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| Brassaï, Escalier de la Butte Montmartre, ca 1937 © Estate Brassaï Succession/Philippe Ribeyrolles, 2026. |
The desire to capture ephemeral forms of social reality underlies all of his best work of the 1930s – both the photographs of graffiti and the images of Parisian nights and their “secrets” – and reflects the particular cultural climate of the late 20s and 30s in which the emergent science of ethnography had much in common with the Surrealist avant-garde.
– Marja Warehime, Brassaï: Images of Culture and the Secret Surrealist Observer
Those eyes. We must talk about those tremendously absorbing eyes that were so large and engrossing that he always emphasised his peepers in the self-portraits that he painted or just simply sketched. When the Transylvanian-born Brassaï was bestowed the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1947, an award that he indeed was very proud of (though he detested the ceremonial formalities), he tainted the calligraphical handwriting on the diploma with his own scribbles which he found to be a necessary addendum: “Otherwise known as Dracula.”
Anaïs Nin observed how totally hypnotised Brassaï looked every time those eyes caught anything that enticed him. And Henry Miller – who earnestly claimed that Brassaï’s rarest gift as a photographer was his normal vision – described how apt his friend was “to meet in the most unexpected quarters. He was always on the qui vive [lookout], always sniffing the air, always poking in corners, always looking beyond you. Everything, literally, was of interest to him.” Those eyes were like the eyes of Ana Torrent in Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) or even more so in Carlos Saura’s Cría cuervos (1976), eyes that took in everything and made an indelible universe out of it.
Brassaï was of course also a writer (he authored several books including a novel) and more so a voracious reader who left many of his favourite books overflowing with comments. One such work was Henri Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis (1902) in which he had underlined the French mathematician’s sentence “It is always with our senses that we serve our instruments.” Brassaï argued that “The photograph is the daughter of the world of externals, of the living second and as such will always keep something of the historic or scientific about it; but it is also the child of the rectangle, a child of the beaux-arts which requires one to fill up the space agreeably or harmoniously.”
A very fine clue as to what Brassaï was looking for in his photography comes from his description of an artist from another medium: “[Pierre Reverdy’s poems] were clear, strong, and pure as crystal. Each line was like a snapshot of an object or event, caught on the wing, firmly secured yet alive with their original power, captured forever. I was amazed by this great poet’s gift for giving a permanent form to things which had struck him, and by the sharpness of his vision. And how fastidiously he eradicated all signs of sentiment or sentimentality from his poems, taking care to conceal anything of himself behind other things.”
As geniuses have their own way of facing up to things, the story (true or false) goes that one night towards the end of 1929, Brassaï – who so far had regarded photography with reluctancy and hardly as a mode of artistic expression – was on Pont Neuf together with André Kertész when his Hungarian compatriot made him realise that capturing the beauty of Paris during the hours of darkness was by and large a conceivable thing with a camera. Within the next few years Brassaï created his most fantastic series of images that came out in December 1932 as Paris de nuit, one of the most famous and special photobooks of all time.
“A creative person is finally born when he has found his own route and voice. The only birthdate which matters to me is not Brassó 1899, but Paris 1933,” explained Brassaï – who took his nom de guerre from the name of his birthplace – about this overdetermined change of heart regarding photography.
He once drew a parallel to a story that Isadora Duncan had told him many years ago when her fabulously wealthy lover Paris Singer engaged a consummate pianist for her whose face, however, she detested so much that he was required to play behind a screen during her dance practices. In due course Duncan and the pianist had to travel together in an equipage, alone. “The carriage came to an abrupt stop and she was catapulted into his arms. She said to me, ‘I stayed there; I understood it was to be the greatest love of my life.’”
Brassaï’s friend David Travis, who ran the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago for a quarter of a century, observes in his book At the Edge of the Light: Thoughts on Photography and Photographers, Talent and Genius that only a small number of the practitioners who created the golden era of photography in Paris were French, and what distinguished Brassaï “is that he wanted to picture what was obscured from the everyday view, what was dangerous, and, most of all, what was forbidden”. What made his work unusually perilous was his bulky camera gear which often put him in harm’s way – a bellowed Voigtländer that took 6.5 x 9 cm glass plates, a tripod and explosively loud magnesium flash powder charges.
