KERTÉSZ ANDRÉ (1894 1985) Distortion 128

Sale 2304 - Lot 33

Price Realized: $ 60,000

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 45,000

KERTÉSZ, ANDRÉ (1894-1985)
Distortion #128. Warm-toned silver print, 9 1/4x7 inches (23.5x17.8 cm.), with Kertész's numerical notation and hand stamp on verso. 1931-1933

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Additional Details

This print was gifted by Kertész to his printer, Igor Bakht, in the 1970s.
Hungarian-born photographer André Kertesz's relocation to Paris, in 1925, exposed him to a community of avant-garde painters and photographers intent on infusing modernism's new visual vocabulary into a range of artworks and pictures made for reproduction. For this emerging photographer, who had formerly focused on lyrical scenes of his homeland, opportunities for pictorial experimentation were writ large. Subsequently, in the 1930s, a genre Kertész worked with briefly, though intensely, was the nude female form.

Kertész had already experimented with unusual patterns and optical illusions created by various surfaces, such as water and glass spheres. However, his series of human Distortions were a highly charged, radical interpretation of the female figure, which appears twisted and elongated due to its visual manipulation by a carnival mirror. The series was commissioned by the French humor magazine 'La Sourire,' and reflected the unusual formal investigations associated with the surrealist idiom.

Interestingly, Kertész's original name for this suite of images was 'The Grotesques,' alluding to the uncanny results: bodies are depicted in ways beyond immediate recognition, and are weirdly distended or bulbous. However, the elegant study in this lot renders the model in a more familiar and elegant fashion, emphasizing the attentuated form of the modern woman.

This image is reproduced in Distortions, 8.