It was wonderful to write on Henri Cartier-Bresson's drawings and lithographs and his views on photography. I am grateful to Cartier-Bresson for his assistance and to David Landau for commissioning the article which was published in Print Quarterly in 1998.
Below is an unpublished essay, written in early 1997, about visiting Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris:
A visit to Henri-Cartier Bresson, Rue de Rivoli, Paris, 31 January 1997
James Hyman
The apartment is on the fifth floor. Cartier-Bresson has forgotten to give me the code to the big entrance doors so I try buzzing and then attempt some random combinations without success. Luckily another tenant arrives and I walk through, buzz the bell and soon I am on the fifth floor. CB is waiting for me outside the lift and greets me in English. It's a good start. I would have spoken in French but I am grateful that he is happy to speak in English.
CB is tall, sprightly and amazingly fit at 88. His face is radiant, pink and fleshy and his eyes sparkle behind his glasses. He wears brown cords, a red shirt and a cravat.
The apartment is comfortable but simple. I am expecting something grander. It is filled with books and catalogues, drawings, sculptures, African art and Indian paintings. The collection of a man who is not a collector, the possessions of a nomad: works by friends - mainly sketches and small sculptures - are presumably gifts not purchases: Mason, Szafran, an early collage drawing by Laurens. There are no photographs by either him or his wife, Martine Franck. Most remarkable is the view from the windows onto the Tuileries.
We sit down and his help brings in tea - black - with digestive biscuits.
'Do you draw or make etchings?' he asks.
'Yes.'
'So, have you brought some pictures for me to see?'
'No, I'd be shy to show you anything.'
'But that's not fair. I'm showing you my work. You should show me yours.'
Instead I give him a copy of my recently published essay on Leon Kossoff.
At times his stories are familiar as he sinks back into anecdote mode. But the storytelling is well honed and vivid. He tells me of Teriade's advice that he should draw: 'you've said all there is to say as a photographer'. And later he tells me of his time working on the farm in small French village. He left to work in Paris for the French Resistance helping people to escape. Years later he returned to the village, meets a woman whose husband had worked on the same farm, and learns that a month after he had left the farm for Paris everyone was denounced and killed.
We go through photographs. He was a great friend, he was a friend, he was a childhood friend. He's dead, he's dead, he died recently, he's got throat cancer. For a moment he looks pensive, tearful. Then the mood changes and his eyes dance again.
He cannot keep still. Mention an artist or a work and up he springs to bring me photographs of pictures by artists who are friends such as Avigdor Arikha and Raymond Mason, and others whom I do not know: Georg Eisler from Vienna, Szafran from Malecov outside Paris.
He starts to confide in me: please don't tell anyone this but... it's a flattering mannerism. He mentions Arikha, 'a great friend', three or four times and is evidently hurt by the artist's response to his drawings: Arikha didn't see the point when CB turned to drawing and in all the years since has never commented on the drawings. He also talks of Arikha's huge ego and warns that if I see him I should not mention any other artists, especially not those of the twentieth century. Poussin would be OK! But he speaks with awe of Arikha's encyclopaedic knowledge: 'put your finger in any page of an encyclopaedia, on any entry, and he can talk for 10 minutes on the subject.'
Later as I look through a catalogue of CBs photographs I come across an image of Samuel Beckett, standing, twisting round, his head looking especially long and extraordinary. I mention Arikha's drawings of the writer and CB responds with passionate enthusiasm. Arikha as a portraitist he admires, seemingly without qualification, but as for 'all those still lifes....'
Each time he mentions an artist that I do not know, he fishes out his pocket address book or cites from memory their address and telephone number: speak to x's wife, he's just got cancer of the throat so he shouldn't really talk; phone y, in the morning, he drinks when there are visits in the evenings....