Brassaï’s nephew Philippe Ribeyrolles, who supervises the Estate Brassaï Succession, delineates in Brassaï: The Eye of Paris what a remarkably distinctive being his uncle was, and how much he loved to visit Brassaï and his wife’s little apartment at 81 rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques “which had been turned into a fascinating Wunderkammer”: “His lively expression would make the rounds of the room and then, through the pronounced sphericality of his eyes, he would turn and suddenly stare at me with disarming intensity. He had quite an effect on me but, most of all, he was spellbinding!”
Ribeyrolles’s words above come from the very fine catalogue that sided a couple of exhibitions in Italy a few years ago, and which luckily inspired Moderna Museet in Stockholm to now present Brassaï: The Secret Signs of Paris. Whereas the Moderna catalogue is quite meh, the reproductions are flat and so are the essays, the exhibition right here (with its dark nooks and cubbyholes) is what happens when you win in life.
What gathers under the “secret signs” designation are Brassaï’s photographic project of graffitied wall figures and his masterpieces from nighttime Paris of the early 1930s, replete with the nocturnal creatures who not only made the city a dangerous place but all the more so gorgeous and alive. All these stunning prints (often 17 x 23 cm in size) on glazed photo paper are done by the master himself, and they do have an aura. In the lovelessness of this day and age it is nice to hear the sound of mandolins for once.
Marcel Proust was Brassaï’s literary hero (his book on Proust was published posthumously) and Brassaï explained how “Photography illuminated for me a new Proust, as a kind of photographer of mental images, with his own being as the sensitised plate; he was able to capture and store thousands of impressions during his childhood, and when he set off in search of lost time, he constantly developed and fixed them, so that the latent image of his whole life was made visible as the gigantic photograph which is Remembrance of Things Past [1913–27].”
There is no doubt that Brassaï’s photosensitive plate during the 1930s was a very personalised form of primal therapy in which he captured the untamed energy of the city through his unique probity and scotopic vision, with which he originated these images where lust joins hands with love, misconduct with merriment and darkness with light. There is not a photograph by Brassaï that is existentially pitchy (nor straight-up uncomplicated for that matter). Behold his quarrelling couple from a bar in Montparnasse, the tough guy apache with his thick cap and the beautiful girl with her hallmark kiss curl, inseparable by Brassaï’s silver lining.
“Brassaï does not wait for the curtain to raise; he waits for it to fall,” suggested Henry Miller in his essay on Brassaï, “The Eye of Paris” (1933). And obviously, Brassaï’s nights were much in contrast to the constant sundowns of Travis Bickle in Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver: “All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies … sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”
Nighttime Paris for Brassaï meant unadulterated intoxication, the joy of holding on to life and a romance for the people he encountered. The streetwalker Georgette in Philippe Soupault’s novel Last Nights of Paris (1928) was one of them: “Thanks to her the Parisian night became an unknown domain, an immense land of wonders full of flowers, birds, glances and stars, a hope thrown out into space.”
Brassaï, the beholder of “man’s strange customs”, expressed that “Night does not show things, it suggests them. It disturbs and surprises us with its strangeness. It liberates forces within us which are dominated by our reason during the daytime.”
In his photobook The Secret Paris of the 30s, which had to wait until 1976 to get published, Brassaï writes that “Just as night birds and nocturnal animals bring a forest to life when its daytime fauna falls silent to the ground, so night in a large city brings out of its den an entire population that lives its life completely under cover of darkness […] Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic.”
In the earliest photographs that he took for Paris de nuit, these nocturnal animals were more like extras – as if brought there by forces of lyrical necessitarianism – in stage sceneries full of atmospheric textures and a chiaroscuro never before seen in photography or anywhere else. The more confident Brassaï became with his camera work, the more he dared to let these captivating figures populate the screen as full characters. It is interesting to note that Paris de nuit was the original seed for the French filmmakers of poetic realism who treated their underworld subjects (naughty or nice) without scorn, disregard or sensationalism.
Brassaï took so many pictures during these night ramblings with the tripoded Voigtländer, and his bag loaded with twenty-four glass plates, that they could have filled up several photobooks. In 1932 he was notified by a friend that publisher Charles Peignot of Arts et Métiers graphiques was on the hunt for a photographer for a book about Paris after dark, which was what evolved into Paris de nuit.
