HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON French, 1908-2004 Adal

Provenance
From the artist to an Anonymous Collection.
Sotheby's Amsterdam, January 25, 2005, lot 20.
To the present Private Collection.

Literature
Cartier-Bresson, The Europeans, 1950, n.p.
Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, 1952, n.p.
Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work, 1987, p. 108.
Montier, Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Artless Art, 1996, p. 14.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the iconic photo-documentarian, was a passionate observer of the subtle aspects of life and was best known for capturing "the decisive moment" — the apex of real-life action. Referring to his visionary and sensitive approach in his introduction to his book The Decisive Moment, 1952, Cartier-Bresson wrote: "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 which give that event its proper expression. I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us.

A balance must be established between these two worlds – the one inside us and the one outside us. As a result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate. But this takes care of the content of the picture. For me, content cannot be separated from form. By form, I mean a vigorous organization of the interplay of surfaces, lines and values. It is in this organization alone that our conceptions and emotions become concrete and communicable. In photography, visual organization can stem only from a developed instinct."

Many viewers have mistaken Andalucia, Seville, 1933, to be a document of the devastation of the Spanish Civil War, as yet one more example of Cartier-Bresson's mission to "testify to the scars of the world" through his photographs. Although chronologically incorrect (the war would not begin until 1936), Cartier-Bresson still manages to convey the coexisting paradox of despair and hope that prevailed in Spain prior to the war. "As much as Cartier-Bresson deplored the hard circumstances of his subjects he admired their spirit, and entered into it" (Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work, 1987, p.27). This current lot reveals that psychological insight and seed of political turmoil, combined with his most compositionally inventive best known work.