His eyes are two pools of liquid blue. They register everything, not only taking in the world around, but registering CBs response to each comment: a momentary widening, a frozen moment of reflection, a spark, a flicker, a sudden change. One moment playful, open and amused then serious, tired and upset, finally sparkling with laughter. Berger writes of his discomfort at looking into these deep eyes, but I hold CBs gaze, fascinated. Around the blue of his eyes, there is a thickening, which at first, I think, is contact lens. It's not, but these eyes are like lenses. Open, wide, kind.
He is very conscious of the notion of a 'late style' and we discuss Picasso, Bacon and Giacometti:
On Picasso: "The drawings are marvellous until the end - I was with Picasso when Yves Bonnefoy made his selection of drawings for the book - but as for the paintings! Why can't people make a distinction and say that he went off. As for his colour! he had no sense of colour at all!"
On Bacon: "there are now so many books on Francis, but why doesn't anyone say that there are two phases. The early work is good, the later work is not."
On Giacometti: "the negative reviews by British critics of Giacometti at the Royal Academy last year were awful... His drawings are incredible until the end. But those early surrealist works - I don't like them at all." He springs up and searches out Sheideggar's book of Giacometti's drawings after the art of the past, from museums across Europe through visits, postcards and reproductions: Egyptian statues, Rembrandt's woman bathing, Matisse even. It's a whole area of which I was unaware and we carefully go through the pages as CB tells me that 'like 'Alberto' I draw from postcards, reproductions and visits to the Louvre.'
We go through portfolios including his lithographs for Louis Aragon's surrealist novel Le Paysan de Paris. He speaks of his pre-war friendship with Aragon, his post war hatred of Aragon's Communism. His visits to the passage Aragon wrote of, where he sat to draw, and where the waiter tells him that by chance he has chosen the very same table at which Aragon had sat. The bute chaumont and the difficulty in drawing the figures since they move far more than he had expected.
We go through a huge ring bound file of photographs of his drawings since 1973. I admire the way he draws trees, especially along the sides of a country road and along one side of the Tuileries Gardens. 'I don't know' he shrugs and each time I praise a drawing, he says 'I'm no good at drawing'. Eventually, on the third occasion I say, 'I bet that Giacometti would have said the same thing, so would Cezanne'. CB says nothing.
He is diffident and seems uncomfortable with praise. If it is an act then it is one that he is very good at. 'Do you really like that drawing? I can't judge. I have no idea if it is any good. Sometimes, though, I go back to a drawing, a month or more after I did it, and I rework it. When there's a touring exhibition I remove works to rework them.' I admire a lithograph of a passage way and another of the Bute Chaumont. 'I can't tell' he says.
Then we look through some photographs. I see a picture of Gandhi, from behind, in conversation. I mention this week's news story about an urn containing Gandhi's ashes that has just been discovered in a bank vault and which is going to be poured into the Ganges. CB hasn't seen the story but cannot believe it. He was there when Gandhi died: 'I saw his ashes, a great pile of them. I covered the funeral, travelling on the train with the family and I saw Nehru pour the ashes into the Ganges. Of course there was lots of ash and anyone could scrape up anything, but I can't really believe this story is genuine.'
We talk about drawings and prints of Paris including 'Alberto's miraculous Paris sans Fins' and Raymond Mason's street scenes - including an ink drawing he owns - 'His drawings are quite wonderful. But as for his sculptures, I am really less interested.'
'Photography and printmaking', he says, 'are linked in terms of reproduction'.
'Photographers are not artists, they are artisans - and the same is true of printmakers. The bourgeoise, nineteenth century notion of an 'artist' is a falsehood - I hate the idea of limited editions. What nonsense to sign and number a print! That's not about creating, that's about the market. I am still making prints from negatives from the 1930s, they just need a little touching up of the holes.'
'I am an anarchist, or more precisely, what we call in French a 'libertin', a libertarian. I believe that every human has the potential to be an artist. But it's not about 'being an artist', it's about expressing yourself. The cab driver writing a letter to his girlfriend is a poet and both are artisans.'
