PARIS BELONGS TO BRASSAÏ

Photography

With a camera, a pack of cigarettes, and a boundless curiosity, Brassaï wandered from brothels to clubs to cafés, exploding into legend in 1932 with his exquisite pictures of Paris by night. For his centennial, a major retrospective illuminates the genius of this protean photographer

VICKI GOLDBERG

The only thing about Paris that interested Brassai was everything—which was pretty much the way he felt about the world. Paris was his microcosm. A young Hungarian who went to Paris to paint in 1924, Brassai fell so in love with the thousand secrets of the city's night that he stayed up till dawn each day and forgot to paint. In time he learned to photograph and made the mundane corners of the city sing.

In the early 1930s he photographed not only monuments but also parks and cafes, bookstalls and pissoirs, bridges, kiosks, brothels, and the entire spectrum of professions and social classes along the city's cobblestone streets: cesspool cleaners, women in ball gowns and feathered masks, bare-breasted dancers at the Folies, bums hunkered down on the quais.

He was once so broke that he had to fork over his last few coins to receive an express-mail letter with insufficient postage. The letter turned out to be a desperate friend's appeal for 100 sous; the two of them had been wiped out by a single stamp. Still, he had a camera, a pack of cigarettes, and a boundless passion for the world—enough to make him one of the major photographers of the century.

Other people photographed after dark, some of them well, but none so assiduously, devotedly, poetically as Brassai. Only he recorded the statue of Marshal Ney waving his sword heroically at a hotel sign in the fog. Only Brassai saw the shadow of a homely buttress as the profile of a big-nosed man, or recognized that the Tour Saint-Jacques, dressed in nighttime light and scaffolding, was really the ghost of a Gothic wedding cake.

And only he recorded the vital, ribald low life of byways and backstreets. No one else photographed inside the bordellos; Brassai snapped three naked women displaying their wares to a customer. No one else hung out in the homosexual bars, where men in fancy gowns and floppy-brimmed hats danced with part-

ners in business suits, and even butchers in their workaday clothes shyly and happily led each other across the floor. No one else got the hoodlum gangs to stare into his lens. Nor had anyone before him noticed the brute force of graffiti, those primitive carvings of love and death and magic that would influence the paintings of Antoni Tapies, Jean Dubuffet, and other artists, most of them introduced to these rough signs by Brassai'.

Bom in 1899, Brassai died in 1984. Just in time for his centennial, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston has organized "Brassai': The Eye of Paris"—that's what his good friend Henry Miller called him—which runs from December 6 of this year to February 28, 1999, then shows at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from April 13 to July 4, and finishes at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it will be from October 17 through January 16, 2000. The first major retrospective in the United States since 1968, with approximately 140 photographs, drawings, sculptures, and books, this exhibition showcases Brassa'fs multiple talents in a way that has never been done here.

In April 2000, an even larger retrospective, also in various media, will open at the Pompidou Center in Paris. This exhibition will concentrate on work that has not been shown before, in an effort to illuminate the scope of the artist. Brassai' had such a hungry curiosity, such eagerness and facility—he designed sets for ballet, built a shadow-puppet theater, drew up a chronology of world history, discoursed on St. Thomas Aquinas—that Henry Miller said he wouldn't be surprised if Brassai became an embalmer or a member of Parliament.

The splendid aura of Brassafs photographs has eclipsed the brilliance of his writings (hundreds of articles and 17 books) as well as the far milder charm of his drawings and sculptures. Gilberte Brassai, his widow, says that Francois Mitterrand invited artists and intellectuals to a party one week after his election to the presidency of France in 1981. "Jack Lang [the minister of culture] said to Mitterrand," as Mme. Brassai tells it, "'Brassai is a very great photographer.' Mitterrand said, 'He is above all a very fine writer.'"

Mme. Brassai still lives in the cramped apartment in Montparnasse she and her husband shared till he died. His albums of photographs, arranged by subject, are neatly lined up on shelves; a Brassai' tapestry covers one wall; some of the old utilitarian objects he collected are around—a glove-maker's wooden form, laundry irons heavy enough to weight down his photographs and keep them from curling. She locates everything quickly, from his baby pictures to magazine clippings to World War II mail on forms issued by the government.

Mitterrand notwithstanding, even Brassai' had to admit that Photography was his finest means of expression. He hadn't meant to be a photographer. He didn't want to be a photographer. He never considered the medium an art, or entirely satisfying. In the catalogue of the Houston show, Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the museum and curator of the exhibition, quotes Brassai' as saying he once detested the camera.