While Brassaï’s sixty-four photogravure-printed images in the spiralbound book became an instantaneous success, critically as well as commercially, much of the experience proved a great disappointment for its author: the publisher fouled up the credits on the cover so that the essayist became the star of the book, and on top of it all the negatives disappeared for fifty years after the book was launched in English too, along with an exhibition in London’s Mayfair in late 1933 (an exhibition that totally changed the course of Bill Brandt’s photography). There was also another book, published outside of Brassaï’s control, that made every effort to turn his meticulous photography into a prurient sleaze show.
After four years in Berlin in the early 1920s, with art studies, get-togethers with the leading poets, and a rather haphazard journalistic career among a lot of the new illustrated magazines of the era – during which he evolved the knack of using different personas as a working method (“every person I meet knows a different mask”), something that he later used elaborately as Brassaï, the Photographer – he made the French capital a permanent home.
As Marja Warehime notes in Brassaï: Images of Culture and the Secret Surrealist Observer, “The twenty-four-year-old Gyula Halász who got off the train at the Gare de l’Est in February, 1924, and grabbed a taxi for rue Delambre [where his long-term-stay hotel was located between the lively boulevard du Montparnasse and the Cimetière du Montparnasse where he was put to rest in 1984] hardly expected to become Brassaï, one of the most important figures in European photography.” In an early letter to his mother and father, he penned: “I’ve become interested, more than anything else, in the way Paris lives and moves and how one moves with it.”
One day in 1925 when Brassaï was visiting his friend Léopold Zbrowski, a Polish poet who tried to make some sort of a career in Paris as an art dealer, someone rang on the door to the flat on rue Joseph Bara. It was the incomparable Atget, with a portfolio of large prints (large as his plates) that overwhelmed the not-yet-there Brassaï: “Streets and alleyways of the Paris quartiers, the façades of buildings, dark courtyards with their little boxes for the concierge, costermongers, brothels, street girls, ancient signs, small-time street traders – all redolent of Paris and its atmosphere. They were everyday photographs but they had meaning and an expression of extraordinary beauty.”
As a child Brassaï had spent a whole and very joyous year in Paris in the early 1900s together with his erudite father, a dedicated Francophile and a university professor back in Hungary. Once Brassaï left his youthful art studies in Budapest in 1921, he never again returned to his precious motherland nor the Alps of his youth. In a letter to a friend in 1976 he confided that “I still cling to a nostalgia for the fir trees, the larches, the rhododendrons, the gentian. It is my only Heimweh [homesickness].” But Paris was his steadfast place in the world, and few of course have shaped that world as quintessentially as Brassaï.
He established this habit early on of rolling out of bed at sundown for another daily dose of uninhibited wandering feats between Montparnasse and Montmartre: “At that time Montparnasse was like a powerful drug; we were a large group of friends, which included the poet Henri Michaux, and we stayed at Le Dôme until one in the morning, only to move to La Coupole, which closed an hour later. When time was up there, we migrated to Aux Îles Marquises in the rue de la Gaîté, always ending up at the Gare Montparnasse, when it was time for fresh coffee and the newspapers.”
In his foreword to Letters to My Parents (published in 1978), Brassaï explains that since that precise moment when he comprehended “that the camera was capable of capturing the beauty of the Parisian night (that beauty with which I had fallen passionately in love with during my bohemian adventures), I pursued photography solely for my own enjoyment. At the same time I also understood that it wasn’t all irrelevant what form of expression an artist chose in a given era.” The first thing that he did with his new Voigtländer camera was to walk around the Jardin du Luxembourg to take his earliest pictures as Brassaï. That marvellous garden was the first love of his life when he was five.
In Berlin he had devoured Oswald Spengler’s two-volume work The Decline of the West (1918/22) and recognised the polymath’s standpoint that “the artist’s place had been usurped by the engineer and the builder”. Yet nothing would diminish Brassaï’s personal creative yearnings as he was on the hunt for something relevant for his time: “I hardly need to add that early in my stay I was so enthralled by the richness of Parisian life that I wasn’t inclined to confine myself to the four walls of an atelier all alone. Life seemed much more exciting than the arts,” he wrote.
The proud urbanite’s flâneurial search for modernity was put into words early on in Baudelaire’s patchy Paris Spleen (1855–67): “The solitary meditative walker draws an unusual excitement from this universal communion. The man who easily joins with the crowd knows feverish pleasures, of which the egotist, closed like a chest, and the lazy person, imprisoned like a mollusc, will forever be deprived. He adopts all professions as his own, all the joys and woes which circumstance presents to him.”
