calendario eventi  :: 

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8/3/2007

Two exhibitions

Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin

Brassai: 1899-1984 A Major Retrospective

Organizer: Berliner Festspiele and Centre Pompidou, Muse'e national d'art moderne ­ Centre de Cre'ation Industrielle, Paris

Brassai, who was born in 1899 in what was then the Hungarian town of Brasso', emigrated in 1920 to Berlin, where he studied at the Academy of Art in Charlottenburg and got to know artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka and La'szlo' Moholy-Nagy. In 1924 he moved to Paris, where he began his career not as a photographer but as a journalist working mainly for German-language magazines. His friend Andre' Kerte'sz took photos to accompany his articles. It was his journalistic work that eventually led him to photography.

During this time he also took an interest in literature and sculpture. In Paris in 1932 he adopted the pseudonym of Brassai, derived from the name of his home town.

The same year Brassai published Paris by Night, a book that made him world-famous. The Museum of Modern Art in New York included his work in an exhibition entitled 'Photography: 1839-1937'. Using a Voigtlander camera, he was one of the first to master the art of night-time photography.

Throughout his life Brassai engaged in a wide variety of artistic activities. He produced sculptures, drawings and graphics, wrote works of literature and made films. In 1956 his Tant qu'il y aura des betes won the 'Most Original Film' award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Picasso was particularly impressed by his drawings. Brassai's Conversations with Picasso (1964) ranks among his major publications, which encompass 25 books und innumerable articles.

Brassai took his first photographs at exactly the same time as Surrealismus was beginning to gain a foothold in France. The influence of Surrealism was particularly marked in the realm of photography, as this medium was considered to play a key role in terms of the perception of reality.

The exhibition features photos and drawings from the period between 1932 and 1960 and is divided into six chapters. Among the exhibits are Paris by Night (1932), Brassai's work for the magazine Minotaure (1933-1939), the so-called Transmutations, drawings, pictures for the photo book Camera in Paris and the Graffiti series (1960). Brassai became famous for his views of Paris by night. During the 1930s he wandered around the city at night either alone or in the company of writers such as Henry Miller and Raymond Queneau. The success of these views encouraged him to photograph daytime Parisian street scenes too.

His involvement with the Surrealists, on the other hand, awakened his interest in the 'primitive' and led to the photographic series of 'involuntary sculptures' ('sculptures involontaires'). Items he came across, such as travel tickets, soap, books of matches and thimbles, became his subjects, taking on sculptural qualities. In the Transmutations Brassai used exposed glass negatives as the raw material for drawings, scratching images onto the photographic plates and then exposing them a second time. He mainly transformed images of female nudes into graphic forms, turning them into guitar, violin or mandolin women and clearly demonstrating the influence of Pablo Picasso. Brassai found the motifs for the Graffiti series in the scratched and scribbled surfaces of the city's dilapidated walls. He saw a connection between these accidental, anarchic graphic expressions and cave drawings. In this respect his work shows a distinct correlation with artistic positions such as the Art Brut (Outsider Art) of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier.

Alongside his photographic work Brassai constantly produced drawings and his sculptural oeuvre also grew steadily. His artistic credo was ³to create something new and striking out of the banal and the ordinary, to show everyday life in such a way as to make it seem as though one is seeing it for the first time². The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, Brassai died in Beaulieu-sur-Mer on 7 July 1984.

The exhibition was conceived and organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The catalogue was published by Alain Sayag and Annick Lionel-Marie and contains contributions by Jean-Jacques Aillagon, Brassai, Gilberte Brassai, Roger Grenier, Henry Miller, Jacques Pre'vert, Klaus Albrecht Schroder and Werner Spies.

Catalogue
Brassai published by Alain Sayag and Annick Lionel-Marie, 319 pages,
Brandstatter Verlag
In the exhibition € 38
bookshop edition €69
ISBN: 978-3-85498-259-3

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Gérard Rondeau – Photographs

The Martin-Gropius-Bau and the Institut français in Berlin are organising the first one-man exhibition in Germany devoted to the famous French photographer Gérard Rondeau comprising over 150 of his works. Gérard Rondeau is presenting a selection of his wide range of portraits. For many years now he has been photographing internationally famous artists, musicians, writers, designers and philosophers. The portraits on display in Berlin include those of Louise Bourgeois, Georg Baselitz, Susan Sontag, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Jim Jarmusch and Carla Bruni. His works continue the tradition established by the great French portrait photographer, Nadar, who produced unforgettable pictures of the intellectual and cultural elite of his time.

Rondeau is also exhibiting a part of his long-term Hors cadre series, in which he takes a look behind the scenes of major museums and shows valuable works of art ‘outside the familiar context’, i.e. during the installation and dismantling of an exhibition, packaged, propped up against a wall or being transported. The sublime and the timeless thus encounter and profane and the temporary, producing images of great poetry. Gérard Rondeau, born in Châlon-sur-Marne in 1953, lives in the province of Champagne. He is a member of the renowned French photographic agency VU and has worked for over 20 years as a photojournalist and portrait photographer for the daily newspaper Le Monde. Rondeau’s Hors cadre series formed part of a comprehensive exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2005. During the Globes de cristal 2007 award ceremony on 5 February 2007 Gérard Rondeau was honoured by 3,000 French cultural journalists as French Artist of the Year.

Martin-Gropius-Bau
Niederkirchnerstrasse 7 - Berlin
Opening time: Wed-Mon 10-20
Admission free

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