He first took pictures late in 1929, when photography was not yet an art, or even a very respectable calling for an artist. Though many were experimenting with photographs, painting was their life and pride. Man Ray was indignant all his life to think he

might be better known as a photographer than as a painter, and even Henri Cartier-Bresson thought of himself as a painter for several years while honing his photographic talents. Picasso thought Brassai' was wasting his time on photography. "You're a bom draftsman," the artist said in 1939 when Brassai' showed him his student drawings. "Why don't you go on with it? You own a gold mine, and you're exploiting a salt mine."

Gyula Halasz, who renamed himself Brassai' in Paris, had considered himself a painter. (Brassai means "from Brasso," his birthplace in Hungary.) His father, a French teacher who had wanted to be a poet, took his children to Paris in 1903 for a year and hoped one of them would live there. World War I and subsequent upheavals in Hungary, however, made Brassai a Romanian citizen and France an enemy; the young man went to Berlin in 1920 to study art and stayed till 1922. His friends there included Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Kokoschka, but what impressed him most was reading Goethe. Asked once what was the most essential encounter of his life, he replied, "Discovering Goethe."

The great 19th-century German poet's thought would shape Brassafs photography and his life. Over and over he spoke of Goethe's shift from a youthful romanticism to a classical, totally objective outlook. He liked to say that Goethe had found the world more fraught with genius than himself, and he quoted Goethe's declaration that objects eventually elevated him to their level.

Brassai took Goethe's maxims as his goal. Though his photographs of nighttime Paris are wrapped in mist and delicate light, they are only what he saw. His approach is unprejudiced, objective, never political, never judgmental or satirical about either the high and mighty or the fallen. He records. He describes. He accepts. A faint sense of tenderness hovers about the edges of so many pictures that one might say he is sympathetic, with a sympathy that extends to the limits of his vision. The least part of the world is valuable and worth paying attention to; a rock is as precious as a streetlamp, a leafless branch as deserving of respect as a naked woman.

"Even the most mediocre photographs contain something no Rembrandt can equal."

He had barely set down his suitcase in Montparnasse in 1924 before being introduced to the city's nightlife. Instantly he became a nocturnal wanderer, in a city where the moon watched over a continuous spectacle. The cafes were crammed till all hours with artists and writers, many of them expatriates and refugees. The proper bourgeoisie, the working class, and the artistic fringe all mingled in theaters, clubs, and brothels, and the raucous life of the popular dance halls and dives spilled out onto the sidewalks. Brassai' said his life was so amusing and bizarre that he could not imagine closing himself up to paint, and so for four years he did nothing.

In fact, he prowled the city, sometimes with friends such as Miller (even before they could speak each other's language), drinking and soaking up the sights. During the day he earned a precarious living writing for Hungarian and German journals on politics, sports (about which he knew nothing), art, and culture. Evidently his loving parents believed in him; they helped support him into his 30s.

Brassai' occasionally sold a drawing or a caricature to the press, sometimes ghostwrote pieces, sometimes sold previously published articles to other papers. Once, he invented an interview with a former Russian prime minister, based on one he'd read two years earlier. After more than a dozen German papers ran it, an editor asked for the Russian's address. Brassai panicked. Suppose the man was dead? He turned out to be alive, and extremely forgiving.

In the 1920s, photographs made their way onto the printed page more and more frequently, and at length Germany gave birth to the illustrated photo magazine. A mass audience immediately responded. Already in 1924, Brassai' was supplementing his meager income by turning himself into a kind of photo agency, collecting photographs, selling them to agencies and papers, and commissioning photographers to take pictures to illustrate his stories. By 1925 a "lady photographer" was on call for his assignments; that year an agency suggested it would be more efficient if he took the pictures himself. He did, but not till four years later.

By then he knew a lot about photographs. He had worked on several articles with his fellow Hungarian Andre Kertesz, already a first-rank photographer, who taught him a thing or two about night photography. Kertesz would later claim that he lent Brassai' a camera and taught him everything he knew, but it wasn't so. All his life Brassai read prodigiously—Baudelaire, Beckett, Freud, Genet, Gide, Kafka, Nietzsche, Proust, Sartre, even quantum physics—and when he wanted to learn about photography, he read up on it and then experimented.