A major proportion of The Secret Signs of Paris exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm is fixed on a series that Brassaï initiated in 1932 – significantly the year when he and Picasso met and became friends for life – a series that he worked on for nearly twenty years, and with the additional intention to register how these primordial images (or indeed signs) changed over time in their rough urban element. “Photography was, in Brassaï’s view, a means of exposing what was fundamental in human activity,” writes Alain Sayag in Brassaï: The Monograph. “That in turn led him to take interest in an ephemeral and underrated form of expression that went back to the earliest days of mankind: graffiti.”
The Stockholm catalogue has an essay by Brassaï (written in 1958 after these pictures had been on show at the MoMA, an exhibition organised by Edward Steichen) titled “Parisian Graffiti”, in which he suggests that a city wall is like a fishing net that accumulates the old archetypes from the metaphorical depths of human waters, and that the wall tantalises “the ‘unsophisticated’, the ill-adapted, the disinherited, the frustrated, and the rebellious (revolutions always start out on a wall) – indeed all those who have something with which to reproach society or existence in general. For a wall exorcises.”
The carnality of this series, that was illuminated in Brassaï’s book Graffiti, published in 1960, is left out at the Moderna but you still get the excess humour, sensuality and the mystique from what he photographed in the working-class areas of Paris and which you still for that matter, in the same manner, can discover in the backstreets of Pompeii. (The most significant sort of graffiti that has taken over Paris today is the artist Invader’s mosaic squares, depicting those sweet and pixellated Space Invaders above 1,500 street corners around the city.)
Elliot Erwitt claimed that photography was about “finding something interesting in an ordinary place. I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” The way that Brassaï observed things – both in what would eventually become Paris de nuit and through his perception of graffiti – was a port of entry to the influential art journal Minotaure and its dozen issues between 1933 and the outbreak of WWII, but also proved a fast lane into the daggered hearts of the surrealists.
As everyone could notice who were lucky enough to experience the nonpareil Surréalisme centennial at the Centre Pompidou (just before Beaubourg closed its doors in 2025 for renovations), the greatest pieces of Surrealism were often made outside of the dictates of André Breton. “Nothing is finer or greater than reality itself; why wrap it up in our own confused emotions?” asked Brassaï in 1932. “Just as a poet reclaims overused words, the creator of images also challenges everything that has become too familiar. He wants to restore the power of the ordinary, disregarded things, to surprise us with what we are tired of seeing every day, or which through habit we no longer even notice.”
The British surrealist and printmaker Stanley Hayter, who established the famous Atelier 17 in Montparnasse, acknowledged Brassaï’s “enormous human appreciation for people under extreme circumstances. They had a feeling of acceptance from him. He felt neither judgement or fear. He could get along with chimney sweeps or royalty.” With those big, spherical eyes that took in everything and a face that would assume a persona to go with every social setting, Brassaï was just as much in his element whether he was socialising in the smart neighbourhoods, during elegant gatherings, or in the “slaughterhouse” brothels – or really wherever in the city where the old ways were challenged by the nightcrawlers and their push towards unknown pleasures.
There’s not without reason that Brassaï called himself a “plunderer of beauty of all kinds”. The graffiti images aside, it is solely the “chimney sweep” population of the city, along with the strange and dreamy night views – like his wet and mysterious Paving Stones at Night (ca 1931–32), Pont Neuf in the Snow (ca 1934–35) with the gleaming trees in the foreground, or the ghostly Statue of Marshall Ney in the Fog (1932) with that Hotel sign suspended somewhere in the back of the gloominess – that compose all the other gorgeous prints in The Secret Signs of Paris.
“His vision penetrated to the simplest yet deepest truths about people and things,” writes Jean-Claude Gautrand in Brassaï Paris. “[All] of his media was driven by the same basic goal: he wanted to create a sort of encyclopaedia of human life. And he never played tricks with the truth.”
Brassaï’s pictures of people joined in a smooch bring human life to light. His sprightly Kiss on a Swing at a Street Fair (ca 1935–37) shows an infatuated couple and their sweet communion of a kiss at that fraction of a second when the cart hits zero gravity and love is perfect. Then we have the boulevard kisses, the bistro kisses, the bar kisses, the ball kisses – and as Brassaï described it in The Secret Paris of the 30s: “The dancehalls were full of poetry and dreams, but they were also full of pitfalls: true love came close to prostitution. In these dancehalls, young pimps seduced girls and recruited the labour force for the streets and the whorehouses.”
