ABSTRACT
The exhibition of Mr. Cartier-Bresson's work which John Szarkowski, the Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, has now installed in the museum's first-floor galleries is called "Recent Photographs". The analytical detachment which Mr. Cartier-Bresson achieves in the face of his subjects and which is very much a part of that empathy is itself indicative of a certain disposition to form—specifically, to a kind of classicism that is essentially French. Mr. Cartier-Bresson, who once aspired to be a painter, studied in his early years with Andre Lhote, and he brings to his photographic work a sensibility imbued with the Cubist aesthetic. Yet the work belongs to Cubism, and to the larger tradition of French classicism of which Cubism is but the most recent chapter, by virtue of its compositional rigor, its clear and highly rational placement of forms, and its impeccable pictorial logic.
