Brassaï

Biography

He took his pseudonym from the name of his native town: “Brassaï” means “from Brassó”. That was the Hungarian name of Brașov, where Gyula Halász was born on 9 September 1899. The town was then part of Austria-Hungary; after the First World War it passed to Romania.

His father taught French literature, and his mother was Armenian. When the boy was three or four, the family spent a year in Paris, where his father lectured at the Sorbonne. They spoke Hungarian at home, and he knew Romanian too. He studied painting and sculpture in Budapest, then served in a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army until the end of the war. Sources differ on the details of those years: by some accounts, in 1919 he briefly found himself in the Red Army and in captivity.

In the early 1920s he went to Berlin, worked as a journalist for Hungarian newspapers and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Charlottenburg. There he became friends with the Hungarian painters Lajos Tihanyi and Bertalan Pór, who later also moved to Paris.

In 1924 Halász settled in Paris, in Montparnasse, and stayed there for the rest of his life. He taught himself French from the novels of Marcel Proust. He earned his living as a journalist and became friends with Henry Miller, Léon-Paul Fargue and Jacques Prévert. He still painted and made sculpture, but something else had taken a firm hold of him: he often wandered the city at night.

He came to photography almost by accident. At first the pictures were meant to illustrate his articles, which paid better that way. His teacher in the basics was a fellow Hungarian, André Kertész. Brassaï recalled that he wanted to capture the beauty of streets and gardens in rain and fog, and Paris by night. To my mind, that is the point of his whole early series: he photographed not the sights but what can be seen only in the dark.

In 1933 the publisher Arts et Métiers Graphiques brought out the album “Paris by Night”, with a text by Paul Morand. The number of photographs is given differently in different editions: 60 or 62. In one of his essays Miller called the author “the eye of Paris”. The album included streets and the districts of the city’s underworld, but Brassaï also photographed high society, intellectuals, the ballet and the opera: a French family who were friends of his introduced him to that circle. In 1931 he photographed a ball at the Magic City amusement park. From 1933 his pictures were published by the Surrealist magazine Minotaure, and in the 1930s he began working for the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar, where he combined Surrealism with fashion photography. He was among the founders of the Rapho agency, set up in Paris in 1933 by Charles Rado. He took part in Surrealist exhibitions but never became a permanent member of the group.

His portraits of contemporaries make up a gallery of their own: Picasso, Dalí, Matisse, Giacometti, Jean Genet, Henri Michaux. He had been photographing Picasso since 1932, recording his sculptures as well. In 1932 he also turned his attention to the graffiti on Parisian walls and worked on them for decades; the book “Graffiti” appeared in 1961, and one photograph from the series became the cover of Prévert’s collection “Paroles” (1946).

During the war Brassaï returned to drawing: in 1945 an album of thirty drawings appeared, with a text by Prévert. In 1947 his photographic panels decorated the ballet “Le Rendez-vous”, based on a libretto by Prévert, at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt. In 1948 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a solo exhibition of his work, which then travelled to Rochester and Chicago. In the same year he married Gilberte Boyer, and in 1949, after many years of statelessness, he became a French citizen. In 1956 his film “Tant qu’il y aura des bêtes” won a prize at Cannes.

He wrote prose as well: “Histoire de Marie” (1949) and “Paroles en l’air” (1977). His memoir of Picasso, “Conversations with Picasso”, came out in 1964, “The Secret Paris of the 30s” in 1976, his book on Miller in 1975, and “Les artistes de ma vie” in 1982. A study of Proust and photography appeared after the author’s death, in 1997. His letters to his parents, covering 1920 to 1940, were published in Hungarian in 1980.

In 1974 he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, in 1976 a Knight of the Legion of Honour, and in 1978 he received the first Grand Prix national de la photographie. In 1979 he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame. A retrospective of 450 works was held at the Centre Pompidou in 2000.

Brassaï died on 8 July 1984 on the French Riviera near Nice. He is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.