--- description: A new retrospective of Henri Cartier-Bresson's work at the Centre Pompidou allows us to look beyond the Frenchman's famous concept of the "decisive moment" title: Beyond Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Fresh Look at a Master's Work image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt46492933f98b4cf6/6987e5f6cd1bba74096f8641/par137636canvas.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [World](/section/world/) ## World Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [LightBox](/tag/time-section-lightbox/) ## LightBox Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # Beyond Cartier-Bresson: A History of a Master's Early Work by [Carole Naggar](/author/carole-naggar/) ## Carole Naggar Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Mar 11, 2014 8:00 AM CUT  Rowers in the Ivory Coast, 1931 Rowers in the Ivory Coast, 1931Henri Cartier-Bresson— Magnum by [Carole Naggar](/author/carole-naggar/) ## Carole Naggar Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Mar 11, 2014 8:00 AM CUT The primary (but hardly the sole) merit of this extraordinary Cartier-Bresson retrospective is that it sheds light on little-known aspects of his career. Too often Cartier-Bresson has been represented only as the artist of the “decisive moment,” as if his vision had emerged fully developed in one burst, and remained constant throughout his career. The reality, of course, is much more complex. A high school dropout, Cartier-Bresson joined Andre Lhote’s painting studio in 1926 and became intrigued with his master’s emphasis on classical harmony and composition. These strict rules, however, were soon challenged by his encounter with the Surrealists, whose meetings he attended with his friend, writer René Crevel, in Parisian cafés. He was deeply influenced by the Surrealists’ advocacy of spontaneity and free association, their desire to probe the mysteries of everyday objects and chance encounters. Through an American couple, Harry and Caress Crosby, founders of the _Black Sun Press_, and their friends Gretchen and Peter Powell, Cartier-Bresson was encouraged to take photography more seriously: “The first photographs I saw, through American friends, were Atget and Kertesz. The Munkacsi photograph, of three black children throwing themselves in the waves, was like a kick in the ass: ‘Go for it!’” At the end of the 1920s Cartier-Bresson started photographing in the spirit of Eugene Atget’s views of Paris’s empty streets and shop windows: a shop window encumbered with wooden molds and gloves might be a crowd of ghosts trapped behind the glass, reaching out; a close-up of enameled plates displayed for street use or cemeteries appears to be a mix of a Walker Evans-inspired scene and a surrealist poem composed of unrelated inscriptions. Such incongruities fascinated the young photographer. His photographs of masses of glistening entrails, too, taken at the La Villette slaughterhouse in 1929 parallel those of his friend Eli Lotar taken in the same spot. In search of adventure, Cartier-Bresson embarked for the Ivory Coast in October 1930: “I left for Africa. I was hunting with a head lantern. I sold the meat. I caught bilharzia and had to come back. Painting was still my obsession and photography to me was a sketchbook, immediate drawings, questions-answers.” Very few photographs of that trip have survived, as mildew corrupted his camera. But in those that did survive, it’s evident that Cartier-Bresson tried to avoid exoticism. Instead, his images emphasize a rigorous formalism: a photograph of three rowers seen from the back, their dark bodies glistening in the high sun, is carefully composed following an arc from head to arm to head; another of wooden dugouts is built upon accumulated triangular shapes. Back in Europe Cartier-Bresson produced several important images similarly focusing on abstraction and geometry. In Florence, two folded metal tables face each other on a terra cotta terrace, as if in conversation, recalling Kertesz’s chair studies taken in the Tuileries garden. In the spring of 1934 he left for Mexico where he settled for a year, and reunited with his Surrealist inspiration. He befriended Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and the two exhibited together. Cartier-Bresson frequented poor neighborhoods of Mexico City; in one striking image a blurred passerby walks in front of a chalkboard featuring columns of numbers. In May 1937, Cartier-Bresson, whose left-wing sensibilities are well-established, was sent by the Communist daily _Ce Soir_ to cover King George VI’s coronation. His extraordinary images do not focus on the king, but on the margins of the event: the crowds, without tickets, waiting outside and watching. For the photographer, it is the people, the agents of their own history, who are the main subject. During World War II, while working in a Film and Photography Unit of the French Third Army, Cartier-Bresson was taken as a war prisoner. After three years of captivity in a German _Stalag_, he escaped and joined a group of Communist resistance fighters. His photographs of the end of the Reich were influenced by his experience collaborating with Jean Renoir to document the war’s painful resolution, as well as by his own personal suffering — evident in the empathy with which he depicts his subjects, such as a child in an outsized man’s coat, or allied prisoners being deloused in a Dessau transit camp. In July 1954 Cartier-Bresson was the first professional photographer to enter Russia since Stalin’s death. His picture of a dancing hall shows keen attention to composition and feels like a still from a Neo-Realist film. Myriad aspects of Cartier-Bresson’s talent and style are highlighted in this 350-picture exhibition. But one thread links them all: the continuing joy he took in his work. As he said to me in France in a 1980 interview for _Le Matin de Paris_: “The joy, the real joy, is to tackle the visible world head on.” --- **_Carole Naggar_** _is a photo historian, poet and regular contributor to LightBox. She recently wrote on_ [_the work of Swedish photographer Anders Petersen_](http://lightbox.time.com/2013/11/12/stark-close-ups-on-europes-late-night-regulars/ "undefined"). _The Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective will be on view at the_ [_Centre Pompidou in Paris_ ](http://www.centrepompidou.fr "undefined")_from February 12 – June 9, 2014._ ---  Rowers in the Ivory Coast, 1931 Henri Cartier-Bresson— Magnum  Store window, Rouen, France, 1929. Henri Cartier-Bresson—Magnum  Storefront in Spain, 1933. Henri Cartier-Bresson—Magnum  Tables near a cafe in Florence, 1933 Henri Cartier-Bresson—Magnum  A Soviet child who was deported with his parents during the war at an Allied transit camp in Dessau, Germany, 1945. Henri Cartier-Bresson—Magnum  The canteen for workers building the Hotel Metropol, Moscow, 1954. Henri Cartier-Bresson—Magnum  Storfront in Paris, 1929 Henri Cartier-Bresson— Magnum  The Slaughterhouse of La Villette in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, 1932. Henri Cartier-Bresson—Magnum  A portrait of Lenin decorates a facade of the Winter Palace, Leningrad, 1973. Henri Cartier-Bresson—Magnum ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3807698/beyond-cartier-bresson-a-history-of-a-masters-early-work/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3807698/beyond-cartier-bresson-a-history-of-a-masters-early-work/"},"headline":"Beyond Cartier-Bresson: A History of a Master's Early Work","datePublished":"2014-03-11T08:00:53.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:40:31.142Z","description":"A new retrospective of Henri Cartier-Bresson's work at the Centre Pompidou allows us to look beyond the Frenchman's famous concept of the \"decisive moment\"","url":"https://time.com/3807698/beyond-cartier-bresson-a-history-of-a-masters-early-work/","keywords":["LightBox","paris","Out There"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt46492933f98b4cf6/6987e5f6cd1bba74096f8641/par137636canvas.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Carole Naggar","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/carole-naggar/"}],"articleSection":"World","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt46492933f98b4cf6/6987e5f6cd1bba74096f8641/par137636canvas.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"IVORY COAST. 1931.","caption":"IVORY COAST. 1931.","creditText":"Henri Cartier-Bresson— Magnum","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/world/","name":"World"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-lightbox/","name":"LightBox"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3807698/beyond-cartier-bresson-a-history-of-a-masters-early-work/","name":"Beyond Cartier-Bresson: A History of a Master's Early Work"}}]}] ```