REVIEW: Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

Click image to visit Hennessey + Ingalls BookstoreHenri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century
By Peter Galassi
(Museum of Modern Art, $49.95 in paperback)

MoMA is touring a retrospective of 300 photographs spanning Cartier-Bresson’s entire career. This companion book contains many of those images in a rather cramped layout, but is chiefly
remarkable for a brilliant essay by curator Peter Galassi. His insights will deepen and change your understanding of an artist you thought you knew. As an example, he likens the early photographs to “collages ripped from the fabric of the streets. The model of his postwar style is the opposite…
the image functions like a well-proportioned stage on which a few figures have gathered to enact a tableau vivant.”