André Kertész

André Kertész Chez Mondrian, Paris 1926 Gelatin silver print, printed later. 24.5 x 18.3 cm (25.2 x 20.2 cm). Signed and dated in pencil on the verso. Provenance Private collection, Paris Literature Pierre Borhan, André Kertész. His Life and Work, Boston i.a. 1995, ill. p. 155; Michel Frizot/Annie-Laure Wanaverbecq (ed.), Kertész, exhib.cat. Jeu de Paume, Paris, Paris 2010, ill. p. 83 In his photograph “Chez Mondrian, Paris” from the summer of 1926, André Kertész transfers the characteristic features of the art of the Dutch Constuctivist into his own pictorial medium, the photograph, in a congenial way. As the photographer later observed, he instinctively captured the “spirit” of Mondrian's paintings when he visited the studio in the Rue du Départ in Montparnasse, and so here too the composition is structured by a grid of horizontal and vertical pictorial axes, in combination with geometric planes. However, this formal severity is retracted by the light falling gently from the right which lends the picture a quiet, poetic power. The artistic circles in which the Hungarian-born Kertész came into contact following his arrival in the French metropolis soon became one of his preferred subjects. “Chez Mondrian, Paris” is undoubtedly one of the best-known works in this circle of motifs.