Brassai, Paul Morand - Paris de nuit - 1933

"Instead of seeing Paris de nuit as a great 'might have been', therefore, one should think of it as amongst the best produced and influential photobooks ever."
- Gerry Badger -

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT TITLES IN PHOTOBOOK HISTORY,
mentioned in all important books about photobooks:

- Andrew Roth, "The Book of 101 Books", page 76/77
- Martin Parr, "The Photobook. A history", volume 1, page 134
- Christian Bouqueret, "Paris. Les Livres de Photographie", page 116
- Hans-Michael Koetzle, "Eyes on Paris", page 106
- Hasselblad Center, "The Open Book", page 110/111
- Michèle and Michael Auer, "802 photo books from the M.+ M. Auer collection", page 198

SPECTACULAR SPIRAL BINDING.
BREATH-TAKING PHOTOGRAVURE PRINTING.

"A modern, superbly printed book, with a spiral binding, which immediately established itself as a major work in the world of photography."
- Christian Bouqueret -

Welcome to the auction by Anatole Desachy (France) and Ecki Heuser (Germany) in honor of Paris. To celebrate the 27th edition of „Paris Photo“, the biggest event for photography worldwide, we have gathered 27 photobooks about Paris each.

IF YOU WIN MORE THAN 1 OF MY BOOKS IN THIS AUCTION, YOU WILL PAY ONLY 1 X SHIPPING COSTS - WORLDWIDE.

Editions Arts et Metiers Graphiques, Paris. 1933. First French edition, first printing.

Spiral bound with card cover (as issued). 193 x 250 mm. 74 pages. 60 black and white photos. Photographs by Brassai. Introduction by Paul Morand. Text in French.

Condition:
Book inside fresh and clean with no marks and with no foxing, outside the binding with the complete spiral. Inside with neat missing part at the bottom left corner of the first pages, small crease at the top right corner of the pages, no other remarkable flaws or defects. Outside with trace of use, especially at the edges; with neat missing part at the bottom left corner and at the top right corner of the front and with a bigger missing part at the top right corner of the rear side. Overall very good condition.

Super beautiful, very famous photobook title by Brassai about Paris.

"It was Brassai who completed our picture of Paris. It was he who explored and recorded the other side of the city, that second, later, darker time of day that is an inseparable part of the 24-hour rhythm. Admittedly, photographs were taken at night, in the shadows of the alleyways or in the darkness of the catacombs, even before Brassai. But never really with a system, according to a concept and with artistic aspirations. Brassai was the "Poète des nuits" and he was the first to produce a more than convincing book on the subject. (It) is probably the best known of all the Paris-related titles, a printed superlative that made Brassai, the more or less penniless immigrant, famous literally overnight."
- Hans-Michael Koetzle -

"In the early 21st century, the discovery of more than 200 letters and hundreds of drawings and other items from the period 1940 to 1984 has provided scholars with material for understanding his later life and career.
Gyula (Julius) Halász, Brassaï (pseudonym) was born on 9 September 1899 in Brassó, Kingdom of Hungary (today Brașov, Romania) to an Armenian mother and a Hungarian father. He grew up speaking Hungarian and Romanian. When he was three his family lived in Paris for a year, while his father, a professor of French literature, taught at the Sorbonne.
As a young man, Halász studied painting and sculpture at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem) in Budapest. He joined a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served until the end of the First World War.
He cited Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as an artistic influence.
Following WWI, his hometown of Brassó, and the rest of Transylvania, was transferred from the Kingdom of Hungary to Romania at the Treaty of Trianon. Halász left for Berlin in 1920 where he worked as a journalist for the Hungarian papers Keleti and Napkelet. He started studies at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste), now Universität der Künste Berlin. There he became friends with several older Hungarian artists and writers, including the painters Lajos Tihanyi and Bertalan Pór, and the writer György Bölöni, each of whom later moved to Paris and became part of the Hungarian circle.
In 1924, Halasz moved to Paris to live, where he would stay for the rest of his life. He began teaching himself the French language by reading the works of Marcel Proust. Living among the gathering of young artists in the Montparnasse quarter, he took a job as a journalist. He soon became friends with the American writer Henry Miller, and the French writers Léon-Paul Fargue and Jacques Prévert. In the late 1920s, he lived in the same hotel as Tihanyi.
Miller later played down Brassai's claims of friendship. In 1976 he wrote of Brassai: "Fred [Perles] and I used to steer shy of him – he bored us." Miller added that the biography Brassai had written of him was typically "padded", "full of factual errors, full of suppositions, rumors, documents he filched which are largely false or give a false impression."
Halász's job and his love of the city, whose streets he often wandered late at night, led to photography. He first used it to supplement some of his articles for more money, but rapidly explored the city through this medium, in which he was tutored by his fellow Hungarian André Kertész. He later wrote that he used photography "to capture the beauty of streets and gardens in the rain and fog, and to capture Paris by night." Using the name of his birthplace, Halász went by the pseudonym "Brassaï," which means "from Brasso."
Brassaï captured the essence of the city in his photographs, published as his first collection in the 1933 book entitled Paris de nuit (Paris by Night). His book gained great success, resulting in being called "the eye of Paris" in an essay by Henry Miller. In addition to photos of the seedier side of Paris, Brassai portrayed scenes from the life of the city's high society, its intellectuals, its ballet, and the grand operas. He had been befriended by a French family who gave him access to the upper classes. Brassai photographed many of his artist friends, including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, and several of the prominent writers of his time, such as Jean Genet and Henri Michaux.
Young Hungarian artists continued to arrive in Paris through the 1930s and the Hungarian circle absorbed most of them. Kertèsz immigrated to New York City in 1936. Brassai befriended many of the new arrivals, including Ervin Marton, a nephew of Tihanyi, whom he had been friends with since 1920. Marton developed his own reputation in street photography in the 1940s and 1950s. Brassaï continued to earn a living with commercial work, also taking photographs for the U.S. magazine Harper's Bazaar.
He was a founding member of the Rapho agency, created in Paris by Charles Rado in 1933.
Brassaï's photographs brought him international fame. In 1948, he had a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, which travelled to George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois. MoMA exhibited more of Brassai's works in 1953, 1956, and 1968. He was presented at the Rencontres d'Arles festival in France in 1970 (screening at the Théâtre Antique, Brassaï by Jean-Marie Drot), in 1972 (screening Brassaï si, Vominino by René Burri), and in 1974 (as guest of honour).
In 1979 Brassaï was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum."
(Wikipedia)