Brassaï: Secret Paris

I always laugh when I remember that Brassaï, the photographer who became famous for documenting Paris after dark, was born in Transylvania. Born Gyula Halász in Brassó, then part of Austria-Hungary, he arrived in Paris in 1924, joining the drift of artists, writers, and émigrés gathering around Montparnasse. Five years later, after his friend André Kertész lent him a camera, Brassaï began teaching himself photography as another way of moving through the city he already knew intimately as a journalist. By the early 1930s, he had already become what Henry Miller called “the Eye of Paris,” a nickname that stuck. He was present in the bars, brothels, streets, and studios he photographed, often known to his subjects and already part of their world.

Brassaï: Secret Paris is curated by art historian Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, Heide director Lesley Harding, and Philippe Ribeyrolles, the artist’s nephew. It brings together over 150 vintage prints centred on the Parisian subjects for which Brassaï became best known, and the city he thrived within. The exhibition begins, appropriately, with Brassaï himself, cloaked in a long coat, with the self-portrait illustrating both the photographer and something of his mythology. From there, chronology loosens. Paris by day and night, Surrealism, nudes, collage, graffiti, artists, lovers, sex workers, and the wider avant-garde are organised into thematic rooms, building up Brassaï through a series of overlapping identities instead of a life traced neatly through time.

The prints themselves are extraordinary. Their surfaces retain an almost bodily materiality: wet pavements flare white, scratches remain visible, creases and tonal irregularities sit within the image. Brassaï did his own developing, printing, and enlarging, working from a makeshift darkroom in the bathroom of his Paris apartment. The density of his blacks and the sharp bursts of his whites demand as much attention as their subjects. In the first gallery, works are set behind heavy black window mounts that seem to swallow some of this tonal delicacy, flattening images that elsewhere feel fresh and alive. Thankfully, white mounts also make their way into the exhibition.

The apparent immediacy of the prints can be deceptive. Brassaï worked slowly. His Voigtländer Bergheil 6.5 × 9 cm camera used glass plates and was often mounted on a wooden tripod, requiring him to frame, focus, load each plate, and calculate an exposure before making the picture (he even used string to measure lights!). Outdoors, his long exposures transformed street lamps, illuminated shopfronts, car headlights, and wet cobblestones into pools or streaks of light; Brassaï famously became so accustomed to their duration that he could gauge some exposures by the burning of a cigarette. Indoors, magnesium flash gave his subjects a sudden, hard illumination. In Le Bal de la Horde au Bullier, Montparnasse (c. 1932), the bare skin and fringed skirts of topless performers flare against the dark suit-and-tie crowd gathered around them. Such pictures feel like snapshots, but their apparent looseness is carefully constructed: composed, timed, and, on occasion, staged.

In Pavés (1931–32), there is barely a city at all, just rows of wet cobblestones catching the light. The image later reappeared on the cover of Paris de Nuit, Brassaï’s famous 1933 book devoted to the city after dark, a first-edition copy of which sits here in a vitrine. Elsewhere in the first galleries, Paris is similarly emptied out—from passageways beneath bridges and deserted alleyways to the Champs-Élysées lit into the distance and fireworks briefly illuminating Notre-Dame.

Hidden among these largely peopleless views is Le Banc (c. 1931), which at first appears to show a couple alone, folded into one another on a park bench. Look closer, and there are four people in the photograph. The hard light catches the crown of a figure slumped at the opposite end of the bench, almost disappearing into its armrest, while across the street a man stands looking towards the couple. Brassaï’s photographs are deceptively complex in this way; what first registers as a single encounter slowly breaks into smaller relationships, glances, and bodies occupying the same frame. From here, doubling begins to appear everywhere. Couples embrace, some sit shoulder to shoulder, their reflections are caught in mirrors, and backs turn towards the camera. In Un Costume pour deux (1931), a bare-backed figure bends into a bare-legged companion, one arm looped around the other’s shoulder. Fat Claude au Monocle, bar lesbien (c. 1932) is unusually face-on, Claude leaning towards her companion with one hand resting lightly against her arm.

The photographs made at Chez Suzy, a brothel in the Latin Quarter, expand his view from duos into larger clusters. The women frequently appear from behind, their faces withheld while the repeated shapes of shoulders and backs organise the image. Brassaï even enlisted his handyman to pose as a client, adding a substitute body to an apparently intimate encounter. This interest in grouped bodies carries into his photographs of performers at rest. In Kiki, Thérèse et Lily (1932), three clothed women collapse across a divan, their limbs tangled with patterned fabric while two petits chiens almost disappear between their legs. Backstage, performers wait between curtains or lie strewn across the floor. Brassaï is particularly good at these moments of suspension, when the public pose drops and another kind of choreography takes over.

That choreography extends to the exhibition design itself, sometimes a little too literally. Selected photographs are reproduced, blown up, and broken across panels suspended throughout the galleries on wire, intentionally interrupting the linear hang of the photographs, and perhaps, for a more whimsical visitor, recall the winding cobbled streets and alleyways of Brassaï’s Paris. I am reminded of a display designed for the 2016 Diane Arbus exhibition at Met Breuer in New York, where individual photographs were mounted on freestanding walls to encourage visitors to weave in and around them. At Heide, however, on a much smaller scale, walls are instead thin hanging panels tethered to the floor by small piles of cobblestones stuck together. Presumably an element of discovery is intended, with visitors moving around the panels to find more works on the verso. In the first galleries, though, you become as conscious of what is behind you as of the photograph in front. I feel more tourist than Parisian as, more than once, I watched visitors back into the suspended structures; one woman even tripped over the stacked stones, leaving a photograph gently swaying in her wake.

