ROME.- From 26 September 2014 to 25 January 2015, the Ara Pacis Museum of Rome hosts a retrospective exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, curated by Clément Chéroux. This large exhibition is a production of the Pompidou Centre of Paris. It is promoted by Roma Capitale Assessorato alla Cultura, Creatività e Promozione Artistica - Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali, produced by Contrasto and Zètema Progetto Cultura, and proposed on the ten-year anniversary of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s death.

Compositional skill, extraordinary visual intuition, and the ability to seize upon the most fleeting but also most important moments, made Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004) one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century. Throughout his career, while travelling the world and witnessing history’s greatest moments, Cartier-Bresson was always able to unite poetry with the power of documentation. From Surrealism to the Cold War, from the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War and Decolonization, Cartier-Bresson was one of the greatest chronicles of our history; the “eye of the century”, as he is rightly called.

His work falls into three great periods. The first, from 1926 to 1935, when Cartier-Bresson socializes with the Surrealists, takes his first steps in photography and goes on his first voyages. The second, from 1936 to 1946, is defined by his involvement in politics, his work for the Communist press and his experience in filmmaking. The third, from 1947 to 1970, covers the period after the founding of Magnum Photos agency to his retirement from photo reporting.

The exhibition presents a new reading of the immense body of photographic work left by Cartier-Bresson. The exposition is the product of extensive research and covers the great photographer’s entire professional career.

It offers a dual vision. On the one hand, it traces the genesis of Cartier-Bresson’s work by illustrating the evolution of his artistic path in all of its complexity and variety. At the same time, it brings together and “paints” the history of the 20th century, through the eyes of a photographer.

Over 500 items including period photographs, drawings, paintings, films and manuscripts, his most famous images and those less known, and rare and unedited documents are brought together providing an in-depth picture of the extraordinary work of this great photographer and chronicler of our times.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue edited by Contrasto with essays by scholars and experts, and unedited texts by Cartier-Bresson. In addition to the catalogue, an easy-to-follow guide to the exhibition is also provided.

INTRODUCTION
"I always had a passion for painting," wrote Cartier-Bresson. "When I was a child, I painted on Thursdays and Sundays, and dreamed about doing it on the other days." He began to draw early on as a boy, illustrating his letters with little drawings and filling whole sketchbooks. At the same time, he began to work as an amateur photographer. From the mid-Twenties, he painted regularly with Jacques-Émile Blanche and Jean Cottenet, then went to study with André Lhote. The earliest paintings that have come down to us date from 1924, and are clearly influenced by Paul Cézanne. In André Lhote's studio, the young man caught the geometry bug. His paintings between 1926 and 1928 were carefully constructed according to the principles of the Golden Section. In the same period, Cartier-Bresson began to mingle with the Surrealists, and created collages in the style of his friend Max Ernst.

RISING SIGNS
Henri Cartier-Bresson's bent for photography was due to a combination of factors: an artistic predisposition, unremitting study, personal ambition, something in the air, and various encounters. He began to take pictures in the Twenties, and here painting, that he practised also as an amateur, was a key element. He then developed his photographic approach through several formative periods, like his trip to Africa between 1930 and 1931. His photography was obviously influenced by his love of art and by all the hours spent reading and looking at paintings in museums. It was deeply marked by the teaching of André Lhote and his contact with American friends like Julien Levy, Caresse and Harry Crosby, Gretchen and Peter Powel. The first introduced him to the delights of composition; through the others he discovered the photographs of Eugène Atget and the "New Vision". The first Cartier-Bresson was the result of these various influences, making for a complex alchemy.

ATTRACTION OF SURREALISM
Through René Crevel, whom he met at Jacques-Émile Blanche's, Cartier-Bresson began to mingle with the Surrealists around 1926. "Too shy and too young to speak up," as he was to say later, he was present "at the end of the table" during several meetings run by André Breton in the cafés of Place Blanche. From his contact with them, he retained a number of motifs emblematic of the Surrealists' world, such as wrapped objects, deformed bodies and dreamers with closed eyes. But the Surrealist attitude marked him even more deeply: the subversive spirit, a liking for games, the importance given to the subconscious, the joy of strolling through the streets, and a tendency to leave things to chance. Cartier-Bresson was particularly sensitive to the principles of convulsive beauty laid down by Breton, and endlessly put them into practice during the Thirties. From this point of view, he was probably one of the most authentically Surrealist photographers of his generation.