He said he was so full of reverberating images that he could no longer hold them inside, yet he could not translate them properly with paint and had to find a more direct form of expression. Convinced that art was dead and had been replaced by engineering, he decided that photography, which was not an art, was the crucial, expressive medium of our times. Later he wrote that the contemporary world had a deep

hunger "to capture life at its source, in its immediacy, and without the intermediary of the artist, whether that artist is brilliant or boring_Even the most mediocre photographs contain some-

thing unique and irreplaceable, something that no Rembrandt, Leonardo, or Picasso—no masterpiece and no artist, living or dead—can attain or equal or replace."

He bought a Voigtlander Bergheil six-by-nine-centimeter with a Heliar lens. It took glass plates (he adapted it for film after three years), and he couldn't carry more than 24 plates at a time, so many of his photographs were taken within walking distance of his apartment in Montparnasse. He seldom made more than two or three pictures of a subject, and occasionally when making a portrait took but a single picture. With an old wooden tripod that would later be described as repeatedly kneeling down like a camel, he devised simple means for difficult night photography.

Gilberte Brassai' says he carried a measured piece of string so that he would know where to place his camera, and invented a black sack with sleeves so that he could change his plates on the street without exposing them. Nighttime exposures were long, sometimes up to 10 minutes. Brassai', an inveterate smoker, timed his shorter exposures with a Gauloise and the longer ones with a Boyard, which was so dense it was known as a chomeur, or unemployed person, because only someone without a job would have the time to smoke it.

To avoid halation, the dead-white, haloed patch that a direct light can leave on film, Brassai' would position his camera behind a tree or a lamppost or whatever would block out the light source. He discovered that the best way to diffuse light was to shoot in fog, or even rain, one reason his night pictures of Paris are so often suffused with romance and nostalgia. "Fog," he said, "is the cosmetic of the city."

Flashbulbs had recently been invented, but Brassai thought the contrasts too harsh, so he stuck with old-fashioned magnesium powder until sometime after World War II. Magnesium was devilish stuff; usually he had an assistant to handle it. The powder, placed on a flat pan, was heated and then lit, setting off a great flare and a mighty noise. Gilberte Brassai remembers that once he burned his whole arm, and another time set a girl's Communion dress on fire.

Unlike many other European photographers, he did his own printing. He converted his bathroom into a darkroom, and once his fixing agent seeped through the wall of his rented room. Alexander Liberman, the longtime editorial director of Conde Nast, worked for the French magazine Vu in the mid-1930s, and recalls that for a while Brassai was using a woman friend's bidet to develop his pictures in.

Soon after that he moved into the apartment he would occupy for the rest of his life and converted the kitchen into a darkroom. Pierre Gassmann, who assisted him for a year, says that when they wanted to eat they had to stop work and clean everything up—one of the reasons they worked late at night. The kitchen remained the place to cook up photographs throughout Brassafs life.

He discovered the best way to diffuse light was to shoot in fog, "the cosmetic of the city."

In 1932, Brassafs first book, Paris de Nuit, was published to enormous international acclaim. It made him, instantly, a legend, and established his place in photographic history. His photographs looked like no one else's. Brassai' often said that one of the inexplicable aspects of photography was that no matter how mechanically the photographer used the little machine, no matter how hard he tried to purge his pictures of personal opinion and psychology, his personality still left an indelible mark.

Paris de Nuit influenced night photography everywhere and specifically influenced photographers such as Bill Brandt, whose A Night in London is a direct descendant; Diane Arbus, who said Brassai reintroduced her to the thrill of darkness; and Vanity Fair contributing photographer Helmut Newton, whose fashion photographs taken by the light of streetlamps—particularly those of a pair of women, one of whom is cross-dressed—derive from Brassai. (Newton went the master one better by posing the "feminine" partner stark naked.)

Brassafs Paris at night is a city that sighs in the fog, where the arches of bridges kiss their reflections, city lights make dancing constellations far off between dark walls, and the atmosphere is dense with a sweet melancholy. But he had already ventured into a tougher part of Paris and, eager to know what lay behind the doors and windows that sealed him out -and others in, had gone inside.

He was young. He was insatiably curious. He was intoxicated with photography and reckless with life. Sometimes the police arrested him, because they couldn't figure out what he was doing, loitering so long at night; no one photographed after dark. Sometimes he went into ramshackle buildings, climbed rickety stairs, and knocked on a stranger's door to ask if he could photograph out a window. The hoods and pimps were dangerous, and there were places where he was altogether unwelcome, "and yet," he wrote, "drawn by the beauty of evil, the magic of the lower depths," he went anyway. "My passion for capturing these pictures made me almost oblivious to danger."

