So this is Christmas And what have you done Another year over And a new one just begun Ans so this is Christmas I hope you have fun The near and the dear one The old and the young
A very merry Christmas And a happy New Year Let's hope it's a good one Without any fear And so this is Christmas For weak and for strong For rich and the poor ones The world is so wrong And so happy Christmas For black and for white For yellow and red ones Let's stop all the fight A very merry Christmas And a happy New Year Let's hope it's a good one Without any fear And so this is Christmas And what have we done Another year over And a new one just begun Ans so this is Christmas I hope you have fun The near and the dear one The old and the young A very merry Christmas And a happy New Year Let's hope it's a good one Without any fear War is over over If you want it War is over Now...
RICARDO ASENSIO nato a Valencia (SPAGNA) nel 1949. Artisticamente si è formato lavorando nella città di ROMA, BARCELONA e VALENCIA, conseguendo numerosi premi in importanti e prestigiosi concorsi Internazionali di pittura, collettive ed esposizioni personali, per citarne alcuni: nel 1979 finalista per la pittura alla Accademia di Spagna in ROMA, 1981 Premio "Villa Alessandra", selezionato per i suoi di ritratti...
Nel resto del mondo: Menzione d'Onore al Salone d'Inverno di NEW YORK, Menzione d'Onore al Museo delle Americhe in FLORIDA...
Prestigioso ritrattista di intellettuali e personaggi illustri, è un artista impegnato continuamente nella innovazione della pittura. La sua opera inizia in un primo momento nella rappresentazione nettamente figurativa, concentrata nella figurazione di personalità dello spettacolo, della cultura e della politica, esprimendosi anche nei paesaggi raggiungendo una perfezione pittorica pari alla fotografia, utilizzando semplicemente i suoi colori ad olio e pastelli sapientemente mescolati dando forza nelle sobrie tonalità delle sue composizioni a tutto tondo. Coerente nella sua opera e con una tecnica che lo identifica e lo distacca dal panorama internazionale. Famosissimi i ritratti di personaggi come il Premio Nobel Camilo José Cela, lo scrittore drammaturgo Antonio Buero Vallejo, la Principessa Beatrice d´Orleans, Marisa di Borbon, le attrici Virna Lisi e Dalila Di Lazzaro, Kim Novak, Faye Dunaway, Brooke Shields ...
Le sue opere sono visibili in musei d'arte contemporanea, collezioni private e pubbliche in Spagna, Francia, Germania e nel resto dell'Europa come anche negli Stati Uniti e sud America.
"Premio Controvento" ROMA, 1982. "Medaglia al Merito" Trofeo Internazionale "Medusa Aurea" ROMA, 1996. Premio "Villa Serravalle", FIRENZE 1997. "Gran Collare D´Argento" Palinuro nel mondo. Premio "Antiqua Firenze" e il "Oscar de la Cultura", 2001, FIRENZE. "Gran Premio Italia", 2003. Premio "La Dea Alata" FIRENZE, 2003. "Medaglia d´Oro" Trofeo "Medusa Aurea" XXVI edizione, ROMA, 2003 Accademia Internazionale D´Arte Moderna. "Gran Premio Maremma" Copa Costa D´Argento della Toscana. "Gran Premio Città di FIRENZE" 2003 Accademia "Il Marzocco". 1º Premio "Costa Toscana" IV Bienale d´Italia. 1ºPremio "Europa" 2004 TORINO. 1º Premio S. Ambrogio D´Oro 2004 ,MILANO. Gran Collare Accademico, ROMA 2004. Gran Premio Europa Art "Mediolanum" 2005, MILANO. Premio Canova " Medaglia d´Oro " Accademia Universale Antonio Canova. 1ºPremio Concorso Internazionale d'Arte "Sprigiona la Fantasia" TORINO, 2005. Oscar delle Arti, Accademico ad Honorem per l'Ordine "Michelangelo Buonarroti" Accademia Internazionale SANTARITA, TORINO. 1º Premio "Festival Hans Christian Andersen" in suo Bicentenario, COPENHAGEN (Denmark), Premio "Donatello 2006", Premio "La Dea Alata " 2006, FIRENZE (Italia), Premio "Coppa Mundis", ITALIA. Premio "Rembrandt 2006", per il 400° anniversario della nascita del pittore olandese.
"Premio SEVER a la carrera", Centro Culturale Internazionale D´Arte Sever, MILANO. Coppa Accademia "Artista anno 2007" Accademia Severiade, MILANO. Premio alla Cultura "Omaggio a Giosuè Carducci" nel centenario. 2007 Centro Molisano La Conca, ROMA. Grand Prix International "URBS MUNDI" 2008. Targa Sever D´Oro 2009, Centro Culturale Internazionale D´Arte Sever, MILANO. Premio Internazionale NOBEL dell´Arte 2009, MILANO. Premio "Leonardo Da Vinci" 2009, "Premio Universale" 2009 , FIRENZE.
* Académique de Mérite dell´Accademia Italiana "Gli Etruschi". * Accademico per la Accademia Internazionale "Il Marzocco", FIRENZE. * Accademico ad Honorem per l'Ordine "Michelangelo Buonarroti" Accademia Internazionale "Santarita", TORINO. * Accademico per la Accademia Internazionale "Greci Marino". Accademico di Verbania. * Accademico della Accademia Universale "Antonio Canova". ITALIA
"Kissing a fool" by Michael Buble
Roses d'automne
Aux branches que l'air rouille et que le gel mordore, Comme par un prodige inouï du soleil, Avec plus de langueur et plus de charme encore, Les roses du parterre ouvrent leur coeur vermeil.
