| Brassai
Biography Wiki
| Brassai (Gyula Halasz) |
|---|
| Born |
Halasz Gyula
9 September 1899
Brassó, Transylvania, Austria-Hungary (Now Romania) |
| Died |
8 July 1984
Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France |
| Nationality |
Hungarian/French |
| Occupation |
Photographer |
| Religion |
N/A |
| Spouse |
Gilberte Brassai |
Brassaï (pseudonym of Gyula Halász) (9 September 1899–8 July 1984) was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century. He was one of the numerous Hungarian artists who flourished in Paris beginning between the World Wars.
In the early 21st century, the discovery of more than 200 letters and
hundreds of drawings and other items from the period 1940-1984 has
provided scholars with material for understanding his later life and
career.Early life and education
Gyula (Jules) Halász (the Western order of his name) was born in Brassó, Transsylvania, Kingdom of Hungary (since 1920Braşov), in Romania, to an Armenian mother and a Hungarian father. He grew up speaking Hungarian.[1] When he was three, his family lived in Paris for a year, while his father, a professor of French literature, taught at the Sorbonne.
As a young man, Gyula Halász studied painting and sculpture at the
Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Magyar Képzomuvészeti Egyetem) in Budapest. He joined a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served until the end of the First World War.
[edit] Career
In 1920, Halász went to Berlin, where he worked as a journalist for the Hungarian papers Keleti and Napkelet.[2] He started studies at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste), now Universität der Künste Berlin.
There he became friends with several older Hungarian artists and
writers, including the painters Lajos Tihanyi and Bertalan Pór, and the
writer György Bölöni, each of whom later moved to Paris and became part of the Hungarian circle.[3]
In 1924, Halasz moved to Paris, where he would live the rest of his
life. To learn the French language, he began teaching himself by reading
the works of Marcel Proust. Living among the gathering of young artists in the Montparnasse quarter, he took a job as a journalist. He soon became friends with the American writer Henry Miller, and the French writers Léon-Paul Fargue and Jacques Prévert. In the late 1920s, he lived in the same hotel as Tihanyi.[3]
Halász's job and his love of the city, whose streets he often
wandered late at night, led to photography. He first used it to
supplement some of his articles for more money, but rapidly explored the
city through this medium, in which he was tutored by his fellow
Hungarian André Kertész.
He later wrote that he used photography "in order to capture the beauty
of streets and gardens in the rain and fog, and to capture Paris by
night."[4] Using the name of his birthplace, Gyula Halász went by the pseudonym "Brassaï," which means "from Brasso."
Brassaï captured the essence of the city in his photographs, published as his first collection in 1933 book entitled Paris de nuit
(Paris by Night). His book gained great success, resulting in his being
called "the eye of Paris" in an essay by his friend Henry Miller. In
addition to photos of the seedier side of Paris, Brassai portrayed
scenes from the life of the city's high society, its intellectuals, its
ballet, and the grand operas. He had been befriended by a French family
who gave him access to the upper classes. Brassai photographed many of
his artist friends, including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, and several of the prominent writers of his time, such as Jean Genet and Henri Michaux.
Young Hungarian artists continued to arrive in Paris through the
1930s and the Hungarian circle absorbed most of them. Kertèsz emigrated
to New York in 1936. Brassai befriended many of the new arrivals,
including Ervin Marton,
a nephew of Tihanyi, whom he had been friends with since 1920. Marton
developed his own reputation in street photography in the 1940s and
1950s. Brassaï continued to earn a living with commercial work, also
taking photographs for the United States magazine Harper's Bazaar.[4] He was a founding member of the Rapho agency, created in Paris by Charles Rado in 1933.
Brassai's photographs brought him international fame. In 1948 he had a one-man show in the United States at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City, which traveled to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.[5] MOMA exhibited more of Brassai's works in 1953, 1956, and 1968.[2]
[edit] Marriage and family
In 1948 Brassai married Gilberte Boyer, a French woman. She worked
with him in supporting his photography. In 1949 he became a naturalized
French citizen after years of being stateless.[6]
[edit] Later career
In 1956, Brassai directed a film Tant qu'il y aura des bêtes (As long as there will be animals), shot at the Paris Vincennes Zoo. It won the "Most Original Film" award that year at the Cannes Film Festival. In the 1970s, he received French national awards for his artistic contributions and especially his photography.
Brassaï wrote 17 books and numerous articles, including the 1948 novel Histoire de Marie, published with an introduction by Henry Miller. Conversations with Picasso (19xx) was translated into 12 languages. His Letters to My Parents (1980), from his 20-year correspondence with his parents during his younger years in Paris, was published in Bucharest with the collaboration of his father, younger brother Kálmán, and Andre Horváth. Both books were translated into English and published in the late 1990s by the University of Chicago Press (see below).
After 1961, when he stopped taking photographs, Brassaï concentrated on sculpting in stone and bronze. Several tapestries were made from his designs based on his photographs of graffiti.
Brassaï died on July 8, 1984 in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Alpes-Maritimes in the south of France, and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.[4] The copyright representative for the Estate of Brassaï is the French photography agency, Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN),[7] which also manages more than 1,400 high-resolution scans of Brassaï's work.
[edit] Legacy and honors
- In 1960, French television produced the special, Brassai: The Eyes of a Man.[2]
- During the 1990s, MOMA sponsored a traveling show of Brassai's work that toured Australia and New Zealand, as well as several countries in South America.[2]
- 1999, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC held the first major US retrospective of his work: Brassaï: The Eye of Paris; it later toured to Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, California.
- 2000, after his widow Gilberte Brassai donated 200 works by Brassai to the Centre Georges Pompidou
in Paris, she helped organize a retrospective that year of his work;
these were added to the nearly 300 pieces held by the museum.[4]
- 2006, more than 500 vintage photos by Brassai were sold at auction to collectors and institutions for tens of thousands of euros, marking great interest in him in the first major sale since his death and that of his widow in 2005.[8]
- More than 200 letters and nearly 500 other items, including drawings
and postcards, were discovered in the early 2000s and brought to the Hungarian National Gallery.
The finder donated 40 letters to the museum and allowed them to make
copies of other items. The letters and art cast new light on Brassai's
career after 1940.[8]
- ^ About.com
"Brassaï's father was Hungarian, a professor of French Literature at
the University of Brassó, but his mother was of Armenian origin."
- ^ a b c d p. 8
- ^ a b [http://books.google.com/books?id=TTue2fyImSMC&pg=PA105&lpg=PA105&dq=Bertalan+Por&source=bl&ots=kEvP3NK32j&sig=YDHgOOFXNo1yH73o-EfSlETQLbQ&hl=en&ei=ky-FTNKXKNKHnQfjltXfAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=Bertalan%20Por&f=false Brassai, Letters to My Parents, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 241, accessed 6 Sep 2010
- ^ a b c d Alain Sayag and Lionel-Marie, eds., Brassai: The Monograph, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2000
- ^ "Brassai Biography", Photo-Seminars, accessed 2 Sep 2010
- ^ "Brassai", Prodan Romanian Cultural Foundation, accessed 2 Sep 2010
- ^ RMN Copyright Conditions (PDF)
- ^ a b Kincses, Károly. "Brassaï: The Hungarian Documents. A Chronology in Letters 1940–1984", The Hungarian Quarterly (188/2007), pp. 58-84, accessed 9 Sep 2010
[edit] Further reading
- Tucker, Anne Wilkes, with Richard Howard and Avis Berman. Brassai: The Eye of Paris. Houston, TX: Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 1997. ISBN 0810963809
[edit] External links
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