He would hang around, doing his best to look invisible, discreetly showing his photographs to a few people, until finally they asked him to take pictures of them. He was small, poor, foreign—a marginal man himself, with a charm so intense that he complained in letters home of too many friends who liked him too much, and people who knew him later would refer to him as "enchanting" or even "a bit angelic."

Still, some of the low life needed to be anonymous. Sometimes Brassai was chased, his camera broken, his bag stolen. After one small-time hood saw his picture published in a magazine that labeled him a murderer, he went to Brassafs room with a knife, and the photographer barely managed to buy him off. When gang members lifted his wallet, he never told the police. "Thievery for them, photographs for me. What they did was in character. To each his own."

He photographed fat prostitutes, commonly referred to as bedbugs or codfish, stolidly planted on the sidewalk near Les Halles, in wait for butchers and tripe sellers, men, Brassai wrote, "who were accustomed to dealing with huge masses of flesh." He photographed pimps and hoods and spit-curled dollies in bars where the mirrored walls reflected relationships in fragments, like exercises in some sort of emotional Cubism. He photographed a performer dressed as a dim-witted gorilla in a plaid suit, with his pale, blond, impossibly innocent child.

He planned a book about this other Paris, and one was published, but he apparently lost control over the way it was put together and in effect disowned it, never mentioning it in his bibliography. So The Secret Paris of the 30's, his astute and memorably touching version of the insistent roles desire and aggression play in life, did not get published till 1976, when it ratcheted his legend up another notch. The photographer Louis Stettner, who knew Brassai' from the late 1940s, says he was a most compassionate person who explained to everyone that he didn't want these pictures exhibited (here Stettner begins to laugh) until the women in them were grandmothers, having presumably become respectable in the interim.

Brassai single-handedly turned the underworld into a serious subject for photography—inviting, amusing, sinister, and complex, as beautiful and haunting as more familiar places, and as profoundly human. Enough of these pictures were published to earn Brassai the credit for having opened up a whole new world for the camera. The American photographer Joel Meyerowitz says, "Brassai verified that photography was a form capable of revealing your strong feeling.... He gave me license to extend my curiosity to the world I lived in."

There are gaiety, bravado, and disaffection in his images, and poignancy, and a muted note of tender affection now and again, but not an ounce of disapproval. "He respected everyone," Gilberte Brassai says—whores and thieves, clerks and financiers—and it shows.

Brassai believed that a good photograph In a Limousine de went beyond anecdote, transmuting its Luxe, Paris, 1930s, subjects into types that stood for hufrom the book mankind. As his friend the editor Roger Paris deNuit. Grenier put it, "He loved to paraphrase Flaubert in saying that life provided only the accidental, and that the task of the artist was to transform the accidental into the immutable." He disliked instantaneity, yet his pictures of people were so natural, so unself-conscious, that they seemed to be entirely candid, as if snatched on the run with one of the new 35mm. cameras, which were so small they were scarcely noticeable and so fast they could shoot by available indoor light—impossible with Brassai's equipment.

People must have noticed Brassai', with his enormous, dark, and slightly bulging eyes, the lower lids drooping a bit, causing the whites to be visible below the irises. Not to mention his tripod, assistant, and blinding flash. But his mammoth store of patience outlasted their awareness, and he either asked them at some point to hold it or simply took the picture when it looked right. The result was a kind of improvised theater, where all the participants, well cast and rehearsed for a lifetime, played themselves.

He seldom actually posed people, but there were exceptions. Anne Wilkes Tucker writes that one assistant, Frank Dobo, acknowledged posing as the lover tenderly holding his beloved in one of Brassafs perfect pictures of young love. Since it was illegal to photograph inside a bordello, the man surveying the naked women or tying his shoelace while a prostitute tends to her business on the bidet was a friend of Brassafs. Brassai' himself appeared exiting a pissoir in one picture and playing a bum in another.

His life had its own theatrical aspects. When he and Henry Miller hadn't a sou between them, they would order sandwiches and coffee at the Dome and sit there for hours hoping for a friend to wander by and pick up the tab. (In later years, partly in memory of this life, he was immensely generous.)