Settembre sta bussando...
L'autunno sta per arrivare...
quante cose da salvare dell'estate che ci sta per lasciare:
una conchiglia,una stella marina,un pò di sabbia,dei sassolini,in una bottiglietta un pò d'acqua di mare.
Sole sulla pelle...ambrato,sarà il colore che l'estate ci avrà lasciato.
Spruzzi,giochi,risa,grida,sagre,passeggiate,pisolini all'ombra di un salice piangente,
sarà il ricordo di un'estate che dura niente.
Torneranno i bimbi a scuola,
si rinfrescherà l'aria e la brina si poserà sull'aiuola.
Le ombre si allungheranno e i giorni più corti diverranno.
Un pittore invisibile dipingerà la natura con colori accesi,
dal giallo oro,arancio,marron al cremisi.
Malinconia per una stagione che va e che sento profondamente mia..
Oh,estate vorrei che non andassi via..
Tutte le stagioni hanno un ciclo ed un senso,
accetto il loro mutar... ma a lei con nostalgia già penso.
E se la vita d'una farfalla dura un'estate...forse un giorno...non sarà il caso mio...
The Honourable John Maler Collier (January 27, 1850–April 11, 1934) was a British writer and painter in the Pre-Raphaelite style. He was one of the most prominent portrait painters of his generation.
Collier's range of portrait subjects was broad. In 1893, for example, his subjects included the Bishop of Shrewsbury (Sir Lovelace Stamer), A Glass of Wine with Caesar Borgia, Sir John Lubbock FRS, A N Hornby (Captain of the Lancashire Eleven), A Witch, A Tramp, and the Bishop of Hereford (Dr Atlee).
His commissioned portrait of King George V as Master of Trinity House in 1901 when Duke of Cornwall and York shows the extent of his fashionable reputation.
A photocopy of John Collier's Sitters Book (made in 1962 from the original in the possession of the artist's son) can be consulted in the National Portrait Gallery Heinz Archive and Library. This is the artist's own handwritten record of all his portraits, including name of subject, date, fee charged, and details of any major exhibitions of the picture in question.
Lilith (1887)
Collier was from a talented and successful family. His grandfather, John Collier, was a Quaker merchant who became a Member of Parliament. His father (who was a Member of Parliament, Attorney General and, for many years, a full-time judge of the Privy Council was created the first Lord Monkswell. He was also a member of the Royal Society of British Artists. John Collier's elder brother, the second Lord Monkswell, was Under-Secretary of State for War and Chairman of the London County Council.
In due course, Collier became an integral part of the family of Thomas Henry HuxleyPC, President of the Royal Society. Collier married two of Huxley's daughters and was "on terms of intimate friendship" with his son, the writer Leonard Huxley. Collier's first wife, in 1879, was Marian (Mady) Huxley. She was a painter, who studied, like her husband, at the Slade, and exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere. After the birth of their only child, a daughter, she suffered severe post-natal depression and was taken to Paris for treatment where, however, she contracted pneumonia and died in 1887.
Shortly afterwards, Collier married in 1889 her younger sister Ethel Huxley. Until the Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907 such a marriage was not possible in England and the ceremony took place in Norway. Collier's daughter by his first marriage, Joyce, was a portrait miniaturist, and a member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters. By his second wife he had a daughter and a son, Sir Laurence Collier KCMG, who was the British Ambassador to Norway 1941-51.
The Land Baby (1899)
Collier died in 1934. His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography (volume for 1931-40, published 1949) compares his work to that of Frank Holl because of its solemnity. This is only true, however, of his many portraits of distinguished old men — his portraits of younger men, women and children, and his so-called "problem pictures", covering scenes of ordinary life, are often very bright and fresh.
His entry in the Dictionary of Art (vol. 7, 1996, p. 569), written by Geoffrey Ashton, refers to the invisibility of his brush strokes as a "rather unexciting and flat use of paint" but contrasts that with "Collier's strong and surprising sense of colour" which "created a disconcerting verisimilitude in both mood and appearance".
The Dictionary of Portrait Painters in Britain up to 1920 (1997) describes his portraits as "painterly works with a fresh use of light and colour".
Sixteen of John Collier's paintings are now in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London, two in the Tate Gallery and one, a self portrait of 1907, in the Uffizi in Florence which presumably commissioned it as part of its celebrated collection of artists’ self portraits.
Four of the National Portrait Gallery paintings are currently (December 1997) on display: John Burns, Sir William Huggins, Thomas Huxley (the artist's father in law) and Charles Darwin (copies of the last two are also prominently displayed at the top of the staircase at the Athenaeum club in London).
Other pictures may be seen in houses and institutions open to the public: his portrait of the Earl of Onslow (1903), for example, is at Clandon Park, Surrey (National Trust) and his portrait of Sir Charles Tertius Mander, first baronet, is at Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire. A large and striking painting of the murderess Clytemnestra can be found in the Guildhall Gallery of the City of London. Reproductions of many others, from various collections, may be consulted in the John Collier box in the National Portrait Gallery Heinz Archive and Library, and a very good selection is published in The Art of the Honourable John Collier by W H Pollock (1914). The Hon. John Collier's work was also included in the Great Victorian Pictures exhibition mounted by the Arts Council in 1978 (catalogue, p 27).
