Magnum opus

Photo: Cartier-Bresson, <em>World&rsquo;s Fair, Brussels, Belgium</em>, 1958 ©2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. &ldquo;Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century&rdquo; is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

It’s kind of hard not to hate Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004). The French photographer wasn’t just “handsome and charming…with a great deal of charisma when he needed it,” as Matthew Witkovsky, chair of the Art Institute of Chicago’s photography department, puts it. From the 1950s through the 1970s, a typical assignment for the cofounder of the prestigious Magnum photo agency involved just spending a month in Portugal, taking pictures to show what life there was like.

Television and the Internet ensured that Life, Paris Match and the other magazines that published Cartier-Bresson’s work—if they still exist—can no longer afford such plum commissions. But the photographer’s retrospective “The Modern Century,” which opens at the Art Institute Sunday 25, asserts that his images of both everyday life and world-changing events remain relevant to a contemporary audience.

Curated by Peter Galassi of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the exhibition brings together about 285 photos that Cartier-Bresson took between the early 1930s and the early 1970s, when he gave up photography to return to the drawing and painting he’d previously pursued.

Once Cartier-Bresson made the transition to photography, “he started out as a Surrealist and made very radical work,” Witkovsky says. “That’s what he’s best known for in art circles. But in 1954, when he had his first show [at the Art Institute], Cartier-Bresson had spent a few key years in Asia photographing the Communist revolution [in China], independence in Indonesia, [and] the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and its aftermath in India, and he was known for that by millions and millions of people.”

One of the most gripping photos from this period, Shanghai, China (1948), depicts a crowd of frantic people outside a bank, trying to exchange their money for gold before the Communists’ advance renders their paper currency worthless. In Galassi’s audio tour for “The Modern Century” at MoMA, the curator reveals that Cartier-Bresson’s clients spoiled the image’s impact by cropping it and surrounding it with lesser photos.

“It’s a sad story,” Witkovsky says, explaining that it happened to Cartier-Bresson all the time, as visitors will see when they compare his black-and-white prints to the photos’ appearance in the vintage magazines on display. “On the backs of many of his pictures there are stamps saying DO NOT CROP and DO NOT OVERPRINT WITH TEXT, but it was a losing battle because you were out in the field far away and the stories were racing along.”

The Frenchman found as much drama at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels (pictured) as he did in the Soviet Union, which he was the first outsider to photograph after Stalin’s death, or in China, where he traveled for a 1958 photo essay on the Great Leap Forward. The Art Institute devotes an entire room to the latter project as well as a 1960 photo essay on Bankers Trust Company. The insights these pictures offer into class and gender relations in a midcentury New York office make them as compelling as Cartier-Bresson’s photos of places few Americans had seen. “We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking he was the kind of journalist who needed to be there when a war was going on,” Witkovsky says. “He wasn’t sensationalist at all.”

The photographer’s humanist but dispassionate approach fell out of favor after the 1970s. Witkovsky suspects that’s because most museums show only a small subset of Cartier-Bresson’s work: “This is the first full retrospective in this country in more than 30 years.”

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