ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (American, b. Hungary

PROVENANCE
The Estate of André Kertész;
Edwynn Houk Gallery, NEW YORK;
Private Collection, PENNSYLVANIA

In the best stories, visionaries rise from humble roots. André Kertész, a bank clerk and avid amateur photographer, left his native Budapest in 1925 at 31, seeking his career as a photographer after a decade or so of dedicated camera work. He brought with him not much more than a keen eye for any genre of picture making and a distinct ambition for success. Within two years the Hungarian mounted his first exhibition at Jean Slivinsky's Modernist gallery, AU SACRE DU PRINTEMPS, and his reputation as a photographer of great merit was born.

This kind of fame was only of mild commercial success, however, and Kertész would struggle financially in Paris. Out of necessity and limited resources he found magical means of presenting his photographs. Two characteristics to his photographs in his early years in Paris reflect his ingenuity as a designer with a camera. The first involved printing many of his photographs on an inexpensive and tiny paper manufactured for sending pictures through the mail. Enlarging paper was expensive and he reserved that for only special prints. He took advantage of the carte postale paper by accentuating the dimensional limitations of the paper through severe cropping of his negatives and asymmetrical placement on the sheet.

The second element concerned his presentation for exhibition prints, which involved carefully trimming and mounting his finished prints onto sheets of vellum, thus giving him a distinguished, elegant and sturdy mount. In Kertész's group portrait of Slivinsky and friends in the exhibition (see: Phillips, et al., ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ, OF PARIS AND NEW YORK, p. 34, fig. 24) his vellum mounted enlargements and cartes postales are clearly visible, hung unframed and pinned to the walls.

The untitled still life offered here is an example of that rare combination of a surviving enlargement from the period mounted on vellum. Although considered quite rare, probably unpublished and possibly the only extant print of this image, the photograph is classic Kertész. The print so struck the dealer Edwynn Houk that when he was allowed to choose works from the artist's estate, it was one of the first selected.

As an artist, Kertész was secure enough in his own vision and talent that he had no need for alignment with any "Ism" of the time, although he borrowed freely from Constructivism, De Stijl, Surrealism and reportage. His were the most Continental of photographic eyes, an amalgam of the essential European points of view. This still life, with its Bauhaus inspired bird's eye view, is avant-garde but earthy. It is possibly a metonymic self-portrait, an arrangement of the photographer's washbasin, toothbrush and powder seen not with the eyes of the Hungarian but through the experienced vision of the émigré. There is humility in such a picture and on viewing it; one has to hope that the daily routine of handling one's toiletries would, in Proustian fashion, remind the artist of home. The visceral effect is almost daunting. An expectation of pouring water and the aroma of soap permeate the image.