Collier's views on religion and ethics are interesting for their comparison with the views of Thomas and Julian Huxley, both of whom gave Romanes lectures on that subject. In The religion of an artist (1926) Collier explains "It [the book] is mostly concerned with ethics apart from religion... I am looking forward to a time when ethics will have taken the place of religion... My religion is really negative. [The benefits of religion] can be attained by other means which are less conducive to strife and which put less strain on upon the reasoning faculties." On secular morality: "My standard is frankly utilitarian. As far as morality is intuitive, I think it may be reduced to an inherent impulse of kindliness towards our fellow citizens." His views on ethics, then, were very close to the agnosticism of T.H. Huxley and the humanism of Julian Huxley.
On the idea of God: "People may claim without much exaggeration that the belief in God is universal. They omit to add that superstition, often of the most degraded kind, is just as universal." And "An omnipotent Deity who sentences even the vilest of his creatures to eternal torture is infinitely more cruel than the cruellest man." And on the Church: "To me, as to most Englishmen, the triumph of Roman Catholicism would mean an unspeakable disaster to the cause of civilization." And on non-conformists: "They have a superstitious belief in the actual words of the Bible which is very dangerous".
Bibliography
Clark R.W. 1968. The Huxleys. p98
Quotations from Collier, J. 1926. The religion of an artist. Watts, London.
A Primer of Art, 1882
A Manual of Oil Painting, 1886
The Art of Portrait Painting, 1905
The religion of an artist, 1926
"....Perché esiste una grande verità su questo pianeta: chiunque tu sia o qualunque cosa tu faccia, quando desideri una cosa con volontà, è perché questo desiderio è nato dall'Anima dell'Universo. E quando tu desideri qualcosa, tutto l'Universo cospira affinchè tu realizzi il tuo desidero.."
Frédéric Chopin (1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849) was a Polishcomposer and virtuosopianist of the Romantic period. He is widely regarded as the greatest Polish composer, and ranks as one of music's greatest tone poets.
Chopin was born in the village of Żelazowa Wola, in the Duchy of Warsaw, to a Polish mother and French-expatriate father, and in his early life was regarded as a child-prodigy pianist. In November 1830, at the age of 20, he went abroad; following the suppression of the Polish November Uprising of 1830–31, he became one of many expatriates of the Polish "Great Emigration."
In Paris, Chopin made a comfortable living as a composer and piano teacher, while giving few public performances. A Polish patriot,in France he used the French versions of his names and eventually, to avoid having to rely on Imperial Russian documents, became a French citizen.After some ill-fated romantic involvements with Polish women, from 1837 to 1847 he had a turbulent relationship with the French writer George Sand (Aurore Dudevant). Always in frail health, in 1849 he died in Paris, at the age of 39, of chronic pulmonary tuberculosis.
Chopin's extant compositions were written primarily for the piano as a solo instrument. Though they are technically demanding,his style emphasizes nuance and expressive depth. Chopin invented musical forms such as the balladeand was responsible for major innovations in forms such as the piano sonata, waltz, nocturne, étude, impromptu and prelude. His works are mainstays of Romanticism in 19th-century classical music.
According to family records, the couple's second child (and only son), christened Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, was born on March 1, 1810. A parish church document found in 1892 gives his birth date as February 22, 1810. Chopin and his mother, however, mentioned repeatedly in letters that he had been born not on February 22, but on March 1.
In October 1810, when the infant was seven months old, the family moved to Warsaw, where his father took a position as French-language teacher at a school in the Saxon Palace. The Chopin family lived on the palace grounds.
In 1817 Mikołaj Chopin began work, still teaching French, at the Warsaw Lyceum at Warsaw University's Kazimierz Palace. The family lived in a spacious second-floor apartment in an adjacent building. The son himself would attend the Warsaw Lyceum from 1823 to 1826.
In spite of Mikołaj Chopin's occupation, Polish spirit, culture, and language pervaded the Chopins' home, and as a result the son would never—even in Paris—perfectly master the French language. All the family had artistic leanings. Chopin's father played the flute and violin; Chopin's mother played piano, and gave lessons to boys in the elite boarding house that the Chopins operated. Thus the boy early became conversant with music in its various forms.
Józef Sikorski, a musician and Chopin's contemporary, recalls, in his Memoir about Chopin (Wspomnienie Chopina), that as a child Chopin wept with emotion when his mother played the piano. By six, he was already trying to reproduce what he heard or to make up new melodies.He received his earliest piano lessons not from his mother, but from his older sister, Ludwika (in English, "Louise").
Chopin's first professional piano tutor, from 1816 to 1822, was the respected, elderly Czech, Wojciech Żywny. Although the youngster's skills soon surpassed those of his teacher, Chopin later spoke highly of him. Seven-year-old "Little Chopin" began to give public concerts that soon prompted comparison with Mozart as a child, and with Chopin's contemporary, Beethoven. That same year, Chopin composed two polonaises, in G minor and B-flat major. The first was published in the engraving workshop of Father Izydor Józef Cybulski (composer, engraver, director of an organists' school, and one of the few music publishers in Poland); the second survives as a manuscript prepared by Mikołaj Chopin. These small works were said to rival not only the popular polonaises of leading Warsaw composers, but the famous polonaises of Michał Kleofas Ogiński. A substantial development of melodic and harmonic invention, and of piano technique, was shown in Chopin's next known polonaise (in A-flat major), which the young artist offered, in 1821, as a name-day present to Żywny.
About this time, at the age of eleven, Chopin performed in the presence of Russian TsarAlexander I, who was in Warsaw, opening the Sejm (Polish parliament).
