Henri Cartier-Bresson

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) photographed the tumult of the 20th century for longer than almost anyone else. His career, begun in the sooty bleakness of the Depression, extended through a world war and numerous upheavals in Asia and Africa, not to mention a U.S. presidential election or two.

But it was his uncanny perceptions of less momentous events—a man trying to leap over a puddle, children scrambling through a blasted-out wall, a woman in black carrying a baby as though it were a deadly tumor—that for many constitute his richer legacy. The small, fast, handheld camera became in his hands a tool for a stealthier way of interacting with the world. Hundreds of times, for more than 50 years, he lifted this precision instrument to his eye and fixed the chaos of reality into black-and-white images that were shockingly graceful, brutal, funny, poignant and unforseen.

These images have been fundamental to the Museum of Modern Art's idea of itself. What Picasso and Matisse meant for its persuasive institutional history of painting, Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans have long represented for its photography curators, their pictures being crucial evidence in making a case for the medium as a distinct and robust modern art.

"Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century," now in MoMA's top-floor galleries through June 28, is the fourth major solo exhibition it has devoted to the French artist. After the triumphant 1987 retrospective of the surrealist-imbued work from the early '30s—organized by Peter Galassi, chief curator of photography, who has also made this far broader selection of 300 prints—it wasn't clear what was left to reveal or say.

The photographer entered his busiest period after 1947, when he co-founded the photo collective Magnum and covered the world for them. From the '30s to the '70s, he spent more days of the year abroad than home in Paris. But photojournalism, which tends to enlist images merely as illustrations, has not found favor at MoMA for many years, and there was no reason to think that stories shot on assignment, even by Cartier-Bresson, deserved special attention.

Mr. Galassi has finessed this issue by meeting it head on. He has divided the show into 13 sections, beginning again with the matchless early work and then grouping later efforts either into distinct photo-essays (on, say, China's Great Leap Forward), or into more fluid categories, arranged by the continents to which Cartier-Bresson traveled. Prints hang on the walls and can be compared with the magazine spreads in which they originally appeared.

The result integrates Cartier-Bresson's peregrine life and career as never before. A hoard of never-before-exhibited pictures renews appreciation for his longevity as an artist, one whose photographs in the '70s were as packed with energy and surprise as those from 40 years earlier, even as he circled around the same themes. The idiosyncratic nature of his mind and politics, and the sometimes perverse ways they inflected his photography, is also reconfirmed.

Mr. Galassi's catalog essay fleshes out the privileged background of his subject with lots of new detail. Cartier-Bresson had roots in Old France as well as the industrial revolution. His family manufactured a brand of cotton thread known throughout Europe. Coming from a fortune based in slavery proved awkward for the scion after he became a Marxist. But his renunciation of moneyed comforts for a vagabond's existence came only after he had graduated from the exalted Lycée Condorcet. His cultural upbringing was sufficiently refined that in a letter to his mother he could make obscure references to Proust and feel assured his witticisms would be appreciated.

After wandering around Europe, Africa and Mexico in the early '30s, and making two films in support of Republican Spain, Cartier-Bresson took a job as a photographer for the Communist daily newspaper Ce Soir. It's a toss-up who got the best of the deal. His press pass served mainly to feed his own curiosity rather than the party's propaganda machine. His identification with outcasts was sincere and lifelong, even if his left-wing politics were of the renegade sort peculiar to French intellectuals.

Take, for example, what impressed him about the cataclysm of World War II. An enlisted member of a French film and photo unit, he was captured by the Nazis in 1940 and imprisoned for almost two years before escaping. Yet the experience did not prevent him from documenting the postwar suffering of the Germans (a wrenching picture here from 1945 shows a woman in Dessau weeping on a pile of rubble) or from sympathizing with a French female collaborator besieged by a mob of his countrymen.

Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris Henri Cartier-Bresson, 'New York City' (1946)