The Eye of Paris

IN 1930 HENRY Miller dubbed Brassai "The Eye of Paris." Nearly forty years later, long after the obscure young painter had become an internationally famous photographer, Lawrence Durrell could still write that Brassai was a "child of Paris, and in some way the city's most faithful biographer."

Brassai was born Gyula Halasz in 1900 in Brasso, a village in Hungarian Transylvania. He arrived in Paris in 1924 after art studies in Budapest and Berlin, determined to make his fortune as a painter. Not until the age of thirty did he hold a camera. His interest in photography grew quickly, however, as he discovered that with a camera he could capture and portray the restless energy and labyrinthine density of Paris. Finally he could fix forever the flickering images he saw in the subterranean night world of cafes and bars that so fascinated him. He became a photographer, he has written "because I am a noctambulist, and the aspects of the capital at night fired and excited me."

The young Hungarian took a version of the name Brasso as a pseudonym and for four decades he has photographed the streets and graffiti, nightclubs and their patrons, the artists, tramps and peasants of his adopted city. His pictures have become inextricably linked with the myth and mystique of Paris and have earned immortality for both the photographer and his subject.

Still, Brassai is not a parochial artist as the sixtytwo photographs on display in M.I.T.'s Hayden Gallery brilliantly prove. Brassai's works confront us as documents and as works of art. They present the appearance of a specific moment in history yet manage to escape a pernicious topicality. Brassai takes pictures that beckon us to return again and again, like his portrait of a peasant sleeping on a train, oblivious to the landscape whizzing by outside his window, his worn and grizzled head thrown back against the seat, his mouth a gaping black hole. Or his photograph of Kiki, a plump and painted chanteuse whose whole posture reveals her self-assured knowledge that all eyes in the tawdry cabaret are focused on her.

THE ORGANIZERS of the M.I.T. exhibit have deliberately chosen works that reveal the range and variety of Brassai's interests. There are scenes of Paris at night and portraits of Brassai's friends and fellow artists--Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Giacometti--surrounded in their studios by their paintings and tools. Several examples of Brassai's graffiti, pictures of the signs and symbols men have carved into or painted on the urban environment to proclaim their existence, are shown.

There is also a section devoted to twelve of Brassai's experiments with cliche verre. These pictures are perhaps the most interesting in the exhibit because they are the least known. The cliche verre process consists basically of scratching lines on a glass plate that has been covered with a thick emulsion and then placing the plate over photographic paper and exposing it to light. The light is able to penetrate through the scratch marks, but not the emulsion and creates a print on the paper. Brassai combined the man-made images created by cliche verre with mechanically produced photographs and created what he called "transmutations." Most of the pictures in the M.I.T. show are photographs of nudes which have been drawn over and changed into abstract designs reminiscent of Picasso's cubist distortions.

No matter what subject or technique Brassai chooses to explore, certain characteristics--seriousness, sensitivity to nuances of form and mood, and a sly sense of irony--are constants in his work. Brassai does not take "candid shots." He does not seek to catch his subject off guard or in moments of transition or private distress. Instead he watches patiently for those moments of equipoise when all that is most permanent and most characteristic is most visible in the face and pose of his sitter. An angry couple sit turned away from each other in a bar, their faces sullen masks lined with bitterness and resignation. The tension between them is palpable yet there are no harsh words or violent gestures, only a deadly calm.

At no time does Brassai treat his sitters as objects of derision or freaks. His pimps and prostitutes are denizens of a bizarre twilight world but within this world they have dignity and command respect. Bijou stares at the camera forthrightly, without embarrassment or shame. When Brassai does choose to comment, it is most likely to be in the form of a juxtaposition of incongruous images--a derelict lying on the pavement under a huge advertisement for salad dressing or a close up of the large and powerful hind quarters of a horse cleaved by a gaily braided tail.

Brassai's sensitivity to the character of a subject or situation is matched by an acute eye for form, for the subtle variations of light and dark and shape against background that make his pictures such beautiful formal structures, as well as compelling documents.

Brassai brings to all his work a rare combination of intelligence and intuition. He is a deliberate creator, patient and painstaking, with a deep committment to the demands of both art and humanity. If he had never chanced to discover his aptitude for taking pictures Paris would have had another biographer but the art of photography would have been immeasurably poorer.