As a child, Chopin showed an intelligence that was said to absorb everything and make use of everything for its development. He early showed remarkable abilities in observation and sketching, a keen wit and sense of humor, and an uncommon talent for mimicry. A story from his school years recounts a teacher being pleasantly surprised by a superb portrait that Chopin had drawn of him in class. In those years, Chopin was sometimes invited to the Belweder Palace as playmate to the son of Russian Poland's ruler, Grand DukeConstantine Pavlovich, and charmed the irascible duke with his piano-playing. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz attested to "Little Chopin's" popularity in his dramatic eclogue, Nasze Verkehry ("Our Intercourse," 1818), in which the eight-year-old Chopin features as a motif in the dialogues.
While in his mid-teens, during vacations spent at the Mazowsze village of Szafarnia (where he was a guest of Prince Antoni Radziwiłł), Chopin was exposed to folk melodies that he would later transmute into original compositions. His letters home from Szafarnia (the famous "Szafarnia Courier" letters) amused his family with their spoofing of the Warsaw newspapers and demonstrated the youngster's literary talent.
An anecdote describes how Chopin helped quiet rowdy children by first improvising a story and then lulling them to sleep with a berceuse (lullaby) — after which he woke everyone with an ear-piercing chord.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the "street photography" style that has influenced generations of photographers that followed.
Childhood Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, near Paris, France, the eldest of five children. His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer whose Cartier-Bresson thread was a staple of French sewing kits. He also sketched in his spare time. His mother's family were cotton merchants and landowners from Normandy, where he spent part of his childhood. The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, near the Europe Bridge, and provided him with financial support to develop his interests in photography in a more independent manner than many of his contemporaries.
As a young boy, Cartier-Bresson owned a Box Brownie, using it for taking holiday snapshots; he later experimented with a 3×4 inch view camera. He was raised in a traditional French bourgeois fashion, required to address his parents as vous rather than the familiar tu. His father assumed that his son would take up the family business, but Henri was headstrong and was appalled by this prospect.
The early years Cartier-Bresson studied in Paris at the École Fénelon, a Catholic school. His uncle Louis, a gifted painter, introduced Cartier-Bresson to oil painting. "Painting has been my obsession from the time that my 'mythical father', my father's brother, led me into his studio during the Christmas holidays in 1913, when I was five years old. There I lived in the atmosphere of painting; I inhaled the canvases." Uncle Louis' painting lessons were cut short, however, when he died in World War I.
In 1927, at the age of 19, Cartier-Bresson entered a private art school and the Lhote Academy, the Parisian studio of the Cubist painter and sculptor André Lhote. Lhote's ambition was to unify the Cubists' approach to reality with classical artistic forms, and to link the French classical tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David to Modernism. Cartier-Bresson also studied painting with society portraitist Jacques Émile Blanche. During this period he read Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Hegel, Engels and Marx. Lhote took his pupils to the Louvre to study classical artists and to Parisian galleries to study contemporary art. Cartier-Bresson's interest in modern art was combined with an admiration for the works of the Renaissance—of masterpieces from Jan van Eyck, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio and Piero della Francesca. Cartier-Bresson often regarded Lhote as his teacher of photography without a camera.
Although Cartier-Bresson gradually began to feel uncomfortable with Lhote's "rule-laden" approach to art, his rigorous theoretical training would later help him to confront and resolve problems of artistic form and composition in photography. In the 1920s, schools of photographic realism were popping up throughout Europe, but each had a different view on the direction photography should take. The photography revolution had begun: "Crush tradition! Photograph things as they are!" The Surrealist movement (founded in 1924) was a catalyst for this paradigm shift. While still studying at Lhote's studio, Cartier-Bresson began socializing with the Surrealists at the Café Cyrano, in the Place Blanche. He met a number of the movement's leading protagonists, and was particularly drawn to the Surrealist movement of linking the subconscious and the immediate to their work. Peter Galassi explains:
The Surrealists approached photography in the same way that Aragon and Breton...approached the street: with a voracious appetite for the usual and unusual...The Surrealists recognized in plain photographic fact an essential quality that had been excluded from prior theories of photographic realism. They saw that ordinary photographs, especially when uprooted from their practical functions, contain a wealth of unintended, unpredictable meanings. Cartier-Bresson matured artistically in this stormy cultural and political environment. He was aware of the concepts and theories mentioned but could not find a way of expressing this imaginatively in his paintings. He was very frustrated with his experiments and subsequently destroyed the majority of his early works.
From 1928 to 1929, Cartier-Bresson attended the University of Cambridge studying English art and literature and became bilingual. In 1930, he did his mandatory service in the French Army stationed at Le Bourget, near Paris. He remembered, "And I had quite a hard time of it, too, because I was toting Joyce under my arm and a Lebel rifle on my shoulder."
In 1931, once out of the Army and after having read Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Cartier-Bresson sought adventure on the Côte d'Ivoire, within French colonial Africa. He wrote, "I left Lhote's studio because I did not want to enter into that systematic spirit. I wanted to be myself. To paint and to change the world counted for more than everything in my life." He survived by shooting game and selling it to local villagers. From hunting, he learned methods that he would later use in his photography techniques. It was there on the Côte d'Ivoire that he contracted blackwater fever, which nearly killed him. While still feverish he sent instructions for his own funeral, writing his grandfather and asking to be buried in Normandie, at the edge of the Eawy forest while Debussy's String Quartet played. An uncle wrote back, "Your grandfather finds all that too expensive. It would be preferable that you return first." Although Cartier-Bresson took a portable camera (smaller than a Brownie Box) to Côte d'Ivoire, only seven photographs survived the tropics.
