FRANCE: France yesterday reacted to the death of Henri Cartier-Bresson with an outpouring of tributes as effusive as the photographer's passing was discreet, writes Lara Marlowe, in Paris
Cartier-Bresson died on Tuesday at his home in southern France, nine days short of his 96th birthday.
Fifteen people attended his funeral at Montjustin in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, and it was only after the ceremony was over on Wednesday evening that the French ministry of culture issued a statement announcing his death.
On summer holiday on La Réunion island, President Jacques Chirac said he learned "with great sorrow" of Cartier-Bresson's death.
"With him, France loses a photographer of genius, one of the most gifted artists of his generation and one of the most respected throughout the world," the French leader said. Expressing "admiration, friendship and respect," Mr Chirac called Cartier-Bresson an "essential witness" of the 20th century.
Le Monde's photography correspondent Michel Guerrin, who knew Cartier-Bresson well, said the photographer felt a certain bitterness towards France, parallelled by gratitude to the US, where he first gained recognition in the 1930s and 1940s.
So it was ironic that the French prime minister and culture minister also issued statements praising "the photographer Par Excellence . . . a visionary . . . a great artist and a great reporter. . . who travelled the world with inexhaustible passion." Le Centre Pompidou, France's national modern art museum, has always ignored Cartier-Bresson, while the New York Museum of Modern Art held its first exhibition of his work in 1947. Last year, the French Bibliothèque Nationale (BN) helped to right the error by holding a Cartier-Bresson retrospective that attracted 82,000 visitors in three months.
The BN marked Cartier-Bresson's death by organising an exhibition of his photographs at its Tolbiac site until the August 22nd. Cartier-Bresson has left the foundation which he established last year in the 14th Arrondissement to the city of Paris.
Rarely have French newspapers devoted so much space to a deceased artist. "The eye of the century has closed," read the first line of the first page of Le Monde, an allusion to Pierre Assouline's 1999 biography "L'oeil Du Siècle". Le Monde devoted 4½ pages to Cartier-Bresson yesterday; Libération 10 pages, Le Figaro, which called him "the most French of all photographers", one page.
The son of a textile manufacturer, Cartier-Bresson failed his Baccalauréat three times, then studied painting. But when he showed his work to the American writer and heiress Gertrude Stein, she advised him to join his father's business.
Cartier-Bresson destroyed his canvases and went to the Ivory Coast to hunt big game by night, selling salted meat in the villages by day. For the last three decades of his life, he gave up photography for drawing, which he considered a higher art form.
Cartier-Bresson bought his first Leica in 1931. "It became the extension of my eye and no longer left me," he wrote. "I walked all day in a nervous state, searching the streets for photos I could trap. I really wanted to capture in a single image the essence of a scene that was taking place." Cartier-Bresson often quoted Gen Charles de Gaulle, who said, "Photographers are like artillery gunners; they have to aim straight, shoot fast and get the hell out." As a soldier in the French army, he was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940.
His third escape attempt - "with Joyce's Ulysses under my arm" - succeeded in 1943. Cartier-Bresson joined the Resistance and photographed the liberation of Paris, 60 years ago this month.
As a co-founder of the Magnum photo agency, Cartier-Bresson was a pioneer of modern photo-journalism. He covered Chairman Mao's rise to power and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and was the first photographer allowed into the Soviet Union, in 1954.
Though a shy man, Cartier-Bresson frequented the artistic and political icons of the 20th century: the French poets Aragon and Breton, Matisse, Dali, Sartre, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, John Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe.
But Cartier-Bresson's greatest legacy is his influence over other photographers, many of whom shared his penchant for Leicas and his aversion to "vulgar" colour. The writer Pieyre de Mandiargues called Cartier-Bresson "the greatest photographer of modern times". The opinion was so widely shared that it seemed to suffocate new talent, especially in France.