Henri Cartier-Bresson. Le Grand Jeu

27 October 2020

There are artists who do not stop producing masterpieces in their old age. Instead of diminishing, their creative energy intensifies. Titian, Bellini, Rembrandt, Degas, Manet, Picasso, Cy Twombly: they all had great endgames, but it is the fortune of a very few. The French critic and publisher Tériade showed that he was well aware of this when, at the beginning of the seventies, he told his friend Henri Cartier-Bresson: “You have done all that you could do in photography…. You have said all that you had to say, and you have nothing more to prove. You would not be able to go as far, and then you would stumble, repeat yourself and become fossilized. You should go back to painting and drawing.”¹ The photographer, who had just turned sixty (he was born in 1908) and was already considered a living monument of contemporary photography, took his advice and in 1974 hung up his Leica and brought to a close the glorious career that had earned him the title of “eye of the century.” He really did devote himself to drawing, returning every so often, up until 1980, to take the odd portrait on commission.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bougival, France, 1956, épreuve gélatino-argentique de 1973 © Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos.

It was in this period, when it was already clear that his work as a photographer was a thing of the past, that the request arrived from the collectors and patrons of the arts John and Dominique de Menil to make a selection of the best of his output. It was an opportunity for HCB to take stock of that work and draw up what is today considered a true artistic testament. And thus the Master Collection was born, or Le Grand Jeu, as the photographer’s friends called it: 385 gelatin silver prints, all measuring 30×40 centimeters, made by George Fèvre at his Parisian lab Pictorial, following the precise instructions of the photographer, and stored in five boxes. Six sets were produced, and are now in the Menil Collection in Houston, at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson and at the University of Osaka, in Japan. The last of the six has recently been acquired by the Pinault Collection, which until March 20, 2021, will be showing these images at Palazzo Grassi in an exhibition divided into five different sections. The title is Le Grand Jeu and refers not just to the unofficial title of the Master Collection but also to the game in which five different curators have been invited to take part. The rules of this game, drawn up by Matthieu Humery, who has coordinated the operation, are simple: the participants have been asked to pick fifty pictures out of the ones chosen by Cartier-Bresson. None of them was aware of the choices made by the other curators. Each was free to choose the setting, the color of the walls and the style of the frames. The players were the master of the house, the collector François Pinault, the photographer Annie Leibovitz, the film director Wim Wenders, the writer Javier Cercas and the conservator and director of the Department of Prints and Photography of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France Sylvie Aubenas.

In the exhibition, the pictures are accompanied by brief texts (and in Wenders’s case by a video too) excerpted from the longer essays in the catalogue published by Marsilio. The show, which occupies the entire second floor of the palazzo facing onto the Grand Canal, does not, therefore, present the whole of the Master Collection (which is, however, reproduced in its entirety at the end of the catalogue), but offers us different takes on a corpus of images of which, moreover, Cartier-Bresson never made clear the criteria on which they were selected. There is no chronological order, there is no rigorous geographical subdivision, there is no, to a casual observer, connection between themes that would justify the sequence. And yet, as Jean-François Chevrier has written: “We should take seriously the fact that an artist who photographs is not just a person who takes pictures. He can also be someone who composes an overarching discourse on the basis of his own images, who assembles them and gives them a sense as a whole.”² To say what is the sense of this sequence is to say who HCB was and what vision he had of the world. It is what the many critics who have written of him have tried to do. But the impression that one gets, after seeing this exhibition, is that the material from which the five curators made their choice is so vast and rich that they were able to see their own reflections in it, offering visitors what is certainly a personal portrait of Cartier-Bresson, but also, and perhaps above all, a picture of themselves.