Can an artist be guided by their emotions throughout a long life, can an artistic vision be successful if one receives and filters life’s events intuitively? André Kertész’s course of life was often defined by his sensibility and emotional attitudes, which could be attraction, fear for others, dependency, tormenting anxiety, camaraderie, ceaseless anger, flaring love or the sense of belonging to a community. He was devoted to a few people: his mother, his two brothers, his first, adolescent love, the circles of acquaintances and close friends, the greats of avantgarde art, and his second wife, Elizabeth. His photographs can often be interpreted as projections of emotions; he considered himself a true-born sentimentalist, with a lifelong need to own and express his feelings.

1894. He was born on 2 July 1894 in Budapest, into a middle-class Jewish family, as the second of three sons. His youth was defined by the turbulent events of the First World War, with forced marches, becoming wounded, a long convalescence and then travelling widely as a military clerk through chaotic, blood-soaked Austria-Hungary and the Balkans. He was not a war correspondent, but he was a keen-eyed man who sometimes stepped out of the column and saw the power in the moment. After he was demobilized in 1919, the none-too-attractive career of a financial clerk seemed to lie ahead until he met Elizabeth Salamon, a young,
amateur painter-to-be, who was to be his lifelong partner after a short detour. Elizabeth was a link to the arts, a stimulus to take on challenges, a partner in change. Thanks to her, Kertész’s interest in and commitment to the arts deepened. He became close friends with some of the so-called Arcadia painters, who became his master tutors in seeing and creating: the compositional principles of paintings and the goals and ideals of the period’s latest artistic endeavours became formative influences on his creative outlook. Autonomously, he reformulated and applied this knowledge to the artistic photography he created.

In 1925, for reasons personal and professional, he emigrated to Paris, where he soon found his way around Montparnasse and the artistic milieu of Café du Dôme, and came into contact with the modern movements of Paris. He took photos in studios and where friends gathered, in the parks and on the squares, throwing himself into the vibrant rhythm of Paris with great verve. His new Paris photos were marked by sharp overhead angles, shadows stretched long, the tangled rhythm of the chairs in Luxembourg Garden, the interplay of roofs and chimneys. Doors opened up to him on Montparnasse and beyond as he photographed Marc Chagall in his sunny garden or composed Mondrian’s studio into a symbolic image. Hungarian emigré artists also considered him a friend, and he was most closely associated with the painter Lajos Tihanyi, who introduced him to the Parisian art scene. Soon leading European magazines were publishing his photos, and in 1928 he purchased his first Leica camera and was commissioned by Vu magazine. Following his first solo display in Paris, he was invited to participate in several major group exhibitions. The 1933 Distortions, a nude series commissioned by Le Sourire magazine, became an unconventional work that shared characteristics with avant-garde and surrealist art. However, a foreboding of war and the rampant anti-Semitism cast a shadow on his triumph in Paris and the seemingly endless possibilities in Europe.

With their future clouded in uncertainty by the declining number of commissions and publication opportunities, he and his wife moved to New York in October 1936; Kertész left most of the Hungarian and French negatives behind. He was attracted by the new impressions, the promise of the American dream and the hope of a secure livelihood, but none of these lived up to his expectations. Instead of the off-site reporting promised, the Keystone Agency forced him to work in a studio to make staged shots for commercial purposes. He quit his contract after a year, and tried to make a living as a freelancer. The escalation of the war and the persecution of the Jews had made the return to Europe an unreasonable choice. His disappointment deepened when Life magazine rejected his pictures on the grounds that they ‘revealed too much.’ There was a vast gap between André Kertész’s human-centred images, which radiate emotional intimacy and emphasize the fragility of life, and the tastes of American editors, who expected technical perfection and an illustrative character from their photographers. In 1952, the couple
found the home they would live in for the rest of their lives, in a 12th-floor flat on 5th Avenue in Greenwich Village, with an amazing view of Washington Square. Here Kertész could resume the attitude that felt so close to him, that of the observing photographer who watches and does not influence the course of events, and then captures the right moment. From the terrace of the flat, he created increasingly simple and abstract images, returning to the taut structure of his early geometric compositions. Over the years spent photographing the homes of America’s high society, he always had his Leica with him to exercise his eyes during the breaks between the shoots and to keep his creative ambitions alive with a hope of allowing them to flourish again when times were more favourable. That turning point came in 1962, when he terminated his contract with Condé Nast. 1963 saw a number of exciting, unexpected developments, and the years of isolation and loneliness had finally come to an end. He exhibited and won a gold medal at the 4th Venice Photography Biennale, and then had a solo exhibition at the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris, with Brassaï giving the undeservedly forgotten André Kertész ‘his due’ in an appreciative review in Camera magazine. Jacqueline Paouillac, to whom he had entrusted most of his Hungarian and French negatives in 1936, also emerged from the distant past. Undertaking considerable risk, the French journalist had been hiding Kertész’s trunks in the air-raid shelter of a chateau in the south of France.

The same year, New York’s Museum of Modern Art invited him to hold a solo exhibition. Success, which had eluded him for some time, was now growing globally, with his name becoming a reference point for modern photography worldwide. The years that followed saw him exhibit in Tokyo, Stockholm, Budapest and London. At the time of his international rediscovery, the Hungarian cultural authorities were also showing an openness to Hungarian artists in exile. Kertész was afforded special attention from the end of the 1960s; he became a subject of professional discourse, interviews, analyses and albums were published. He welcomed the interest and made several trips to Hungary, including to Szigetbecse, one of the most important places of his childhood and intellectual growth. ‘Everything they consider valuable in my life comes from Hungary,’ the aged master said.
He died in his New York home on 28 September 1985, at age ninety-one.

Katalin Kopin
art historian, curator of the exhibition