Under Paris Skies

If you say to yourself, “Paris in the ‘30s,” a picture will likely come to mind. Chances are, the picture will have been made by Brassai (1899-1984):

* Graceful bridges over the Seine at night, their lamplight softly glowing in moist atmosphere, reflections scattered across black water like diamonds on velvet.

* A chunky prostitute, eyebrows penciled into thin arcs and tight-sweatered chest thrust proudly forward, standing wryly at the edge of a snooker table.

* A huge mound of white-aproned man, ample arms folded across an even more ample belly, as he poses like an early-morning colossus astride the bustling activity of Les Halles market.

* A lesbian couple, one in a severe suit and the other a sultry satin dress, enjoying the nightly party at the famous boi^te Le Monocle.

* American expatriate writer Henry Miller loitering in a hotel doorway, his eyes like expectant targets circled by black-rimmed glasses.

Brassai, Miller famously wrote in one of many books and essays on his friend, was “the eye of Paris,” and his photographs have distinctively shaped the way we have perceived the city ever since--especially in the decade before Europe erupted for the second time this century into catastrophic war. In a way, Brassai managed to achieve what the great poet and newspaper art critic Charles Baudelaire argued couldn’t possibly be done by a photographer wielding a camera, only by an artist equipped with pencil, paints and brush: His photographs of Paris call to mind the critic’s famous 1863 essay for Le Figaro, “The Painter of Modern Life,” albeit now finally transformed into “The Photographer of Modern Life.”

On Tuesday, the first full-scale survey of Brassai’s work in more than 30 years opened at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Brentwood. The culmination of many years of research by Anne Wilkes Tucker, photography curator at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where the show had its debut in December, “Brassai: The Eye of Paris” brings together more than 100 gelatin silver prints for a satisfying overview of a remarkable body of work.

Indeed, the only disappointment in this otherwise captivating display is the absence of a catalog, which is said to be in production. (A Houston Museum spokesman was unable to say just when the catalog would be published or what had caused the delay.) Go and acquaint yourself with this incomparable artist.

The son of a Hungarian professor of French literature, Brassai was born Gyula Halasz in Brasso, Transylvania, in 1899. World War I made it impossible for the young man to study painting and sculpture in Paris, so he made do--first at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest and, late in 1920, at Berlin’s Charlottenburg Academy.

To help support his studies, he worked as a journalist for various German and Hungarian newspapers. Brassai continued the freelance journalism when he finally moved to Paris in 1924. Somewhere along the way he also began to take photographs, in order to illustrate his stories. By 1929, he was making photographs in earnest.

Amazingly, just three years later he published a spiral-bound book of 64 photographs that remains one of the great ensembles of modern photography. Titled “Paris by Night,” the book instantly established the reputation of the young artist.

Brassai’s lush, wide-ranging photographs astutely recognized that, if Paris was indeed “The City of Light,” then the cover of darkness was essential to the prospect of seeing that metropolis clearly. With the poet Leon-Paul Fargue and other friends, he regularly wandered the nocturnal city--an after-hours fla^neur for whom the urban landscape, outdoors and in, was an unending source of evocative subject matter.

One pleasure of the exhibition is watching how Brassai managed to coax a remarkable array of velvety tones across his pictures, because photographing at night posed a variety of technical problems. An eloquent 1932 self-portrait demonstrates something of how he managed it, while also emphasizing the pivotal importance of light to Brassai’s artistic sensibility.

Bundled against the winter chill in an overcoat and hat, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, Brassai shows himself in profile standing before a slender tripod and peering into his Voigtlander Bergheil 6-by-9 camera. The camera used glass plate negatives (he later adapted it for roll film), and for each night’s outing he would take along about two dozen negatives.

Look carefully at the picture and you’ll see how available light is pushed, pulled and manipulated with virtuosic delicacy. The bright light illuminating the photographer’s face and the black shadow extending from his feet suggest Brassai has positioned himself near a strong light source (perhaps a street lamp, or maybe a night-owl friend with a flash beyond the framing edge). The brightness of his foreground face is balanced on the opposite side and at the rear by an intensely glowing urban light, whose origin is wholly mysterious; likewise, it’s contrasted directly above the camera by a second lamp off in the distance, one whose light is here muffled behind the branches of a tree.

A thin dusting of wet snow on the ground creates a gently light-reflective horizontal field, which draws out otherwise imperceptible details of the receding stone paving and street curbs; the paving itself forms a grid in line with the stark shadow extending from Brassai’s feet. Moisture in the air creates a halation of diffused light, which increases in atmospheric density as the streetscape recedes.

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When Brassai began work on “Paris at Night,” the city was in the early stages of replacing its gas lamps with electric ones. In making an apparently simple and straightforward self-portrait of the artist at work, Brassai incisively shows himself as a magical conductor leading an orchestra of light.

Another kind of orchestration is also at work in his subject matter, although less perceptibly so. Many of Brassai’s photographs show him enjoying that greatest of all urban pastimes: people watching. The assorted nightclub denizens, aristocrats at the racetrack, hookers and such were regularly engaged as participants in telling the pictorial story the artist wanted to tell. Journalist or not, his pictures are always subjective, not objective.

He didn’t pose his people; but he was more than willing to casually inform his subjects of what he wanted, then step back and wait until the moment seemed opportune. Series like “Paris by Night” and “Secret Paris” are reportage, but without the pretense of neutral documentation. Perhaps he had in mind Baudelaire’s famous dismissal of photography as bound-and-gagged by being a copyist of nature.

That Brassai saw himself as an artist working with a camera, not specifically as a photographer, might be inferred from the professional name he chose for himself. Brassai means “from Brasso.” It’s an archaic construction dating to a pre-modern era, when artists (Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio and countless others) were commonly identified by their town of origin.

It might also be inferred from the many portraits he made of other artists--Giacometti, Dali, Germaine Richier--which are another highlight of the show. Perhaps the greatest is his 1939 picture of Picasso dwelling in his cavernous studio, like the Minotaur in his labyrinth or a spectral shadow in Plato’s cave.

The picture was made in the month when Germany invaded Poland, and France and Britain declared war on Germany. In his personal life, Picasso had created another bitter struggle, between mistresses Marie-Therese Walter and Dora Maar.

Brassai--who was a close friend of Picasso and who briefly shared a darkroom with Maar--photographed the 58-year-old Spaniard, dressed in suit and tie and smoking a cigarette, seated on a stern wooden chair adjacent to an evenly lit, sculpturally dramatic heating stove. Picasso, engulfed by the jagged shadow of the stove that looms on the prison-like wall behind him, glows like a metaphorical fire within the threatening furnace.

The Getty show is divided thematically and chronologically into a variety of groups, including portraits, nudes, society pictures and photographs of urban graffiti. Only four of the images published in “Paris by Night” are included (prints are rare because the publisher, not Brassai, kept the negatives), but many other similar examples from the period are on view.

Two drawings and three small sculptures of bronze or stone are also shown, but they’re mostly of a general rather than specific interest. (The Arp-like sculptures, dating from 1962 to 1971, are organic forms whose elongated, pear-like shapes are at once feminine and phallic.) Mostly, the sculptures and drawings further underscore Brassai’s disinterest in regarding photography as a discipline separate from art.

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The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, through July 3. Parking reservations and information: (310) 440-7300. Hours: Tue.-Wed., 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thur.-Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission: Free.