'When I take a photograph or make a drawing for a print, I am not interested in the process of making the photographic print or the lithograph: printing is a discipline in itself.'
He is very aware of what is going on in both Paris, where he lives, and London where his daughter works as a fashion designer. Several times he mentions a review in today's Liberation. He hates journalism and the review of the Beauborg exhibition Made in France has obviously touched a nerve. The show includes drawings by CB, which despite works by friends such as Arikha, have been singled out by the Herve Gauville. The review is accompanied by an illustration of a Matisse cut-out framed by a Buren, whom CB particularly dislikes: 'It's true, what does my work have to do with art like that. What relevance does it have for such art.' He recommends this show, another Beaubourg exhibition Face d'Histoire on art and politics and Morandi at the Maillol Museum. He recalls that a friend of his knew Morandi well and that he was to photograph the painter, but Morandi was ill and died a week later.
CB is modest about his own status in relation to those he has photographed. He has a genuine excitement about those he has met:
'Photography is a duel: a clash between the photographer and the subject. Like a thrust with an epée', he gestures.
He tells me that he has put away his camera - 'I no longer take it out on the streets' - but that he does still take portrait photographs. He has just received a commission to photograph Lucian Freud. 'I have no idea why. I don't even know the man. I have never met him. I don't even like the paintings. They are too cold - I don't respond to their mood.' 'But although puzzled he is clearly flattered.
We move on to talk about English artists. Auerbach he admires and he is pleased that I am giving him my article on Kossoff. His wife Martine Franck returns, CB shows me a portfolio of her photographs and she careful looks at the Kossoff article: she, especially, admires Kossoff's prints but is clearly unfamiliar with the work asking how old is the artist and is he still alive. I talk about the Tate show, about Kossoff's studio in his home and about his mistrust of the outside world. I quote his belief that artists can only be judged 50 years after their death. CB responds to this idea with enthusiasm. He hates hype and commercialism.
I mention that I have read John Berger's piece in the Sunday Times. CB liked it and likes JB very much. He recently received a collection of Berger's drawings and poems - 'do you know his drawings, they're wonderful' - but CB regrets that he cannot understand English poetry. Literature yes, but 'the rhythm of the poetry is all wrong, it's so different from French poetry.'
We look at reproductions of his first paintings from the mid 1920s. He shows me one of a street in a village and digs out a post card of a Cezanne of exactly the same view. He hadn't realised that it was the same street until John Rewald pointed it put to him many years later. He promises to send me a copy of the Cezanne.
We look through the window at the Tuileries and back to a drawing of the subject on papier rapport for a lithograph. The lithographic image is reversed and we prop it against a post card of a Monet of the same view, where it acts like a ghostly mirror. In the drawing there are the same buildings, the same pool and many of the same trees. But in CBs drawings the trees are giants. Now, though, the view from the window has changed once more. Monet's shrubs and CBs trees have been felled as the park is remodeled.
It is getting late. The Tuileries has vanished in the dark. Over a whisky he warns: 'Don't quote me. You can't believe what I say. You can believe my pictures, but don't trust my words, they change.' Then he turns to me and apologises: 'I'm sorry I didn't take your photograph or draw you.' 'I've spent today drawing Durer', he adds, as though this is an explanation.
When it is time to go, he shakes my hand with real warmth. I'm relieved. It has gone well.
He tells me I must touch the gold ball on the staircase at the bottom. It gives good luck. It was touched by Monet, Pissarro and Cezanne when they used to visit Choquet at his apartment on the floor below CB's. Later I think of all those eminent visitors who have come here to visit Cartier-Bresson, been told this same story and touched the same ball. There must be hundreds.
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In the months that follow we correspond and one day in the post he sends me a book of his work. In it he has inscribed "For James Hyman with my deep gratitude for your encouragement, Henri Cartier Bresson, April 1998".
copyright, 2023, James Hyman