Returning to France, Cartier-Bresson recuperated in Marseille in 1931 and deepened his relationship with the Surrealists. He became inspired by a 1931 photograph by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi showing three naked young African boys, caught in near-silhouette, running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. Titled Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, this captured the freedom, grace and spontaneity of their movement and their joy at being alive. Cartier-Bresson said:
"The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said damn it, I took my camera and went out into the street." The photograph inspired him to stop painting and to take up photography seriously. He explained, "I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant." He acquired the Leica camera with 50 mm lens in Marseilles that would accompany him for many years. He described the Leica as an extension of his eye. The anonymity that the small camera gave him in a crowd or during an intimate moment was essential in overcoming the formal and unnatural behavior of those who were aware of being photographed. The Leica opened up new possibilities in photography — the ability to capture the world in its actual state of movement and transformation. He said, "I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, ready to 'trap' life." Restless, he photographed in Berlin, Brussels, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Madrid. His photographs were first exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932, and subsequently at the Ateneo Club in Madrid. In 1934 in Mexico, he shared an exhibition with Manuel Alvarez Bravo. In the beginning, he did not photograph much in his native France. It would be years before he photographed there extensively.
In 1934 Cartier-Bresson met a young Polish intellectual, a photographer named David Szymin who was called "Chim" because his name was difficult to pronounce. Szymin later changed his name to David Seymour. The two had much in common culturally. Through Chim, Cartier-Bresson met Hungarian photographer Endré Friedmann, who later changed his name to Robert Capa. The three shared a studio in the early 1930s and Capa mentored Cartier-Bresson, "Don't keep the label of a surrealist photographer. Be a photojournalist. If not you will fall into mannerism. Keep surrealism in your little heart, my dear. Don't fidget. Get moving!"
The middle years Cartier-Bresson traveled to America in 1935 with an invitation to exhibit his work at New York's Julien Levy Gallery. He shared display space with fellow photographers Walker Evans and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar, gave him a fashion assignment, but he fared poorly since he had no idea how to direct or interact with the models. Nevertheless, Snow was the first American editor to publish Cartier-Bresson's photographs in a magazine. While in New York, he met photographer Paul Strand, who did camerawork for the Depression-era documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains. When he returned to France, Cartier-Bresson applied for a job with renowned French film director Jean Renoir. He acted in Renoir's 1936 film Partie de campagne and in the 1939 La Règle du jeu, for which he played a butler and served as second assistant. Renoir made Cartier-Bresson act so he could understand how it felt to be on the other side of the camera. Cartier-Bresson also helped Renoir make a film for the Communist party on the 200 families, including his own, who ran France. During the Spanish civil war, Cartier-Bresson co-directed an anti-fascist film with Herbert Kline, to promote the Republican medical services.
Cartier-Bresson's first photojournalist photos to be published came in 1937 when he covered the coronation of King George VI, for the French weekly Regards. He focused on the new monarch's adoring subjects lining the London streets, and took no pictures of the king. His photo credit read "Cartier," as he was hesitant to use his full family name.
In 1937, Cartier-Bresson married a Javanese dancer, Ratna Mohini. They lived in a fourth-floor servants' flat at 19, rue Danielle Casanova, a large studio with a small bedroom, kitchen and bathroom where Cartier-Bresson developed film. Between 1937 and 1939 Cartier-Bresson worked as a photographer for the French Communists' evening paper, Ce Soir. With Chim and Capa, Cartier-Bresson was a leftist, but he did not join the French Communist party. He joined the French Army as a Corporal in the Film and Photo unit when World War II broke out in September 1939. During the Battle of France, in June 1940 at St. Dié in the Vosges Mountains, he was captured by German soldiers and spent 35 months in prisoner-of-war camps doing forced labor under the Nazis. As Cartier-Bresson put it, he was forced to perform "thirty-two different kinds of hard manual labor." He worked "as slowly and as poorly as possible." He twice tried and failed to escape from the prison camp, and was punished by solitary confinement. His third escape was successful and he hid on a farm in Touraine before getting false papers that allowed him to travel in France. In France, he worked for the underground, aiding other escapees and working secretly with other photographers to cover the Occupation and then the Liberation of France. In 1943, he dug up his beloved Leica camera, which he had buried in farmland near Vosges. By the time of the armistice, he was asked by the American Office of War Information to make a documentary, Le Retour (The Return) about returning French prisoners and displaced persons.
Towards the end of the War, rumors had reached America that Cartier-Bresson had been killed. His film on returning war refugees (released in the United States in 1947) spurred a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) instead of the posthumous show that MoMA had been preparing. The show debuted in 1947 together with the publication of his first book, The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Lincoln Kirstein and Beaumont Newhall wrote the book's text.
Formation of Magnum Photos In spring 1947, Cartier-Bresson, with Robert Capa, David "Chim" Seymour, William "Bill" Vandivert, and George Rodger founded Magnum Photos. Capa's brainchild, Magnum was a cooperative picture agency owned by its members. The team split photo assignments among the members. Rodger, who had quit Life in London after covering World War II, would cover Africa and the Middle East. Chim, who spoke most European languages, would work in Europe. Cartier-Bresson would be assigned to India and China. Vandivert, who had also left Life, would work in America, and Capa would work anywhere that had an assignment. Maria Eisner managed the Paris office and Rita Vandivert, Vandivert's wife, managed the New York office and became Magnum's first president.
Magnum's mission was to "feel the pulse" of the times and some of its first projects were People Live Everywhere, Youth of the World, Women of the World and The Child Generation. Magnum aimed to use photography in the service of humanity, and provided arresting, widely viewed images.