While still young and penurious, he was taken under the wing of Mme.

Marianne Delaunay-Belleville, a wealthy and talented woman 21 years older than he, who had been

devoted to him for several years. She introduced him to society and taught him the proper maneuvers. He learned to navigate handily between two worlds, one night dressed as a bum to photograph in mean streets, the next in a suit at a soiree with aristocrats. He was able to trace the breadth and depth of Paris life with the sweep of an anthropologist and the close attention of a lover. With easy entree to the upper reaches of society, he photographed at clubs that wouldn't have admitted him and costume balls worthy of Marie Antoinette, staged by Parisian socialites in the 1930s while Hitler was drawing up plans to bum their city down.

He sold most of his pictures to journals and later put them into books or exhibitions, drawing no line between commercial necessity and art but bearing witness to his era. Once he told an interviewer, "It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times."

He actually lived in three worlds, for he had quickly become friends with the literary and artistic avant-garde, which included Salvador Dali, Le Corbusier, Jacques Prevert, and Tristan Tzara. Their world had its own madcap adventures and stratagems, and Brassai', who was a superb storyteller in both pictures and words, often recounted them.

No one else recorded the bars where men in gowns danced with partners in business suits.

Item: Once, when the writer Pierre Mac Orlan was penniless but could not get his publisher to advance him money, his friends put him to bed and told the publisher he was dying. The publisher came to pay his respects, shed a tear, and left behind 20 francs, a fortune that revived the dying man instantly. Item: Once, the painter Hans Reichel came home so drunk he thought the lift was his bedroom, stripped off all his clothes, put one leg up in the cramped space, and slept until his bedroom woke him by ascending.

In 1932, Brassai' was asked to photograph Picasso's sculpture, which no one had yet seen; this was the start of a lifelong friendship. The pictures were printed in the first issue of Le Minotaure, the exquisite magazine of Surrealism, in 1933. (After Brassai' published Conversations avec Picasso in 1964—Picasso and Company in English—Picasso told the Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg that if he wanted to understand him he should read this book.)

Le Minotaure published Brassai' a lot: pictures of graffiti (the book by that name would not come out until 1960); "Sculptures Involontaires," a collaboration with Dali (objects seen so closeup and magnified they cannot easily be recognized as mere rolled-up bus tickets or smears of toothpaste); curlicued details of the Art Nouveau entrances to the Metro, which the camera's scrutiny converted into praying mantises.

The Surrealists liked to claim Brassai', but he wouldn't be claimed. Independent to the core, he did not join groups, and besides, he was irritated by the Surrealists' refusal to value any element of a painting but the subject. On the other hand, their notion that poetry could be found in the street, in ordinary life, anywhere at all, matched his own.

"A simple leaf that grows, that lives," he said, "any living being whatever, even a crystal, a molecule, when you look at them attentively, constitute a sort of miracle that surpasses dream a thousandfold, surpasses a thousandfold the most absurd inventions of the 'surrealists.'" Another time he said, "The great event, the sensational event, is daily life, the normal and not the exceptional conditions of existence," a conviction that permeates his oddly affecting, even lyrical photographs of cobblestones gleaming under a streetlamp, a wall graced by the shadow of trees, a hefty worker at Les Halles.

Brassai was almost explosively creative during his first two or three years of photographing; most of his greatest pictures were taken then, and in that short interval he produced a body of work that remains unparalleled. There were wonderful photographs later, but during those first years he made picture after picture of perfect conviction and emotional complexity, which he never equaled in anything like the large numbers he made then.

Much later he said he had a theory that everything a man accomplishes he has in his head by the age of 20 or 25; he spends the rest of his life carrying out those early ideas. He told another interviewer, "I think that photography is as rich as the world; but for a photographer it is limited.... A photographer may change his subject, but he cannot change himself. His vision stays the same." He went on to say, "When I began photography I had done everything I could within two years; I came to the end of myself entirely. I can still take photographs—but I cannot renew myself."

And yet, determined not to scant the profuse gifts he'd been given, he did attempt to renew himself from time to time by shifting into other arts. There was film, which he tried out for money and promptly gave up. In 1932 the film director Alexander Korda hired him for good pay as a set photographer and trained him as a cameraman. He was bored, and the 12-hour days cost him his photographic career for a time, so that was that.

