Brassai by Lawrence Durrell.

Museum of Modern Art, 1968. Fine with protected dust jacket with minor edge wear at top of spine. Summary:

Brassai is a 1968 monograph published by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in conjunction with a major retrospective exhibition of the photographer’s work held in New York. Featuring an introductory essay by British novelist Lawrence Durrell, the publication surveys Brassaï’s signature black-and-white visual archive, capturing the atmosphere, bohemian subcultures, and artistic circles of 20th-century Paris.

Overview & Highlights

• Literary Essay: Features an insightful intro by Lawrence Durrell that contextualizes Brassaï’s romantic yet unvarnished sensibility, noting his deceptively simple technical setup and his mature, literary approach to capturing human subjects.

• Visual Scope: Includes 61 iconic black-and-white plates spanning Brassaï's work from the early 1930s through the late 1950s.

• Core Subject Matter: Highlights his famous nocturnal street scenes, portraits of avant-garde artists and writers (such as Henry Miller, Salvador Dalí, and Jean Genet), brothel and café life, and studies of Parisian wall graffiti.

Brassaï (1899–1984) (born Gyula Halász in Brassó, Transylvania) was a Hungarian-French photographer, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker who became one of the defining visual chroniclers of 20th-century Paris. After studying fine arts in Budapest and Berlin, he moved to Paris in 1924, working as a journalist and artist before taking up photography around 1929 under the influence of André Kertész. Dubbed "the eye of Paris" by his close friend Henry Miller, Brassaï gained international acclaim with his seminal 1933 photobook Paris de nuit (Paris by Night), which pioneered low-light nocturnal photography and offered an empathetic, unsentimental look into the city's underworld, high society, and bohemian artist circles. Throughout his career, he seamlessly bridged journalism, fine art, and literature, producing celebrated portraits, avant-garde surrealist imagery, and landmark documentary studies until his death in 1984.