This remarkable exhibition, “The Visual Language of Modernity: The Early Photographs of André Kertész,” featured forty-three of the artist’s gelatin silver prints, almost all of which were made between 1926 and 1936—the years he spent in Paris after leaving his native Budapest. Kertész (1894–1985) was not simply a “photo-reporter,” as he styled himself when he moved to the City of Light, but an exquisite, inventive, and rigorous formalist whose images, even many decades later, still manage to feel strangely and unerringly fresh. His art made “the same demand for awareness,” to quote Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that Cézanne’s did, unsettling and discrediting preconceived notions of perception with a merciless form of looking.
In the show were portraits of many canonical artists—Brancusi, Calder, Chagall, Mondrian—and one of fellow Jewish photographer Edwin Rosskam, as well as photos of still lifes, cityscapes, and everyday people. Distortion #37 and Distortion #159, both 1933, are torqued, Brancusi-esque renderings of female nudes, pictures that seem more stylistically clever than phenomenologically disruptive. Yet Chairs in the American Library, Paris, 1928, and Paris from the Eiffel Tower, 1933, properly disorient the viewer: Both works are implicitly geometrical abstractions. However contained, the spaces depicted in them are sublime in their attenuated splendor. In the former, the shadows of an elaborately wrought window frame are cast onto a floor, extending beyond the room and, seemingly, into infinity. In the latter, the people perched high upon the famous Parisian landmark look down at a city that, from the artist’s vantage point, appears to bend and warp like overheated glass. Kertész was a master of drama: See the figures in On the Quais, Paris, 1926, and the row of lampposts in Place Gambetta, Paris, 1929, whose subjects function as repoussoir devices marking perspectival space.
Being a dyed-in-the-wool formalist, Kertész brings a certain indifference to people—and their inherent messiness—into his photographs, as the small, even trivialized figures in View by the Seine and Dieppe, both 1927, indicate. While he was still making representational art, Kertész’s lack of interest in the “all too human,” as Clement Greenberg dismissively characterized it, suggests that he was implicitly a purist, interested in the cool and controllable. For instance, a man might use the namesake utensil of Fork, Paris, 1928, to shovel vast quantities of greasy food into his hungry maw, but who would dare sully such an object, especially as the artist depicts it? By his estimation, it is a Platonic form, pristine and hypnotically curved—even the shadows it casts are uncannily clean. Meanwhile, the comically contorted woman in Satiric Dancer, 1926, is convulsively abstract, the angles of her white arms and legs at odds with the deep blacks of her dress, reminding us that a photograph, at its most fundamental, involves the insightful exploration of relationships between light and dark. The contrast of a coal-black locomotive racing across a vertiginous bridge surrounded by open white panels of space (Meudon, 1928) demonstrates that these compositional elements are at dialectical odds, irreconcilable to the extent of being enemies. The work also implies that Kertész was an abstract symbolist, and this point is made explicitly clear in Untitled (Chair & Horn), 1936, a refined union of unlike objects that calls to mind the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” as the proto-Surrealist/Dadaist Isidore Lucien Ducasse (aka Le Comte de Lautréamont) described it. Although Kertész had acquainted himself with a number of Dadaists during his time in France, his art eschewed the group’s nihilism, cynicism, and love of absurdity; he chose to distill the chaos of the modern world instead.