Still, cinema had lodged in his mind since early childhood. When he was a boy in Paris in 1904, movies were so new that some big stores played little snippets of film in their windows every half-hour, and Brassai' would refuse to leave till he'd seen them twice. As a grown man, he had a very strong narrative sense. Some of his pictures of people in cafes—men and women locked in love or quarrels, groups whose relationships fracture in mirrors or shift in comparison to others at nearby tables—have the complicated emotional potential of short stories.

"The great, sensational event," he said, "is daily life, the normal conditions of existence."

If he made photographs that were a form of theater, their mise en scene struck him as a film set. In an article called "Techniques of Night Photography," he wrote, "At night, a city becomes its own decor, studiolike, recomposed in papiermache. The overhead lights are out, the projectors set on movable platforms are unplugged." Also, he sometimes photographed sequences, such as "A man dies in the street": a fallen man seen from the photographer's window, a crowd gathering, the police arriving and taking the body away, the empty sidewalk where the corpse had been— a little stretch of film in still pictures. He planned a book of sequences, which, like so many of his other projects, never got done. In 1936 he was a founding member of Cinematheque, the film archive and theater in Paris.

And then, in 1956, Brassai' decided to make a film himself, just to see if he could. He went to the zoo one day and shot swans waggling their feet above the water, llamas chewing in syncopated rhythms, polar bears lolling and scratching their stomachs and underarms and crotches (especially their crotches), giraffes twirling their heads like drunken ballerinas, and gibbons swinging with uncanny grace between trees.

From this "ballet of animals," as he described it, he made Tant Qu'il Y Aura des Betes (As Long as There Are Animals). A musical score by Louis Bessieres made witty comments on the animals' all-too-human antics, but not a word was spoken. Brassai, out to prove that motion is the essence of film, produced 23 minutes of bouncing, twitching, wiggling delight, a short that was shown in some 30 countries and won a prize at Cannes.

Soon after he finished this one, he wrote Frank Dobo that he was at work on a film about domestic animals, and four years later wrote that he wanted to do a film based on his graffiti and another on the material for The Secret Paris of the 30's. He never made a second film. When asked why, he said that he'd been invited to do so many times but found the idea of exploiting a success offensive, though no doubt that was the key to making money.

He had finally begun earning a decent living in the second half of the 1930s. In 1937 he could resign from a magazine called Coiffure de Paris and sign on with Harper's Bazaar. Later he would say, "After a brief period of slavery—I too have worked for a hairdressing magazine!—I achieved complete freedom." Vanity Fair contributing photographer Jonathan Becker, who became friendly with him in the mid-1970s, says he "tried hard not to complicate his life with doing things that were outside what he thought he was meant to do with his talents.... He felt he had something to express, and he was always in touch with that spirit." Gilberte Brassai' says that one time her husband detested an idea proposed by Harper's Bazaar, which no one ever refused, so he instructed her to say no. She became the official naysayer, preserving Brassai's reputation for unlimited graciousness and charm.

He had begun to draw again in the late 1930s, which stood him in good stead during the war. He fled Paris in 1940 for the South of France, found no work, returned to the capital to make sure his negatives were safe, and stayed for the rest of the war. He refused to work for the Germans and was therefore forbidden to photograph or publish, so he was destitute once again. Gilberte Brassai' says that when the Germans demanded to know why he would not work for them, he said he wasn't photographing anymore, only drawing.

Picasso did arrange for him to photograph his sculpture, but even Picasso had so little coal that Brassai' had to wear an overcoat and scarf while working. Canvas was so scarce that Picasso bought up bad paintings to paint over, and he was so tickled with one kitschy reclining nude that he got Brassai' to photograph him pretending to paint it while the actor Jean Marais, fully clothed, lay on the floor with his hands behind his head as if he were the model.

It was so cold in Brassai's apartment during the war that his pet fish froze. For a while he lived there in a kind of tent made from large exhibition prints and sometimes started fires on the floor—the burn marks are there to this day. He had been an army officer more than 20 years earlier in Hungary, and he was still a Romanian citizen. Mobilized to serve in the AustroHungarian army, Brassai deserted by fleeing his apartment and using false identity papers.

One day not long after the war's end, he was waiting for a man who worked for one of the magazines to pick up an urgently needed picture. The bell rang. Brassai answered. The fellow had been replaced by a remarkably beautiful young woman in her 20s, Gilberte-Mercedes Boyer. She says Brassai disappeared almost instantly; she was left staring at an empty hallway.