The Decisive Moment
Cartier-Bresson achieved international recognition for his coverage of Gandhi's funeral in India in 1948 and the last (1949) stage of the Chinese Civil War. He covered the last six months of the Kuomintang administration and the first six months of the Maoist People's Republic. He also photographed the last surviving Imperial eunuchs in Beijing, as the city was falling to the communists. From China, he went on to Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where he documented the gaining of independence from the Dutch.
In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published his book Images à la sauvette, whose English edition was titled The Decisive Moment. It included a portfolio of 126 of his photos from the East and the West. The book's cover was drawn by Henri Matisse. For his 4,500-word philosophical preface, Cartier-Bresson took his keynote text from the 17th century Cardinal de Retz: "Il n'y a rien dans ce monde qui n'ait un moment decisif" ("There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment"). Cartier-Bresson applied this to his photographic style. He said: "To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression."
Both titles came from publishers. Tériade, the Greek-born French publisher whom Cartier-Bresson idolized, gave the book its French title, Images à la Sauvette, which can loosely be translated as "images on the run" or "stolen images." Dick Simon of Simon & Schuster came up with the English title The Decisive Moment. Margot Shore, Magnum's Paris bureau chief, did the English translation of Cartier-Bresson's French preface.
"Photography is not like painting," Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. "There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative," he said. "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."
Cartier-Bresson held his first exhibition in France at the Pavillon de Marsan in the Louvre in 1955.
Later years Cartier-Bresson's photography took him many places on the globe – China, Mexico, Canada, the United States, India, Japan, Soviet Union and many other countries. He became the first Western photographer to photograph "freely" in the post-war Soviet Union. In 1968, he began to turn away from photography and return to his passion for drawing and painting. Cartier-Bresson withdrew as a principal of Magnum (which still distributed his photographs) in 1966 to concentrate on portraiture and landscapes. In 1967, he was divorced from his first wife, Ratna "Elie". He married photographer Martine Franck, thirty years younger than himself, in 1970. The couple had a daughter, Mélanie, in May 1972.
Cartier-Bresson retired from photography in the early 1970s and by 1975 no longer took pictures other than an occasional private portrait; he said he kept his camera in a safe at his house and rarely took it out. He returned to drawing and painting. After a lifetime of developing his artistic vision through photography, he said, "All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing." He held his first exhibition of drawings at the Carlton Gallery in New York in 1975.
The Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation was created by Cartier-Bresson, his wife and daughter in 2002, to preserve and share his legacy.
Death and legacy Cartier-Bresson died in Céreste (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France) in 2004, at 95. No cause of death was announced. He was buried in the Cimetière de Montjustin, Alpes de Haute Provence, France. He was survived by his wife, Martine Franck, and daughter, Mélanie.
Cartier-Bresson spent more than three decades on assignment for Life and other journals. He traveled without bounds, documenting some of the great upheavals of the 20th century — the Spanish civil war, the liberation of Paris in 1945, the 1968 student rebellion in Paris, the fall of the Kuomintang in China to the communists, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the Berlin Wall, and the deserts of Egypt. And along the way he paused to document portraits of Sartre, Picasso, Colette, Matisse, Pound and Giacometti.
Cartier-Bresson was a photographer who hated to be photographed and treasured his privacy above all. Photographs of Cartier-Bresson do exist, but they are scant. When he accepted an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1975, he held a paper in front of his face to avoid being photographed.
Cartier-Bresson believed that what went on beneath the surface was nobody's business but his own. He did recall that he once confided his innermost secrets to a Paris taxi driver, certain that he would never meet the man again.
Technique Cartier-Bresson exclusively used Leica 35 mm rangefinder cameras equipped with normal 50 mm lenses or occasionally a wide-angle for landscapes. He often wrapped black tape around the camera's chrome body to make it less conspicuous. With fast black and white films and sharp lenses, he was able to photograph almost by stealth to capture the events. No longer bound by a huge 4×5 press camera or an awkward two and a quarter inch twin-lens reflex camera, miniature-format cameras gave Cartier-Bresson what he called "the velvet hand the hawk's eye." He never photographed with flash, a practice he saw as "mpolite...like coming to a concert with a pistol in your hand." He believed in composing his photographs in his camera and not in the darkroom, showcasing this belief by having nearly all his photographs printed only at full-frame and completely free of any cropping or other darkroom manipulation -- indeed, he emphasized that the entire negative had been used by extending the area reproduced on the print to include a thick black border around the frame.
Cartier-Bresson worked exclusively in black and white, other than a few unsuccessful attempts in color. He never developed or made his own prints. He said: "I've never been interested in the process of photography, never, never. Right from the beginning. For me, photography with a small camera like the Leica is an instant drawing."
Cartier-Bresson is regarded as one of the art world's most unassuming personalities. He disliked publicity and exhibited a ferocious shyness since his days in hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Although he took many famous portraits, his own face was little known to the world at large (which presumably had the advantage of allowing him to work on the street in peace). He dismissed others' applications of the term "art" to his photographs, which he thought were merely his gut reactions to moments in time that he had happened upon.
