Fine Art – Top 15 Artists – Henri Cartier-Bresson
As you know, every Tuesday, we are talking about 1 of top 15 artists recognized for its fine art. You can still find their outstanding work through art galleries. Due to their talent, life and the power to impress us they are a inspiration and deserve be known.
Fine Art - Top 15 Artists - Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson has described himself as a photojournalist, a label doubtless no more misleading than any other available.
To put the identification in a fuller perspective, it might be added that he is probably the only photojournalist to have studied painting with Andre Lhote, the chief academician of Cubism, and also that relatively few of his pictures are concerned with journalistic events in the traditional sense.
Fine Art - Top 15 Artists - Henri Cartier-Bresson
It is also true that many of his finest pictures have been made not on assignment, but out of an amateur’s fascination with the world about him; but this is of course true of most important photographers.
A photographer’s best work is, alas, generally done for himself.
Fine Art - Top 15 Artists - Henri Cartier-Bresson
Without minimizing the value of his work as reportage, it must be said that Cartier-Bresson’s photographs are revered by other photographers because they are beautiful.
Fine Art - Top 15 Artists - Henri Cartier-Bresson
They possess grace, balance, surprise, economy, tension, and visual wit: the qualities of a good gymnast or dancer. Or the qualities of a good picture.
Fine Art - Top 15 Artists - Henri Cartier-Bresson

Fine Art - Top 15 Artists - Henri Cartier-Bresson
This is not to suggest that Cartier-Bresson’s pictures are abstractions.
They spring from a response to specific life; their formal eloquence is a tribute to their human meaning.
Aquila Degli Abruzzi by Henri Bresson,1958
Country Club Aguascalientes Mexico by Henri Bresson, 1963
Pras de Juvisy France by Henri Bresson, 1955
If they were less they would be, to Cartier-Bresson, solutions without problems. The photograph opposite concerns gesture, line, shape, scale, the flatness of the picture plane, and the difference between art and life.
Martines Legs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1967
To say that the picture concerns these things does not, of course, mean that it explains them.
from “Looking at Photographs” by John Szarkowski
Henri Cartier Bresson art photographer
Next week we will present the American Painter and Photographer Chuck Close. The second in a list that still will feature Jim Dine, Marcel Duchamp, Tracey Emin, Donald Judd, Roy Liechtenstein, Louise Nevelson, Pablo Picasso, Herb Ritts, Edward Ruscha, John Singer Sargent, James Turrell and Andy Warhol.