Exhibitions 1
Portraits: Tete a Tete (National Portrait Gallery, till 7 June) Europeans (Hayward Gallery, till 5 April)
Master of the moment
Martin Gayford
Generally speaking, photography does not live up to the claims made for it as a major art form. Or, at least, that's how it seems to me. But the work of Henri Carti- er-Bresson is an exception. As is shown by two current exhibitions which celebrate his 90th birthday this year — Portraits: Tete a Tete at the National Portrait Gallery, and Europeans at the Hayward Gallery — Cartier-Bresson is a true master of the visual arts.
It is worth considering why this is so. The answer, perhaps, is that he is able to oper- ate in many ways as a painter would, but to do so not over a period of hours or months, but instantaneously, in the time taken to press a shutter.
In fact, Cartier-Bresson's work often reminds one of paintings. The early series of 'Seine-side Revellers on the First Paid Public Holiday' are living, of course, in the visual world of Monet and Renoir. When he takes a shot of a team of oxen pulling a plough in the Dordogne, it brings to mind landscapes of similar subjects by the painter Balthus — his exact contemporary, and an artist with whom he has a good deal in common, especially formally. He shares a fascination for the austere simplicity of Mediterranean architecture with Cezanne and Braque among others.
But it's true also of design. Cartier-Bres- son is able to arrange the world into a for- mal order that closes tightly as a lock. Thus he waited, bobbing on the ripples of the canal, until exactly the second when the prow of his gondola bisected a footbridge at Torcello like the hand of a clock. Then he took his picture.
The result is a perfect design, the curves of the ponte, its reflection and the boat forming harmonious segments, the whole punctuated at precisely the right point by the upright of a distant campanile, a passer- by hurrying along at an angle that com- pletes the rhythm. Time and again, Cartier-Bresson finds such moments of order, arrangements that can have existed only for an eye-blink of time. And he does so not — like many photographers — by loosening off a thousand exposures, then choosing the best. Nor by cropping the neg- ative until it looks right.
He must see the possibilities inherent in a place, or a situation, then wait until someone walks along and puts their leg just so — and click. It's an extraordinary way to work. What he is finding is analogous to the moment of vision that some painters Bonnard, for instance, or Sickert — pre- served in a rapid sketch. But they would then work and rework the idea in the stu- dio. With Cartier-Bresson, the whole thing's completed, as it were, on the spot.
Naturally, the results — as so often in art Brussels, 1932, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, on show at the Hayward Gallery — are highly unnatural. What we see sel- dom has this Poussin-like geometric lucidi- ty. Like painters, Cartier-Bresson has his favourite devices — steps crop up again and again, forming a structure of diagonals and verticals, or, as in a celebrated image taken in Hyeres in 1932, a snail-like spiral across which the blurred figure of a cyclist shoots. He likes to put an orderly frame around disorderly humanity in this way. It is one of the qualities that gives a playful air to much of his work, that constitutes his visual wit.
Cartier-Bresson has a gift for the comedie humaine, and for finding the piquantly revealing moment. In Athens, two identical, black-clad matriarchs stump past a decaying classical portico upheld by two identical, youthful, bare-breasted cary- atids. In Moscow, two smartly uniformed soldiers march past, glancing libidinously at two pretty girls. It's the duplication that makes it funny. But the same eye can dis- cover instants that are poignant, even trag- ic, as in the shots of the Warsaw ghetto.
The same knack for finding what Sir Ernst Gombrich calls the 'significant moment' makes Cartier-Bresson an extraordinary portraitist. Indeed, of the two exhibitions, the portraits at the NPG is the better one. The Hayward show is a shade too large, and its arrangement by countries mattes it seem traveloguey. Cartier-Bres- son, like most artists, is not equally good in all places. His France is a visual equivalent to Simenon's in its rich variety; his England is a bit of a cliché, all coronation and public schools.
The Portraits exhibition is nearly faultless. Invariably, Cartier-Bresson chooses an image that reveals the subject, in, as it seems, an unforced, almost casual fashion. Suitably enough, his gallery of painters con- tains many of the most compelling shots: Matisse, seated in a light-filled room, sur- rounded by birdcages, drawing a dove; Picasso, in 1944, stripped to the waist beside a tousled bed, holding the viewer's gaze with magnetic charm, then again in high old age staring despairingly into space; Bonnard, stooped, hesitant, swathed in scarves, plus Balthus, Lucian Freud, Rouault and Bacon. But the writers are pretty good too — Camus lobking the ultimate post-war romantic hero, cigarette in mouth, Sartre in a mist, looking two ways at once.
There are some which are, perhaps, not strictly portraits — Indian transvestites, Mexican prostitutes, an Imperial Chinese eunuch — a portrait being a picture of a person in which we are interested in the individual, not the type. But that scarcely matters. Nor does it diminish Cartier-Bres- son's achievement that he took a few hints from Degas — the oblique positioning, the high viewpoint — especially as Degas in turn took his cue from photography.
To produce images as memorable, fresh, and durable as these simply by clicking a shutter is a remarkable, scarcely paralleled achievement.
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