Quotation "The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression... . In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif." — Henri Cartier-Bresson
Works
Bibliography 1947: The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Text by Lincoln Kirstein, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1952: The Decisive Moment. Texts and photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Cover by Henri Matisse. Simon & Schuster, New York. French edition 1954: Les Danses à Bali. Texts by Antonin Artaud on Balinese theater and commentary by Béryl de Zoete Delpire, Paris. German edition 1955: The Europeans. Text and photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Cover by Joan Miro. Simon & Schuster, New York. French edition 1955: People of Moscow. Thames and Hudson, London. French, German and Italian editions 1956: China in Transition. Thames and Hudson, London. French, German and Italian editions 1958: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Fotografie. Text by Anna Farova. Statni nakladatelstvi krasné, Prague and Bratislava. 1963: Photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Grossman Publisher, New York. French, English, Japanese and Swiss editions 1964: China. Photographs and notes on fifteen months spent in China. Text by Barbara Miller. Bantam Books, New York. French edition 1966: Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Artless Art. Text by Jean-Pierre Montier. Translated from the French L'Art sans art d'Henri Cartier-Bresson by Ruth Taylor. Bulfinch Press, New York. 1968: The World of HCB. Viking Press, New York. French, German and Swiss editions 1969: Man and Machine. Commissioned by IBM. French, German, Italian and Spanish editions 1970: France. Text by François Nourissier. Thames and Hudson, London. French and German editions 1972: The Face of Asia. Introduction by Robert Shaplen. Published by John Weatherhill (New York and Tokyo) and Orientations Ltd. (Hong Kong). French edition 1973: About Russia. Thames and Hudson, London. French, German and Swiss editions 1976: Henri Cartier-Bresson. Texts by Henri Cartier-Bresson. History of Photography Series. History of Photography Series. French, German, Italian, Japanese and Italian editions 1979: Henri Cartier-Bresson Photographer. Text by Yves Bonnefoy. Bulfinch, New York. French, English, German, Japanese and Italian editions 1983: Henri Cartier-Bresson. Ritratti. Texts by André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Ferdinando Scianna. Coll. " I Grandi Fotografi ". Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, Milan. English and Spanish editions 1985: Henri Cartier-Bresson en Inde. Introduction de Satyajit Ray, photographies et notes d'Henri Cartier-Bresson. Texte d'Yves Véquaud. Centre National de la Photographie, Paris. Editions anglaise Photoportraits. Texts by André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Thames and Hudson, London. French and German editions 1987: Henri Cartier-Bresson. The Early Work. Texts by Peter Galassi. Museum of Modern Art, New York. French edition Henri Cartier-Bresson in India. Introduction by Satyajit Ray, photographs and notes by Henri Cartier-Bresson, texts by Yves Véquaud. Thames and Hudson, London. French edition 1989: L'Autre Chine. Introduction by Robert Guillain. Collection Photo Notes. Centre National de la Photographie, Paris Line by Line. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s drawings. Introduction by Jean Clair and John Russell. Thames and Hudson, London. French and German editions 1991: America in Passing. Introduction by Gilles Mora. Bulfinch, New York. French, English, German, Italian, Portuguese and Danish editions Alberto Giacometti photographié par Henri Cartier-Bresson. Texts by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Louis Clayeux. Franco Sciardelli, Milan 1994: A propos de Paris. Texts by Véra Feyder and André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Thames and Hudson, London. French, German and Japanese editions Double regard. Drawings and photographs. Texts by Jean Leymarie. Amiens : Le Nyctalope. French and English editions Mexican Notebooks 1934–1964. Text by Carlos Fuentes. Thames and Hudson, London. French, Italian, and German editions L'Art sans art. Texte de Jean-Pierre Montier. Editions Flammarion, Paris. Editions allemande, anglaise et italienne 1996: L'Imaginaire d'après nature. Textes de Henri Cartier-Bresson. Fata Morgana, Paris. Editions allemande et américaine 1997: Europeans. Texts by Jean Clair. Thames and Hudson, London. French, German, Italian and Portuguese editions 1998: Tête à tête. Texts by Ernst H. Gombrich. Thames & Hudson, London. French, German, Italian and Portuguese editions 1999: The Mind's Eye. Texts by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Aperture, New York. French and German editions 2001: Landscape Townscape. Texts by Erik Orsenna and Gérard Macé. Thames and Hudson, London. French, German and Italian editions 2003: The Man, the Image and the World. Texts by Philippe Arbaizar, Jean Clair, Claude Cookman, Robert Delpire, Jean Leymarie, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, Serge Toubiana. Thames and Hudson, London 2003. German, French, Korean, Italian and Spanish editions. 2006: An Inner SIlence: The portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Texts by Agnès Sire and Jean-Luc Nancy. Thames and Hudson, New York.
Filmography
Films directed by Henri Cartier-Bresson Henri Cartier-Bresson was second assistant director to Jean Renoir in 1936 for La vie est à nous and Une partie de campagne, and in 1939 for La Règle du Jeu.
1937–Victoire de la vie. Documentary on the hospitals of Republican Spain: Running time: 49 minutes. Black and white. 1938–L’Espagne Vivra. Documentary on the Spanish Civil War and the post-war period. Running time: 43 minutes and 32 seconds. Black and white. 1944–45 Le Retour. Documentary on prisoners of war and detainees. Running time: 32 minutes and 37 seconds. Black and white. 1969–70 Impressions of California. Running time: 23 minutes and 20 seconds. Color. 1969–70 Southern Exposures. Running time: 22 minutes and 25 seconds. Color.
