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Photographs: Unveiled Beauty

Thursday 14 March 2024, 03:00 PM • Milan

71

Henri Cartier-Bresson

(1908 - 2004)

Alicante, Spain, 1933

Artist's Resale Right

Estimate

€ 5.000 - 6.000

Sold

€ 5.760

The price includes buyer's premium

Information

Gelatin silver print, printed later
cm 39,8 x 30 (cm 35,7 x 24,2 picture) | 15.7 x 11.8 in. (15.1 x 9.5 in. picture)
Signed in black felt pen on the white inferior recto margin

Provenance

Sotheby's, Photographs from the collection of Graham Nash, New York, April 25th 1990, lot 277

Literature

Y. Bonnefoy, Henri Cartier-Bresson Photographe, Delpire, Paris, 1979, p. 22Catalogue d'exposition, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The early work, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987, p. 134J. P. Montier, Henri Cartier-Bresson L'art sans art, Flammarion, Paris, 1995, p. 21Catalogue d'exposition, Henri Cartier-Bresson, de qui s'agit-il ?, Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Gallimard, Paris, 2003, p. 111M. Frizot, Le scrapbook d'Henri Cartier-Bresson, Steidl, Göttingen, 2006, pl. 80
The at the time twenty-five year old Henri Cartier-Bresson captures the prostitutes waiting at a brothel in Alicante, Spain, for some clients. In front of his lens, women smile but give up seductive attitudes; sometimes they ignore the photographer's presence on purpose, but in other cases like this some of them decide to strike a playfull pose. Here emerges the surreal vein that constitutes the expressive mark that already characterized the great French reporter.