POLITICAL COMMITMENT
Like most of his Surrealist friends, Cartier-Bresson shared many of the Communists' political positions: a fierce anti-colonialism, an unswerving commitment to the Spanish Republicans and a profound belief in the need "to change life". After the violent riots staged in February 1934 in Paris by the far-right leagues, seen then as a risk that the rising power of European fascism would infect France, his commitment took a more tangible form. He signed several tracts exhorting the forces of the Left to engage in in “l’appel à la lutte” [call for struggle] and “l’unité d’action” [united action]. During his travels to Mexico and the US between 1934 land 1935, most of those he mixed with were deeply committed to the revolutionary fight. On his return to Paris in 1936, Cartier-Bresson became more radical. He took a more active part in the activities of the AEAR (Association of revolutionary writers and artists), and began to work for the Communist press.

CINEMA AND WAR
Cartier-Bresson used to say that the cinema "taught him to see". The first signs of his desire to direct films himself emerged during his Mexican trip in 1934. He was interested in the cinema in the context of his own militant commitment, because it reached a larger audience than photography and its narrative structure communicated a message more powerfully. In 1935, while he was in the US, he learned the basics of using a film camera from a cooperative of documentary makers led by Paul Strand, who were highly inspired by Soviet political ideas and aesthetics. The name of the group was "Nykino", from the initials of New York and the Russian word for cinema.

Cartier-Bresson made his first short film with them. On his return to Paris in 1936, after unsuccessfully trying to get work as an assistant for Georg Wilhelm Pabst, then Luis Buñuel, he began a collaboration with Jean Renoir that lasted until the war.

THE CHOICE OF PHOTO-REPORTAGE
In February 1947, Cartier-Bresson inaugurated his first major institutional retrospective at the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York. A few months later, with Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert, he founded the cooperative Magnum Photos, which soon became a world reference in terms of high quality photo reportage. After his MoMA exhibition, Cartier-Bresson could have elected to be solely an artist. But he decided to become a fully-fledged reporter through his commitment to Magnum. From 1947 until the early Seventies, he undertook a large number of trips and assignments all over the world, working for nearly every leading international illustrated news magazine. Despite the constraints imposed by the press, the extremely short deadlines of the media system and the unpredictable nature of commissions, Cartier-Bresson maintained his photographic output at a high level of excellence throughout these decades of reporting.

VISUAL ANTROPOLOGY
At the same time as his photo reports, Cartier-Bresson also photographed certain subjects repeatedly in all the countries he travelled to, and did this for several years. These series of pictures, which he worked on as a sideline to his photo reports or totally independently, explored some of the major social issues of the second half of the 20th century, and are valuable as genuine investigations. They were not carried out as commissions or taken in the conditions of urgency imposed by the press, and were considerably more ambitious than many photo reports. These investigations focused on certain themes across the board, and were described by Cartier-Bresson himself as "a combination of reporting, philosophy and analysis (social, psychological and other kinds)", and were similar to visual anthropology: a form of knowledge of the human being in which analogue recording tools play an essential role. "I am visual," as Cartier-Bresson used to say. "I observe, I observe, I observe. I understand things through my eyes."

AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY
As from the Seventies, Cartier-Bresson, now over sixty, gradually stopped taking on photo report assignments, i.e. photographing within a constrained framework. Feeling that Magnum was now moving further each day from the spirit underlying its creation, he withdrew from the agency's activities. His international reputation continued to grow; he was now a living legend. In France, he embodied the institutional recognition of photography almost single-handedly. This, obviously, was not a situation he enjoyed. He spent a great deal of time supervising the organisation of his archives, sales of his prints and the production of books and exhibitions. Although he had officially stopped his activity as a photographer, he still kept his Leica within reach, and occasionally took more contemplative pictures. But above all, he visited museums and exhibitions, and spent most of his time drawing.