The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004). His relationship with Joan Miró.

The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004). His relationship with Joan Miró.

The French painter and photographer Henri Cartier- Bresson (Chantelup, France, 22-VIII-1908-Paris-2-VIII-2004) was educated at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. His first passion, which never completely abandoned, was to be a painter, and even in his later years, following a tip from Tériade, returned to the practice of drawing and painting.

From 1930 he devoted himself to photography and was originally associated with the Surrealist group, taking pictures of everyday objects (clothes hanging, windows) that resemble those of Man Ray, while collaborating as Jean Renoir camera. He traveled frequently and soon appeared photographs published in newspapers and magazines.

Documented the Spanish Civil War and during the Second World War he was imprisoned by the Germans for 35 months and after three attempts to escape fled to Paris and worked for the French Resistance, and made pictures with her insaparable Leica on the occupation and German withdrawal.

In 1945 he went to the office of U.S. information warfare, the documentary Le retour (The Return). That same year he founded Magnum Photos with Robert Capa, Seymour and other photographers, and Cartier-Bresson made photographic coverage of social documentary in various countries: India of Gandhi i Nehru, Mao’s China, Stalin’s USSR, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Franco’s Spain... on all everyday topics, which published in the magazine “Life” or in his earlier books, while initiating exhibitions in galleries and museums, being his first retrospective of the MOMA in New York in 1947 and arriving in 1955 to be the first photographer who exhibited at the Louvre in Paris. Along with Robert Doisneau was the most famous of the mid-twentieth century French photographer.

Thanks to its refined photographic technique not needed to cut the negative, but the positive obtained directly from the entire image, without frame or cut anything. Experienced an endless when looking through the viewfinder of his camera pleasure, composing knew rigorously observed gestures and juxtapositions of elements and fired at the precise moment in which all created a harmonious whole, capturing what he called moment or moment decisive (1952 ), because as he said “Our only moment of creation is that 1/125 seconds it takes the shutter to shoot” and “I prefer the photo-booth strips stuck on the window of a shop that passport photographs portraits perched” and the great photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, an unrepeatable moment of profound significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which give that fact its proper expression.

They are those little everyday moments of important personages of art and literature, such as Miró, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jose Bergamín, Colette, Samuel Beckett, Susan Sontag, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Alfred Stieglitz, Ezra Pound, Truman Capote or stars film or song as Marilyn Monroe, Edith Piaf or Isabelle Huppert, but also of anonymous people, like the Jewish photographed in Warsaw in 1931 which followed in 1999 its already old daughter -  “... the faces... everything is written on them ...”- on a long trip around the “universal human nature” through wars, revolutions, concentration camps, moments of happiness, misery and greatness of the individual.

He seems to know soon Miró, in Paris in the 30s. Their relationship was maintained over time, as proof that the artist made the cover for your photo book Les européens (1955). There are also three photos of Miró taken by Cartier-Bresson in 1972 at a foundry, the Fonderie T. Clémenti in Meudon, near Paris [The first publication p. 157 in Rose, Barbara. Joan Miró. A half century of great painting. “Vogue” 160 (XII-1972) 156-158 and 200. PML, PMG B 21, 22. The three photos in https://www.magnumphotos.com/Catalogue/Henri-Cartier-Bresson/1972/FRANCE-1972-NN146188.html]

He have published their photographic collections: The Decisive Moment (1952), Les européens (1955), The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1968), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1980), An inner silence. The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson (Electa, 2006).

Sources.

Internet.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson]

[http://www.henricartierbresson.org/index_en.htm]

Exhibitions.

<Cartier-Bresson. Drawing -Photography>. Zaragoza. Exhibition and Congress Center, Ibercaja (1993). Catalogue. Texts by Jean Leymarie; Henri Cartier-Bresson, cartoonist.

*<From the future to the past. Masterpieces of contemporary art>. Zaragoza. Patio de la Infanta, Ibercaja (May 22 to October 20, 2008). 66 works by 30 artists: Miró, Cartier-Bresson and others. 653 pp. Catalogue. Louis Deledicq. Biography (418) Jean Leymarie. Henri Cartier-Bresson, cartoonist (419-423).

<Cartier-Bresson>. Paris. MNAM (February 13 to June 9, 2014). His greater anthology.

Books.

AA.VV. Magnum Revolution. 65 years of fighting for freedom. Prestel. Munich. 2013. 65th anniversary of the famous photojournalism agency founded by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour. Text of John Lee Anderson, Revolutionary partners (44-45).

Cartier-Bresson, Henri. Les européens. Photographies. Éditions Verve. Paris. 1955. 140 pp. 114 photos. Cover: a lithograph by Joan Miró, printed by Mourlot .

Sire, Agnes; Nancy, Jean -Luc. An inner silence. The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Electa. Barcelona. 2006. 159 pp. Portrait of Miró at p. 104.