Films compiled from photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson 1956–A Travers le Monde avec Henri Cartier-Bresson. Directed by Jean-Marie Drot and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Running time: 21 minutes. Black and white. 1963–Midlands at Play and at Work. Produced by ABC Television, London. Running time : 19 minutes. Black and white. 1963–65 Five fifteen-minute films on Germany for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk, Munich. 1967–Flagrants délits. Directed by Robert Delpire. Original music score by Diego Masson. Delpire production, Paris. Running time: 22 minutes. Black and white. 1969–Québec vu par Cartier-Bresson / Le Québec as seen by Cartier-Bresson. Directed by Wolff Kœnig. Produced by the Canadian Film Board. Running time: 10 minutes. Black and white. 1970–Images de France. 1991–Contre l'oubli : Lettre à Mamadou Bâ, Mauritanie. Short film directed by Martine Franck for Amnesty International. Editing : Roger Ikhlef. Running time: 3 minutes. Black and white. 1992–Henri Cartier-Bresson dessins et photos. Director: Annick Alexandre. Short film produced by FR3 Dijon, commentary by the artist. Running time: 2 minutes and 33 seconds. Color. 1997–Série "100 photos du siècle": L'Araignée d'amour: broadcast by Arte. Produced by Capa Télévision. Running time: 6 minutes and 15 seconds. Color.
Films about Cartier-Bresson Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye (72 mins, 2006. Late interviews with Cartier-Bresson.)
Exhibitions
Public collections of Henri Cartier-Bresson's works Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, France De Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, USA University of Fine Arts, Osaka, Japan Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, USA The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, USA Institute for Contemporary Photography, New York, USA The Philadelphia Art Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA Kahitsukan Kyoto Museum of Contemporary Art, Kyoto, Japan Museum of Modern Art, Tel Aviv, Israel Stockholm Modern Museet, Sweden
Exhibitions of Henri Cartier-Bresson's works 1933 Cercle Atheneo, Madrid, Spain 1933 Julien Levy Gallery, New York, U.S.A. 1934 Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico (with Manuel Alvarez Bravo) 1947 Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A. Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany; Museum of Modern Art, Rome, Italy; Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, UK; Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A.; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile 1952 Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK 1955 Retrospektive – Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, France 1956 Photokina, Cologne, Germany 1963 Photokina, Cologne, Germany 1964 Philipps Collection, Washington 1965–1967 2nd retrospective, Tokyo, Japan, Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, France, New York, U.S.A., London, UK, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Rome, Italy, Zurich, Switzerland, Cologne, Germany and other cities. 1970 En France – Grande Palais, Paris. Later in the U.S.A., USSR, Australia and Japan 1974 Exhibition about the USSR, International Center of Photography, New York, U.S.A. 1974–1997 Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris, France 1975 Carlton Gallery, New York, U.S.A, 1975 Galerie Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland 1980 Portraits – Galerie Eric Franck, Geneve, Switzerland 1981 Musée d'Art moderne de la Villa de Paris, France 1981 Retrospective – Musée d'Art de la Ville en France 1982 Hommage a Henri Cartier-Bresson – Centre National de la Photographie, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France 1983 Printemps Ginza – Tokyo, Japan 1984 Osaka University of Arts, Japan 1984–1985 Paris à vue d’oil – Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France 1985 Henri Cartier. Bresson en Inde – Centre National de la Photographie, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France 1985 Museo de Arte Moderno de México, Mexico 1986 L'Institute français de Stockholm 1986 Pavillon d'Arte contemporanea, Milan, Italy 1986 Tor Vergata University, Rome, Italy 1987 Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK (drawings and photography) 1987 Early Photographs – Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A. 1988 Institute français, Athen, Greece 1988 Palais Lichtenstein, Vienna, Austria 1988 Salzburger Landessammlung, Austria 1989 Chapelle de l'École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France 1989 Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, Switzerland (drawings and photographs) 1989 Mannheimer Kunstverein, Mannheim, Germany (drawings and photography) 1989 Printemps Ginza, Tokyo, Japan 1990 Galerie Arnold Herstand, New York, U.S.A. 1991 Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan (drawings and photographs) 1992 Centro de Exposiciones, Saragossa and Logrono, Spain 1992 Hommage à Henri Cartier-Bresson – International Center of Photography, New York, U.S.A. 1992 L'Amérique – FNAC, Paris, France 1992 Musée de Noyers-sur-Serein, France 1992 Palazzo San Vitale, Parma, Italy 1993 Photo Dessin – Dessin Photo, Arles, France 1994 Dessins e première photos – La Caridad, Barcelona, Spain 1995 Dessins e Hommage à Henri Cartier-Bresson – CRAG Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Valence, Drome, France 1996 Henri Cartier-Bresson: Pen brush and Cameras – The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, U.S.A. 1997 De Européenne – Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France 1997 Henri Cartier-Bresson, dessins – Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montreal, Canada 1998 Galerie Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland 1998 Galerie Löhrl, Mönchengladbach, Germany 1998 Howard Greenberggh Gallery, New York, U.S.A. 1998 Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland 1998 Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany 1998 Line by Line – Royal College of Art, London, UK 1998 Tete à Tete – National Portrait Gallery, London, UK 1998–1999 Photographien und Zeichnungen - Baukunst Galerie, Cologne, Germany 2003–2005 Retrospective, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France; La Caixa, Barcelona, Spain; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany; Museum of Modern Art, Rome, Italy; Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, UK; Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A.; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile 2004 Baukunst Galerie, Cologne 2004 Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin 2004 Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Non respingere i sogni perchè sono sogni. Tutti i sogni possono essere realtà,se il sogno non finisce. La realtà è un sogno. Se sogniamo che la pietra è pietra,questo è pietra. Ciò che scorre nei fiumi non è acqua, è un sognare,l'acqua,cristallina. La realtà traveste il sogno,è dice: "Io sono il sole,i cieli,l'amore".ù Ma mai si dilegua,mai passa, se fingiamo di credere che è più che un sogno. E viviamo sognandola. Sognare è il mezzo che l'anima ha perchè non le fugga mai ciò che fuggirebbe se smetessimo di sognare che è realtà ciò che non esiste. Muore solo un amore che ha smesso di essere sognato fatto materia e che si cerca sulla terra.
