HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON 1908-2004 Cuba, 1934 Gela

Provenance
From the artist; to Ben Maddow; to a Private Collection

Literature
Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work, p. 122

Each photograph, the best ones particularly is a frame cut out of the incessant movement of people's lives. But what extraordinary frames they are! Time is dissected here by the shutter of his Leica as if by the sectioning knife in a biological laboratory. It is the freezing, the preservation of the second that otherwise decays so easily. But in this process, the slice through time becomes enlarged, becomes gigantic in its human implications.
– Ben Maddow, "Surgeon, Poet, Provocateur", The Photo League Bulletin,April 1947, n.p.

In the catalogue for the exhibition Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work, Peter Galassi argues for a particular portrait of the artist as a young man, drawn from the influence of his background, his upbringing and his family. Galassi's composition takes into consideration the economic fortune with which he was raised but ultimately rejected, his political affinities for the far left, his dedication to his friends and associates. He explores the vigor with which the young artist ingested the influential literature and creative ideas of the era, the passion he devoured life experience with and, not the least, the peripatetic course of his life in the first half of the 1930s. Ultimately, the image is of a determined, brave, independent, intelligent and critical observer able to condense the complexities of modern life into single 35 mm frames concisely, with a catholic view of 20th century humanity and a rigorous formal intensity that would inform generations of photographers to follow. The humanist yet incisive eye of the later work, of The Decisive Moment, is alluded to but not approached as it was the radically accomplished work Cartier-Bresson executed from 1931 to 1934 that established his reputation before World War II and beyond.

The Museum of Modern Art exhibited Cartier-Bresson's work after World War II in 1947. Organized by Beaumont and Nancy Newhall during the war, it was planned without knowing whether or not the photographer had lived through the ordeal (The Early Work, p. 25). The critic, historian and author, Ben Maddow reviewed the exhibition in the April 1947 issue of The Photo League Bulletin, from which the above quotation was taken. Maddow and Cartier-Bresson met in New York in 1935 through a filmmaking group known as Nykino, led in part by Paul Strand (op. cit., p. 22). Cuba, 1934, the photograph offered here, belonged to Maddow, a gift of the photographer. Some sixty years later, the print was sent to Cartier-Bresson for his signature. When returned, it was embellished with the extensive inscription on the verso, noting that he had given other prints of the image to Julien Levy and Lincoln Kirstein (see illustration). In regards to the rarity of works such as Cuba, in The Early Work, Galassi notes that, "In the early 1930s, Henri Cartier-Bresson made his own prints but he did not make a great many, since his audiene at that time was very small. The great majority of surviving prints from the period were made for exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery; a few others were gifts for friends" (op. cit., "A Note On The Prints", p. 143). Over the last twenty years only one other period print of this image has appeared at auction.

Maddow also notes in the Photo League review, "It's interesting that many of Cartier-Bresson's finest photographs concern children. He responds well to their mockery combined with grace, to their gaiety and the pure quality of their sadness." Cartier-Bresson was in Cuba only briefly in 1934, during the year he spent in Mexico having signed up as a photographer for a failed expedition to map out a Pan-American highway. That this particular image survived the photographer's stringent editing just prior to the War, when he disposed of a good number of negatives, is significant. It is one of the few remaining pictures that although there are three men seemingly disassociated from the scene far in the background, it does not center around or focus on human presence or interaction (The Early Work, pp. 20, 143). The scene may have intrigued Cartier-Bresson exactly for its very absence of children, which it seems to demand, or for its nearly decrepit view of the remains of a childhood joy, a carnival's carousel, broken down and degraded, stripped of its ornamentation and reins. What does remain, with its nod to Surrealist composition and oblique viewpoint, suggests astronomy. It is a galaxy of woe then, childless, abandoned by the gods, with a constellation drawn of shattered wooden horses surrounded by stars of detritus and the crumbled stucco of what might be a fortress, disintegrated, emulating horse head nebulae; the men, dispossessed Orions.