He had answered the door shirtless; he returned properly dressed and invited the messenger in. He must have been smitten. He sent her back with the wrong photograph.

(One wasn't half dressed when meeting a woman then; anyway, Brassai' was a Middle-European gentleman of another generation who spent a good deal of his life in a tie, even at home. The photographer Marc Riboud, who revered Brassai', says that when he knew him other French photographers all tried to look like one another and especially tried to look poor, but Brassai', still neatly, formally, and in his way elegantly turned out, looked like a provincial notary.)

His delight in the female form shines through his photographs of women-clothed or not.

Gilberte refused to marry him until he became a French citizen, saying that she did not want to be Romanian. Nor did he. They married in 1948. He was more than 20 years older than she, and late in the marrying game. He had been broke a long time, and determined to be free. In the 1930s he had fought against the conditions that come with success—"a permanent address, responsibilities, social status"—but now he would live for the rest of his life at the same address and be married till he died.

He always clung to the liberties of the bohemian life and protected himself against the demands of success, which came late. He had a house in Eze, in the Midi, high on an isolated hill with a view of Cap d'Antibes. To escape the pressures of Paris he spent up to six months a year there, tending his cactus garden, recharging his sense of self, and working. Gilberte Brassai' says the fashion photographer Erwin Blumenfeld once told her husband he was foolish not to trade on his renown with publicity campaigns, but Brassai' told her he didn't _ want to be a slave—Blumenfeld was still working at midnight, and his nails were bitten to the quick. Mme. Brassai' says her husband was determined not to be a prisoner of luxury.

Harper's Bazaar, a mainstay of his income for a time, published some of his most famous early pictures and commissioned reportage and portraits of leading artists and writers. Having no studio, he photographed artists in their studios and writers at home. (Jean Genet, just out of prison, was homeless; Brassai' photographed him in his favorite saloon.) In 1982 he published The Artists of My Life, with pictures of artists at work—Henri Matisse soberly sketching a nude, Aristide Maillol lovingly carving one. (Maillol told Brassai', "I love to caress buttocks, lovely full buttocks. They're the most beautiful shape nature ever created!") Brassai' photographed the jumbled statues, orderly canvases, and lively counterpoint of works arranged by artists for themselves. His text opened a window into the life and thought of men such as Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Alberto Giacometti, Georges Braque, and Joan Miro. Many of the artists and writers he photographed were old friends. Gilberte Brassai' says that when they went to Spain to photograph Dali he was so eager to have his picture taken he had the entire house whitewashed, changed costume four times in a single day without being asked to, and one morning, early, tossed a note wrapped around a rock through their open hotel window to say: "The sun is iffy, the sea very calm. Perhaps we could profit from this. Good morning."

"I take a portrait as if it were a potato," Brassai said. "One doesn't need psychology.... When I do a person's portrait, I like to photograph the immobility of the face, so as to refer each of us back to his own solitude. The mobility of a face is always an accident. I search for what is permanent."

He never ambushed a subject. He told the critic John Gruen, "You must look into their eyes and see what is inside of them, but then you must look away, because they don't like that." But he had looked inside. His portraits have a psychological subtlety that potatoes cannot match: La Mome Bijou, the aged courtesan, her eyes burning behind her jewels; Giacometti, straightforward but a bit sad and hesitant behind his sculpture of a bony arm and hand with outstretched fingers.

In 1946, Brassai ventured into a new field: sculpture. He picked up small stones on the beach and coaxed from them forms he said the water had already begun blocking out. Sometimes these pebbles suggested faces, but most of the time the ocean had been unusually preoccupied with the female body. Brassai repeatedly produced headless female nudes with swelling hips and small breasts—a shape that brings to mind (a little too readily) Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, and Cycladic art, which Brassai admired above all. This was a whole new career, and he pursued it for years, as passionately as he pursued all his art, attacking his stones with such zest and making such a racket while carving on train trips that his wife was embarrassed to be with him.

Brassai obviously loved women. Almost all his drawings and most of his statues were nudes, and he made some early, tantalizing nude photographs, such as the one of a woman seen from the waist down wearing a black corset and net stockings with nothing covering her delicious derriere. In the 1930s he scratched drawings onto photographic plates, turning photographs of nudes into hybrid creatures: half human, half musical instrument; half human, half African mask.

His delight in women and the female form shines through his photographs of women, whether they wear clothes or not. One would expect no less of a man so delighted by the pleasures of the eye, a man of such vitality and charm that the art dealer Virginia Zabriskie said the energy radiating from him well into his 70s struck her as a mix of creative and sexual intensity.

