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Brassaï was a major figure of Montparnasse, the area where most foreign artists were working and living. The Houston Museum of Fine Arts notably organised a roving retrospective exhibition of his works in 1999.

This exhibition in Paris has been organised this time with the help of Gilberte Brassaï, the artist's widow who is known to be not really easy-going with museums or collectors.

Brassaï befriended many artists or writers during his career and dozens of portraits of his friends are being shown here, notably those of Jean Genet, Bonnard, Giacometti or Matisse but curiously not that of Henry Miller who accompanied Brassaï so often in his nocturnal outings.

Brassaï's first shots dated from 1931 before his celebrated photos of Paris by night. He also produced Surrealist images from the “Minotaure” magazine between 1933 and 1939 and became internationally known with his book “Secret Paris” published in 1979.

Still there are too many photos on the walls of the Pompidou Centre, which tend to indicate that Brassaï was not always at his best especially as he was quite productive during his career.

It remains that Brassaï was the “eye” of the 1930s in Paris capturing incredible images in cafés, dancing-halls and other places at night.
Brassaï can thus be placed on the same level with Doisneau regarding popular and nostalgic themes, less mysterious and imbued with much poetry as the retrospective organised by the Houston Museum suggested.

It seems in fact quite complicated to really situate Brassaï simply because his widow has always been keeping a vigilant eye on all events revolving around his works.

Gilberte Brassaï has a huge collection of 43,000 photographs and a moral right on these. As a result she has had always a word regarding their use.
Anne Tucker, who worked during thirteen years on the Houston catalogue notably said she had not received the authorisation from Gilberte Brassaï to refer to the Brassaï archives in Paris. In addition, it was the latter who selected 100 out of the 140 shots reproduced in that catalogue.

Gilberte Brassaï had thus say in the organisation of the Paris exhibition and rejected images that seemed to suggest that her husband had something of a “gutter-camera sniper”.

Apart from the idealistic vision given by his widow who recently decided to donate her collection to the Pompidou Centre after her death, it is interesting to note that Brassaï was also a writer. He had a deep passion for literature and wrote a lengthy diary, which he called his “yellow-note-book”.

Brassaï was not only the photographer of a secretive Paris but also that of New York and London who enjoyed much freedom regarding the way he took his shots.

Brassaï considered himself as a painter and even as a sculptor and dearly wished to devote part of his time to painting and sculpture. “I have the desire to return to plastic art and this wish is more and more a physical necessity while photographic is rather stimulating. Even if a shot may seem fully successful and still, I remain unsatisfied”, he wrote in his diary.

In fact Brassaï first frequented the Academy of painting in Budapest and the School of Fine Art in Berlin and produced many drawings before settling in Paris. These drawings notably represented distorted nudes with heavy hips and enormous thighs like photos taken at too close a range. Such proportions were found again in the sculptures he executed and which resemble Cycladic idols or prehistoric female figures. Unsurprisingly he worked like a sculptor when he used a camera. Last but not least, he often frequented the studios of Picasso, Laurens, Maillol, Lipschitz or Giacometti while these artists took themselves an interest in primitive sculptures.

Brassaï also took pictures of wall scribbles in many parts of Paris in an attempt to capture the essence of scriptures and to decipher animals, demons or heroes among signs. Such photos of wall scribbles were already shown in the MoMA in 1956 and bring questions on whether Brassaï viewed them as a sculptor or as a topographer of signs.