Marionette Photographs by André Kertész

Marionette Photographs by Andre Kertesz Sandra S. Phillips When Andr6 Kert6sz went to Liege in 1929 to attend a congress of marionettes from many different countries, he was at the height of his career in France, an acknowledged master in capturing the haunting, sometimes melancholic moments of everyday life. Kert6sz had arrived in Paris from his native Hungary in 1925, at thirty-one already an experienced photographer. Less than two years later, in 1927, he was given his first one-man exhibition in an art gallery called "Au Sacre du Printemps." But besides the occasional sale of his photographs as art, he gradually became involved in a more dependable source of income, selling his work to the new pictorial magazines. At this moment in his career, therefore, Kert6sz was not only interested in photography as an art form, he was also experimenting with that new form of photography which developed in Europe between the wars, namely photojournalism. The photographs reproduced on these pages were sent to two very different magazines: the MUnchener Il/ustrierte Presse where they were published the following January, and L'Art Vivant, where they appeared late in 1929. The first was a popular high-circulation magazine, newsy and lively. Like other mass directed magazines which appeared in Germany at this moment , the MUnchener Il/ustrierte became a prototype of Life. Welding pictures to a text served a similar function as the videotaped news events and their commentary for today's television audiences. Photographs were definitely not considered art-indeed, most people who worked for the German magazines were hostile to that idea. In Kert6sz's photo essay, the photographs bear witness to an interesting event, and would appeal to the same audience that liked pictures of the circus, night life in Berlin cabarets, and theatrical personalities which frequently appeared in this magazine. 115 Meyer Levin at Liege Congress, 1929. Photo by Andr6 Kertssz. 116 THE DOLL, a marionette play by Meyer Levin performed at the 1929 Marionette Congress in Liege. Photo by Andre Kertesz. 117 The Baden-Baden Marionette Theatre at the 1929 Congress in Lige. Photo by Andr4 Kertesz. L'Art Vivant was an entirely different publication. The editor of the Munich magazine, Stefan Lorant, was an experienced journalist with diversified interests who would go on to produce other important popular magazines. The editor of L'Art Vivant was Florent Fels, a cultivated art critic. All the photographs that Fels reproduced were either of art, or as art-in some cases both. Fels was not interested in linking words and pictures together to create a more vivid story, but in sober layout and careful reproduction which directed these very photographs to the attention of sensitive connoisseurs . In fact, L'Art Vivant was one of the very few magazines seriously and consistently to treat photographs as a new form of art, and published early critical discussions of Atget, Man Ray, and Kert6sz. Kert6sz made these photographs at the suggestion of an editor, although he has forgotten which one. Nevertheless, the subject was very much related to his own interests. In 1929 he photographed Alexander Calder with his witty, wire-figured Circus. (As fellow American expatriot artists, Calder and Levin probably knew each other.) This same time Kertesz traveled also to Savoie, the rugged western province of France, to document folk customs, and to photograph folk objects, including some collected by the painter, Jean Hugo. In Hungary, folk art had been treasured and seriously studied for nationalistic as well as artistic reasons. Bela Bartok's name is well known in the West, but he was one of a much larger number of Hungarian artists and 118 writers, as well as musicians, who concerned themselves seriously with popular arts. These creative people found aesthetic inspiration in the arts of Hungarian peasants. Their tastes, educated by modernism to accept abstraction and dissonance, found peasant culture a rich and stimulating source. The active search for folk traditions in Eastern Europe and the conscious preservation of them was also an expression of self-identification for those emerging nations. In France there was a group of artists who pursued a primitive or naive style of painting: they included both the true naives...