour (1930). The latter was shot from above, and shows a horse-drawn cart turning at an intersection at Blois, followed by a bicyclist. The single portrait in the portfolio is the 1930 image of the writer Colette. The contorted pose of Satiric Dancer (1926) prefigures his famous 1933 series of nearly 200 works, exemplified by Distortion No. 40 (1933).
Although Kertész was gaining recognition for his work in Paris, with the changing political situation in Europe and war on the horizon, he decided to move to the United States in 1936. Hoping to make a living as a photographer, he signed a contract with the Keystone Agency, but left after a year. His aversion to working in the studio made him uneasy about under-taking the lucrative fashion and advertising commissions that were central to success during this period. The situation depressed him, and his mood may be seen in Melancholic Tulip, made three years after he arrived in America. A single blossom in a slender vase hangs downward. He freelanced, but that did not provide a steady income. His Jewish family background made returning to Europe dangerous. In 1941, the American government designated him an enemy alien, and he was forbidden to photograph outdoors.
In 1949, Condé Nast offered him a steady position with House and Garden, and by the time he left in 1962 he had made 3,000 images for them. Although it was difficult to find the time do his own work, recognition gradually came, and a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1946 helped establish his reputation.
Fork was originally made in Paris in 1928, and was widely exhibited. It was taken at the end of a dinner party at Fernand Léger’s studio, and remains an iconic example of modernist still life. Although the objects are utilitarian, a fork resting on the edge of a plate (both of which are cut off on either side), the composition has been carefully arranged, made dynamic with the play of shadows. That they are clean suggests that neither had been used for eating that night. Its play of formal elements gives these everyday objects a surprising expressive strength. The image was reproduced in the German magazine Uhu, accompanying an article on new photography, and Peter Bruckmann, a sponsor of the famous 1929 “Film und Foto” exhibition, used it as an advertisement for his silverware company.
Elizabeth Unbehaun
André Kertész, Fork, PARIS, n/p 1928/1981, gelatin silver print, 7.5 x 9 cm, SOLARI 91.004.009L