Brassaï: The Eye of Paris

It is always distressing to pore through a poorly executed monograph on an artist whom one deeply admires.  Brassaï: The Eye of Paris is unfortunately such a book.  Compiled as a catalog to a 1999 exhibit held at the Houston Fine Arts Museum, the book is first of all poorly designed.  The choice of layout, fonts and photo placement are all disappointing.  The text by Anne Wilkes Tucker jumps arbitrarily from one aspect of Brassaï's career to the next with only a passing nod to chronological order.  Worse, the reproductions of Brassaï's photographs are not of the first quality and are better suited to a magazine article than a scholarly study.  Even the book's bindings are inferior and cracked on first reading.

Brassaï was born Gyula Halász in Hungary in 1899.  At age 21, he emigrated first to Berlin and then to Paris which became his home for the remainder of his life.  He is known today, at least in the U.S., primarily for his titillating The Secret Paris of the 30's, not to be confused with his earlier (1932) and far superior Paris by Night with an introduction by Paul Morand.  Originally welcomed to Paris by Hungarian compatriots, such as the photographer André Kertész, with whom he later quarreled bitterly, Brassaï soon enlarged his circle to include the most important cultural figures living in Paris in the early part of the twentieth century.  Prominent among these were Picasso (many of whose artworks he photographed), Henry Miller, Proust and the Surrealists.  

Brassaï, whose work should be ranked alongside that of the other famous Parisian expatriate Man Ray, was not only one of the last century's greatest photographers but was also a talented painter, sculptor and writer. Still, it was in his photography that Brassaï showed his greatest genius.  He was a master of recording low light situations and his nighttime photographs, especially those taken in rain and fog, have never been excelled.  He was also a witty and urbane man who deserves to be memorialized in a much better volume than the present one.