“I assiduously attended the surrealist meetings on the Place Blanche,” he wrote later. At the same time, the aspiring artist met André Breton and the surrealists. He had no desire to take over the family business, and referred to his uncle Louis, a painter who was killed in the first World War, as his “mythical father”.Ĭartier-Bresson studied for two years with the painter André Lhote, who imparted his obsession with Renaissance rules of geometry and composition. Young Henri learned English from a governess called Miss Kitty, and was taken to concerts, exhibitions and museums. The Cartier-Bresson family had amassed a fortune from two factories in which hundreds of workers produced white cotton spools labelled “shiny Irish thread”. The exhibition shows the extent to which Cartier-Bresson’s life and work embodied the 20th century. When he died, in August 2004, just short of his 96th birthday, newspapers across Europe published the headline: “The eye of the century has shut.”Ī decade later, the Pompidou Centre in Paris has organised the first major Cartier-Bresson retrospective in Europe since his death. I understand things through my eyes.” A successful photograph, Cartier-Bresson said, required the alignment of the head, heart and eye.Ĭartier-Bresson was known in his lifetime as “the eye of the century”, as reflected in the title of Pierre Assouline’s 1999 biography. ‘I am a visual man,” the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson told Life magazine in 1963.
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