Late in life, he savored the adulation that came his way. The photographer Inge Morath, who met him in Paris in the 1950s, says he was revered and knew he was and would kind of hold court in his favorite cafes. Friends and admirers gathered around to hear him talk about Picasso blowing a trumpet out the window in the 1930s whenever he finished an illustration for his editor across the street; or Jacques Prevert leaving his scribbled poems behind him in cafes when he'd been drinking, and an editor traipsing after him to collect them for a book. At the Marlborough Gallery opening in New York in 1976, when the Secret Paris material was received with an outburst of enthusiasm, Louis Stettner steered all the pretty young women Brassai 's way and told them to give him a kiss. "Louis, you're my pimp," the 77-year-old photographer said, no doubt with his usual twinkle, for he later wrote Jonathan Becker with relish about the young women who "fainted with emotion or sobbed in [his] arms" at the show. Stettner also says that on weekdays Brassai would wander around his show, tap someone on the shoulder, and say, "Look, I'm the photographer," in expectation of a flattering response.

He never stopped writing. In 1949 his first book of text without pictures, L'Histoire de Marie, was published. It briefly records the thoughts and one-sided conversations of Marie, his uneducated maid, who gets hauled into court for making too much noise at night with a lover, though she doesn't have one, and is, as her own lawyer points out, so old and ugly no one would believe she did. Tough, salty, vernacular, original, the book is written with the same kind of objectivity and the same hearty acceptance and refusal to judge that characterize his photographs. Samuel Beckett, who was a friend, sent Brassai' a note saying he had read it "laughing sadly."

Conversations avec Picasso originated with scribbled notes which Brassai stuffed into a box in the 1930s and later found again. He never used a tape recorder, but rather reconstructed conversations from his prodigious memory, saying the important things were what persisted, precisely his feeling about photographs. His ear was as good as his eye at finding the telling anecdote and the essence: Picasso ruining a bronze of his mistress Dora Maar by urinating on it to improve the patina; Picasso refusing to scratch graffiti into walls, because he would have to leave them to their fate; Picasso saying he never let anyone dust his things, because he wanted to know if they'd been meddled with, so he usually wore gray suits, which wouldn't show the dust that settled on him too.

In the 1960s, Carmel Snow, Brassai's brilliant editor at Harper's Bazaar, died, and magazines were changing; there wasn't much room for his kind of work anymore. He preferred sculpting and writing by then anyway, and virtually gave up his camera. He took a few color photographs in America at the end of the 1950s, and more elsewhere, mostly of walls that time and weather had remade into abstract paintings. He preferred black-and-white but thought American civilization cried out for color.

Whatever he did he insisted on doing with passion, and he had used up his passion for photography. He began to make bigger sculptures in marble, sometimes in bronze. He designed several tapestries by combining images from various graffiti.

In the early 1970s, the photography market started to bloom, first in America, and gave Brassai new worldwide fame. Honors rained down. Gilberte Brassai' says the French government offered him a major award when he was 80, but he wrote to say that he didn't need any more honors at his age; they should keep them for younger people.

Etravagantly gifted as Brassai' was, he thought it a near calamity to have so many talents and said that he was constantly waging a kind of interior civil war, tom between things he wanted to do and aware that he could not do them all. Once, asked on TV whether he had had a happy life, Brassai' looked confounded, thought awhile, finally smiled and said he wasn't entirely happy, because he had too many desires. But then, he said, that's life, and if all your desires were satisfied, that would be the end. Gilberte Brassai' says her husband was good-hearted, generous, and optimistic. In a difficult situation he would say, "It will arrange itself. Courage. Life is courage."

He was convinced that people liked to work and that the best way to rest was to change activities. He died just after finishing a book about photography's influence on Proust, which has only recently been published. An interviewer once asked if he worked a lot. "Me?" said Brassai', smiling. "I never work!" Taken all in all, it looks like an enviable life.

He had always meant to live on the heights. In 1924 he wrote his parents, "I don't need a 'nice' life but a great one—otherwise everything, everything is meaningless." From the beginning, before he published anything he cared about, before he could earn a living, he had total confidence in his talents. Rightly so; he was every bit as good as he thought he was. As David Travis, curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, puts it, "He was not the best of his kind—he was the only one."

He was. There has never been another.