The Secret Signs of Paris shows the Eiffel Tower as a rocket from an illuminated past when it carried André Citroën’s logo on three of its sides, formed by a quarter of a million bulbs; the clochards and the bargemen down by the Seine; the meat porters and the streetwalkers around the old and forever lost Les Halles; the Morris columns and the pissotières (“Neither the smell nor the dirt of these places repulsed the devotees of Greek love. On the contrary. The more malodorous the chapels, the more popular they became”) and, certainly, his iconic picture of the Steps of Montmartre (ca 1937) on top of rue Foyatier – and one can only imagine Brassaï standing there, out of breath, after having started the climb from the never-ending spiral staircase at the nearby Abbesses metro station.
Two further examples of Brassaï’s early mastery of the photographic medium is his night shot of Edmond Lévêque’s sculpture Diana the Huntress in the Tuileries Garden (1931), in what he makes from the little light around and that strange maze of bare branches behind the Roman goddess. The other one is “La Cage au fauves”, Scene at the Folies-Bergère (ca 1932) with a dozen of glamorous (though not particularly wild) showgirls who are lying half-naked on the floor of a cage like pieces of hors d’oeuvres from a surrealistic nocturnal discharge.
Brassaï encountered La Môme Bijou in a bar in Montmartre in the middle of the night at the beginning of 1932. He took three pictures (which was his fixed limit) of her and never saw her again. This “ageless” woman in her tattered turn-of-the-century garments who looks at us at the Moderna does have the appearance of an Xmas arrangement gone wrong. “Mlle Diamonds” was indeed a heap of cheap glitter and too much of everything else, but not of herself which makes this portrait another Brassaï classic.
The picture of Fat Claude from the same year is showing Violette Morris as a crossdresser at the lesbian nightclub Le Monocle, and she is possessively touching a very feminine woman’s elbow at a table. After Morris had become a discus and shotput world champion in the 1920s, she had her breasts removed and then transformed herself into La grosse Claude – a nasty figure who, after appearing as a guest of honour at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, became a Gestapo collaborator who fancied beating up female prisoners of war. Morris was assassinated by the Resistance in 1944.
There are of course a couple of prints of the Queen of Montparnasse too, and you can sense the photographer’s love for her in these pictures and how he spelled it out: “Kiki [de Montparnasse] raised immodesty to an art. Her wit was equally uncorseted. Totally spontaneous, frank without the slightest trace of hypocrisy, she called things by their names. She never avoided vulgar words, but when she spoke them in her fresh, innocent voice, they lost all their vulgarity and even took on a kind of nobility.”
When Kiki collapsed on the street in the spring of 1953, after a life of alcohol and cocaine dependency, she wasn’t even as old as the century. The painter Tsuguharu Foujita was the only one who attended the funeral. Foujita mourned his lifelong friend and he mourned that “the glorious days of Montparnasse were buried forever”.
Nina Bouraoui is treating words as bodies without organs in the Stockholm catalogue and contends that “Brassaï delivers us characters untarnished by the passing of time, characters who could be part of today’s underground scene.” This habit of blotting things past with contemporary rubbish and invalid ideology is the ticket for the fools and the frauds who cannot or will not care for anything deep and necessary.
“Look again at that dot,” urged Carl Sagan in his book Pale Blue Dot (1994), startled by that incredible picture acquired by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990: “On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
It is abundantly clear how Brassaï’s from-dusk-to-dawn photography of the Parisian underworld managed to pull out this whole existential magnificence from a tellurian point of view, sixty years earlier. His images of unwonted human presence of yesteryear, suspended in time, are in equal shares about the unconventional fauna of humanity and about finding a speck of fellowship among others. What’s “us”. And as the Moderna Museet show makes you wonder: almost a century later there are enough and to spare of the pretenders, crooks and destroyers, while the prettiest stars are staying back in your memory.
Brassaï: The Secret Signs of Paris at the Moderna
Museet in Stockholm through October 4, 2026.
Brassaï, Couple d´amoureux dans un petit café parisien, Place d’Italie, ca 1932. © Estate Brassaï Succession/Philippe Ribeyrolles, 2026.