The Surrealist room contains twenty-two prints, each recessed into small box-like peepholes that project from the wall, hung unusually low, with scattered stools placed in front of them—an awkward game of art-musical chairs. Presumably, we are meant to sit. During my visit, nobody did. Instead, visitors bent and craned their necks to meet the works. The first, and my personal favourite, of these photographs shows a cat asleep while three white rats nestle into its body. Around it are close studies of coral, dew on a nasturtium leaf, a pansy, the pistil and pollen of a tulip, a butterfly wing, a Metro silhouette, and another self-portrait. The sequence then shifts into the orbit of Pablo Picasso: an armchair and slippers, a plaster head, sculptures at Boisgeloup, an imprint of Picasso’s hand, and views of his studios on rue La Boétie and rue des Grands Augustins.

Brassaï was embraced by Surrealist circles in the 1930s, without formally belonging to André Breton’s group. His position feels analogous to the way he photographs, already inside the room but set apart. Often described as “the invisible photographer,” there is little sense of intrusion in his images, no disturbance; he appears at ease within these spaces he records. In a vitrine sits an issue of the influential art and literary magazine Minotaure, to which Brassaï contributed photographs and texts for its first issue in 1933, alongside annotated contact prints for La Tourterelle et la poupée (1937), in which a turtledove flutters around a contorted plastic doll. The photographs were later used to illustrate a short story that Brassaï wrote for the magazine, revealing how his images could both function as stand-alone documentary photographs and be instrumentalised as illustrations of a Surrealist worldview.

You can hear Brassaï’s 1955 short film Tant qu’il y aura des bêtes (As Long as There Are Animals) before you properly encounter it. Its tinny, whimsical soundtrack drifts through the galleries, faintly Chaplinesque, giving the exhibition a continuous accompaniment. Shot at the Vincennes Zoo in Paris, the film moves between lions yawning, giraffes tonguing the air, gibbons leaping from branches, and polar bears playing. What was the attraction to the zoo? It sits within a room devoted to Brassaï’s wider avant-garde milieu, alongside a grid of portraits of Henry Miller, Dalí, Picasso, Joan Miró, Dora Maar, Matisse, and Braque, as well as a 1944 group photograph taken in Picasso’s Grands Augustins studio. Another bunch of animals? Another zoo? Brassaï’s images are so sharp that, in one portrait, you can see the dirt beneath Picasso’s fingernails as he holds a well-loved cigar. The film was screened at the Melbourne Film Festival in 1958, which is, somewhat surprisingly, the only Australian connection I found acknowledged in the wall labels.

However, as Lesley Harding traces in the exhibition catalogue, that 1958 screening was the beginning of a longer Australian reception. Thirteen years later, in 1971, the National Gallery of Victoria presented a touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition of seventy-one photographs, selected by John Szarkowski, and first shown at MoMA in 1968. Brassaï’s work then returned to Melbourne through two commercial exhibitions at Tolarno Galleries in 1979 and 1980, organised by Georges Mora, who had met Brassaï in Paris in the late 1960s. The Tolarno years also coincided with significant institutional collecting in Australia. The NGV purchased a group of Brassaï photographs in 1980, while the Australian National Gallery (now the National Gallery of Australia) acquired works around the same period; John and Sunday Reed also acquired a photograph from the Tolarno shows, now in Heide’s collection. It is an unusually substantial local history, yet one largely pushed into the catalogue and briefly noted in promotional material, rather than made legible in the exhibition itself. For a show at Heide, the question of why Brassaï is being shown here is curiously difficult to answer from the galleries alone.

By the end, the problem feels larger than a missing local context. The exhibition’s thematic structure is competent, even handsome, but its curatorial proposition remains thin. Nightlife, Surrealism, graffiti, portraiture, the avant-garde: the categories accumulate without quite becoming an argument. Perhaps there is no argument to uncover. Maybe the proposition is simply to bring together extraordinary vintage prints of Brassaï’s best-known work and organise them through digestible themes. There is plenty of pleasure in that. What is harder to understand is why the exhibition seems so uneasy with such a simple premise. Much of the interpretive labour is left to the catalogue, a $60 supplement, including Lesley Harding’s parallels between Brassaï and Australian modernists such as Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker, and Gael Newton’s discussion of W. L. Lucke-Meyer’s 1934 Melbourne by Night. These connections I find more dutiful than revelatory. Heide, usually so invested in its own modernist romance, here make these local parallels feel obligatory.

The installation betrays a similar anxiety. Designed to ward off “viewing fatigue” across 150 similarly sized black-and-white photographs, it repeatedly intervenes in how we encounter them in overdetermined, awkward ways. It is a curious fear at a moment when most of us move through hundreds, even thousands, of images each day. The challenge is surely less how to keep us looking than how to make such looking matter. There is something exhausting about the format of the international photography solo exhibition, when the work arrives already canonical and the exhibition asks so little of that canon. This show seems unsure what more to ask of it. Brassaï hardly needs rescuing. What he does need here is a reason to be seen again.