JANDRE KERTESZ POSTCARDS FROM PARIS

The first comprehensive study of these rare and influential objects, documenting a moment training at the beginning of the famous photographer's career This elegant book collects all known postcard prints by photographer André Kertész (1894-1985), including portraits, views of Paris, scenes studio paintings and still lifes of exquisite simplicity. The essays shed new light on the artist's most acclaimed images; themes of materiality, exile and communication; his social circle illustrious and bohemian; and the changing identity of art photography. Playful but refined, the book's design reflects the spirit of 1920s Paris while highlighting the modernity of the more than 250 illustrated works in the catalog. Kertész made his rigorously composed prints on card paper. cheap but lush postcards, sharing them with friends and sending them back to his family in Hungary. The works reveal that the artist is learning his craft as he meets an international group of modernists, including Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger and Joseph Csáky, in the metropolis of the interwar period. Prized by collectors as well as by Kertész himself, the postcards influenced his compositions and the intimate scale of her pictorial creation for decades. Elizabeth Siegel is curator of photography and media at the Art Institute of Chicago.