Authentic Cartier ARTS
BRYAN ROBERTSON
The big Cartier-Bresson show at the Victoria and Albert Museum is so overwhelmingly exact in its attitudes and responses to life that any other exhibition in town is bound to seem muf- fled by comparison. This will be one of the memorable events of the year. The old argument as to whether photography is an art or not seems especially irrelevant when confronted by the noble realities of Cartier-Bresson's insights into life, place and time. As a photographer he is quite simply supreme. What he finds for us adds, time and again, to our awareness of life in the miost concrete terms, even when heightened by such a fastidious concern for texture, light and dark, and the relationships at work in any given scene. And what he finds is consistently positive, and affirmative of life itself. Cartier-Bresson is plainly one of the great humanists of our age. He renews belief in the meaningfulness as well as the casual, infinitely graceful rewards of existence.
The reality presented by his work is too strong for argument. It reminds us, rather necessarily, that a photograph can convey something which nothing else can. A written description is a literary act, quite separate from what it de- scribes; eye witness accounts are their own opera or plainchant; a painting is a painting. A photo- graph is some kind of selective record, and in Cartier-Bresson's case the dominant theme is the quality rather than the stuff of life.
He narrows his sights, consistently, in pursuit of people in relation to their environment. This can be Moscow, Paris, Peking, London, Naples, New York, or Bali; the people can be children playing in a harshly divided street in Berlin by the frontier, elderly grotesques with Ten- niel-like clothes and hats conspiring moment- arily outside London's National Gallery, or some Russian workers stomping about elatedly in a poster-cluttered café in Moscow, and look- ing like a Moscow Arts production of some edifying theatrical tract that has become un- expectedly hilarious. Are these photographs artistic in the negative sense? Do they have pre- tensions towards some higher form of art? Do we look at one of Cartier-Bresson's faces and think 'Rembrandt . . .'? Absolutely not. He has the most scrupulous respect for his medium; his own vision being so acute, he has no need of others'.
It may be useful here to consider the nature of French visual realism. Cartier-Bresson embodies its principles to perfection. He brings a particular spirit to bear on whatever it pleases him to find; this spirit is constant and to define it is also to delineate an extraordinary national tradition. Think for a moment of Georges de la Tour with his inexorable contours, immaculate planes, and dramatic lighting; remember the granite-like integrity and compression, so loaded but so unrhetorical, of Courbet. Both artists make intimacy monumental; if the earlier painter shows a more theatrical grandeur in his formal sense, so evident even in the folds of a woman's gown, let alone the Iong-sustained curve of her inclined neck and shoulders, then our thinking must shift from the religious piety of the seventeenth century to the imminently marxist fidelity of, the nineteenth: Courbet's formal sense was so strongly attuned to the very substance, the matter, of life or nature that contour became the end result of an organic vitality within the form. Degas, later, could afford to take this latter preoccupation for granted with his laconic condensations of form.
The constant factor at work between all three artists is, I believe, that of worldliness; if you're in this world you must be of it and the French have the blessed capacity for making such an
identification an act of affectionate complicity rather than mere acceptance. You do not have to go to the delicacies of Fouquet or recall the delights of Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berri to comprehend the benignly detached association between a Frenchman and his own particular universe. The portraiture of Fantin- Latour has it as well as that of Degas; the art of Matisse is worldly in this way. It is at once tender and like steel.
There is one final aspect of French realism which Cartier-Bresson also establishes in his work. Between de la Tour and Courbet comes Watteau, and in his masterpiece Gilles or le Jongleur there arrives, like magic, some extra- sensory consciousness to do with fatality, pos- sibly, or mortality, or some nervous alienation from society. it has to do, also, with implying the existence of some extraordinary state of being or set of conditions which are at work out- side or beneath whatever is straightforwardly presented to us. Alain-Fournier's novel of course comes to mind; and Jean Renoir's early film La Regle du lea was steeped in this awareness, in the way in which separate kinds of life, indoors and outdoors, above and below stairs, action and thought, were continually set in counterpoint throughout the antics of a brittle weekend house party. Who can forget the Turgenev-like forays through the grasses and undergrowth in the shooting party scene? Cartier-Bresson worked with Renoir on this film in 1936 and again in 1939, and one can quite see why. He also studied initially as a painter, but has managed to keep all the wrong kinds of pictorial ambition firmly removed from his photography.
Avoiding the pretences of fine-art photo- graphy with its flashy highlights and insistently amplified textures, Cartier-Bresson has the artist's instinct for the total fabric of life—the scene, the person as well as the underlying structure of society or psychology. He has also the born artist's flair for composition which, in its inevitability, comes only from a firm grasp of fabric, structure or psychology. Great com- position is the direct equivalent of a mature philosophy of life; having all this at his finger- tips, Cartier-Bresson's visual insights are con- tinually matched by his sense of form. Wholly integrated, his vision would be wrecked by cropping: form and content are one. He makes this plain in a technical note put up at the ex- hibition, and his words are those of an artist.
The photograph of the Maharaja of' Baria arriving with companions for his wedding to the daughter of the Maharaja of Jaipur would have delighted Delacroix in its vivacity of movement as much as for the gorgeous robes and sunlight. The intensity and split-second precision with which Colette has been caught by the camera is breathtaking: one eye is half concealed by shadow and that frizzy hair, the other eye stares at you so directly—and sud- denly, as if she's just turned toward you—that the effect is unnerving, like being thrust into the company of a formidable personage with- out adequate introduction or preparation. The photographer knew what he was doing: cut off the pain-disfigured, stoic mouth and that eye is a marvel of shrewd kindliness, of ease with life, and repose.
Other portraits are almost as unforgettable: William Faulkner, patrician as ever, standing in a garden like a soldier returned to his memoirs and managing a country estate; the astonishingly handsome J. M. G. le Clezio not looking like a writer at all but a film star with elegant film wife in a casual scene from Truffaut; the aged Mauriac crouched vehemently behind a richly finished desk, pro- testing or arguing—Forain or Daumier would have painted him with relish; Bonnard gently, diffidently, staring into space with innocent eyes, his prints and drawings stacked behind him; Matisse, slumped heavily, reclining in caftan and turban-like cap, holding a white bird with one hand, drawing with the other, in a room filled with bird cages.
But elsewhere, in landscapes or city squares, Cartier-Bresson's gift of catching the telling incident goes much further than journalism, the only claim he modestly makes for his art. For the incidents are weighted with such a confluence of time, place and detail, and so confirmed by his unerring use of black and white—and extraordinary greys—that the in- vincible French gift for loaded realism which, outside France, only Vermeer understood, is enriched time and again. And not without wit: De Gaulle's head appears above a cloth sheet at a public address like Mr Punch—or Ubu Roi. Irony, that automatic Gallic reflex, ripples through these photographs.
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