The Art Institute of Chicago, 2021
Purchase from the Art Institute Museum Shop.
Available to booksellers from Yale University Press.
This elegant book unites all of the known carte postale prints by photographer André Kertész (1894–1985), including portraits, views of Paris, careful studio scenes, and exquisitely simple still lifes. Essays shed new light on the artist’s most acclaimed images; themes of materiality, exile, and communication; his bohemian social circle; and the changing identity of art photography. The book’s design reflects the spirit of 1920s Paris while underscoring the modernity of the catalogue’s more than 250 illustrated works.
Kertész made his rigorously composed prints on inexpensive but lush postcard stock, sharing them with friends and sending them back to family in Hungary. The works reveal the artist learning his craft as he encountered an international group of modernists—including Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, and Joseph Csáky—in the interwar metropolis. Prized by collectors as well as by Kertész himself, the cartes postales influenced his compositions and the intimate scale of his picture making for decades.
Edited by Elizabeth Siegel
With essays by Sarah Kennel, Sylvie Penichon, and Elizabeth Siegel
240 pages, 8 × 10 1/4 in.
390 duotone + 10 color illus.
Hardcover $60 ($54 members)
ISBN: 978-0-300-260038
