André Kertész 1894-1985

on the original full vellum mount, signed, dated, and inscribed 'Paris' by the photographer and numbered '454' in an unidentified hand in pencil on the mount, credited and with the photographer's '5 rue de Vanves, Paris, 14e' studio address, titled and annotated '7 Etude I Agr.' (marked out), possibly by the photographer in ink, and numbered in unidentified hands in red and blue crayon and with the 'I. mezinárodní fotografický Salon, Praha, 1928' exhibition label affixed to the reverse, matted, 1927

Acquired by the Gilman Paper Company from the photographer, 1977

Prague, Association of Czechoslovak Clubs of Amateur Photographers, First International Salon of Pictorial Photography, 9 - 27 March, 1928

Other prints of this image:

Sandra S. Phillips, David Travis, and Weston J. Naef, André Kertész: Of Paris and New York (The Art Institute of Chicago and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), cat. No. 54, pl. 153

Weston Naef, In Focus: André Kertész (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1994), pl. 27

Weston Naef, The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), p. vi and pl. 186

This study of the hands of a bookseller relates to other studies of hands and objects made by Kertész, the best-known of which are a number of photographs of the hands of Paul Arma, who holds his eye-glasses (cf. Of Paris and New York, cat. nos. 59-62).   Although the presence of human hands interjects an anthropomorphic element into these and other studies, the present image, like those of Arma and his glasses, functions as one of the photographer’s still lifes, with its emphasis on the ordinary rituals and objects of daily life.

The print offered here, on a vellum mount, signed and dated by the photographer on the mount, is indicative of an exhibition print, and indeed, on the reverse of the mount is a partial label from a 1928 exhibition in Prague.  As Sandra Phillips notes, this image of a bookseller’s hands, reproduced in Of Paris and New York as cat. no. 54, has a fairly extensive exhibition history: it was included in the Paris Salon de l’Escalier (the First Independent Salon of Photography) in 1928; the Fotographie der Gegenwart in Essen, 1929; and the highly important Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, 1929.   The numbering on the front and the back of the mount of the print offered here, ‘454,’ is in the same hand as the ‘456’ on the mount of Lot 30, indicating that the two may have at one time been shown in the same venue. 

Phillips identifies the bookshop of the present photograph as the Librairie H. Soudier at 174-76, boulevard Saint-Germain, and points out that the image was later reproduced on some of the store’s dust jackets.  Kertész took several photographs in and around bookshops, including l’Esthétique, near the Café du Dome, a store owned by a cousin of Evsa Model, the photographer Lisette Model’s future husband (ibid., cat. no. 53).  Another Parisian bookseller, André Jammes, remembers photographs made by Kertész at the Librairie Ledouarin, also in the boulevard Saint-Germain.  In 2005, a carte-postale of a man removing books from a high shelf at the Librairie Soudier was offered in these rooms (Sale 8086, Lot 102).

Another print of the image offered here is in the collection of Harriette and Noel Levine, New York.