Vindication of an Old Master

By Richard Lacayo

The superb Andre Kertesz exhibition currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago is that rare thing, an art world vindication that the artist is around to enjoy. When Kertesz arrived in the U.S. in 1936, he was 42. He had behind him a celebrated body of work in photography. During eleven years in France, and before that in his native Hungary, he had perfected one of the camera's fundamental charms, its ability to fix those brief entanglements of form and event that escape the eye. Netting perishable moments in a deft geometry, he practiced photography as an art of sublime attention.

The offer of a photo-agency contract coaxed him to the U.S., but his work went unappreciated. It was subtle and delicate; photo editors who wanted easy- to-read pictures were unmoved. In Paris he had been one of the pioneers of photojournalism. In New York City, where the hustle and grind made him shudder, he turned to routine assignments, flattering swank living rooms for House and Garden.

It was not until 1964, when the Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of his work, that his rehabilitation got under way. In recent years, through books and smaller exhibits, his stock has risen further. The Chicago show, which travels in December to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, caps the long effort to re store his fame. Today, at 90, Kertesz still aims a zoom lens from the balcony of his Manhattan apartment, and he was in Chicago to be toasted at his exhibition's opening.

The Paris of Kertesz's early career was the cockpit of modernism, where surrealists, Dadaists and constructivists fanned the air with their manifestos. Kertesz felt the breeze but sailed his own course. He absorbed the lessons of constructivism, without becoming an arctic formalist. His fellow Hungarian expatriate Laszlo Moholy-Nagy could turn people into compositional load bearers upholding a grand design. Kertesz linked his formal sense to benign temperament. Joining elegant compositions to gentle human anecdotes, he achieved a formalism with the juice still flowing.

He would also learn to take the gambits of surrealism beyond the titillations of the absurd. In Homing Ship, taken eight years after he left Paris, he let a walking sailboat (actually a toy that obscures part of the man carrying it) and an inverted tree (a reflection in a puddle) speak for the yearnings of his own exile. It is a lovely image, unlikely and tender. It also typifies his knack for keeping sentimentality at bay in even the most tempting circumstances. His pictures are sweet-tempered but never pat, heartfelt but not tearstained, legible but rarely obvious.

Sidestepping the familiar monuments of Paris, Kertesz sought candid bits of street life, preferably from a high vantage point, where he could inspect the world without engaging it. He had a geometer's orientation: in many of his best shots, people are distant figures, elegantly distributed among the grids and arcs of the city. The Paris that issued from his camera was not the serene city of Atget, immemorial and mostly unpeopled. Neither was it Brassai's close-in platform for the dramas of the demimonde. Kertesz's Paris was like the woman in his picture Satiric Dancer: pert, ironic and caught at a fresh tilt.

A new world opened for Kertesz in the later 1920s with the appearance of the Leica, the first popular 35-mm camera. During his early years in Paris, he was still shooting with a box camera into which a glass plate negative had to be inserted before every shot. The Leica, a lightweight instrument with film on a frame-advance roll, enabled photographers to catch slices of life on the wing. For Kertesz, it made possible subtle and serendipitous pictures like Meudon, a strangely arresting image in which a man is simply crossing the street in one direction while a train passes by over-head, going the other way. It makes no "narrative" sense; it offers no conventional beauty, but it fascinates.

In such pictures, Kertesz recognized photography's affinity for the haphazard and the fragmentary, but he never lost his classicizing impulse. Through the good government of composition, the most frivolous bits of life -- scraps of poster advertising, a hodgepodge of footprints in the snow -- were redeemed by him and made coherent. With his camera, he once said, "I give a reason to everything around me."

Throughout the bitter years in the U.S., during which Kertesz felt forgotten, he continued to photograph. Some of the most pungent images in the Chicago show were made in New York during the 1940s and '50s. Partial to the human scale of Paris, Kertesz had to adjust his eye to the magnitude and visual disarray of America. In the process, he saw things that a more acclimatized vision might miss. In one picture from 1947, the immense web work of the Queensboro Bridge is played against the finer lattice of the superstructure around some storage tanks. Then diagonal ranks of metal pipe chimneys lead the eye to a surprise in the lower left corner: tiny figures on a dwarfed residential street.

If the exhibition disappoints on any score, it is only by coming to a halt in the mid-1950s, although Kertesz did not. The weighty catalog, written by Co- Curators David Travis and Weston J. Naef with Sandra S. Phillips, provides an admirable overview of the three decades in which Kertesz did most of his best work. But his later pictures are often no less finely conceived, especially those he made after retiring from House and Garden in 1962. Shows like this act as a catalyst, however. In New York City, for instance, the Susan Harder Gallery is showing his pictures of gardens and flowers, while the International Center of Photography is planning an exhibit of later work for next year. "It only took them 24 hours to get me a visa," Kertesz once lamented. "But it took them 35 years to discover me." There are discoveries still to come.