André Kertész

the photographer's '75 Bould. Montparnasse, 6e Paris' studio and reproduction rights stamps on the reverse, framed, the Buhl Collection label on the reverse, 1929-30

The photographer to Meyer Levin, New York

By descent to his son, Mikael Levin

Acquired from Mikael Levin, New York, 1995

Palm Beach Photographic Centre, In Good Hands: Selected Works from the Buhl Collection, March 2011

This early, photograph, slightly warm-toned and on paper with a surface sheen, is in generally very good condition. It has some wear at the edges, and tiny losses at the left edge. When examined in raking light, the following are visible: light silvering; offsetting of faint lines in a rectangular shape, possibly from a prior mat; and original retouching. On the reverse, there are two tape remnants, as well as 2 small abrasions. According to 'Of Paris and New York,' the photographer's '75, Bould. Montparnasse, Paris 6e' studio stamp (Kertész Paris Stamp #2), was used between 1929 and 1931.
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In 1929, Stefan Lorant, editor of the Münchner Illustrierte Presse, asked Kertész to photograph a conference of international puppeteers in Liége.  Sandra Phillips has pointed out that Kertész was deeply interested in folk art, both in his native Hungary and later in Paris, and that his photographs of French folk culture appeared also in Vu and Art et Médicine.  ‘These little figures are not only folk art,’ Phillips has written about the puppet series, ‘but artful imitations of human lives.  Though they purport to document folk culture, they also reflect the surrealist fascination with the manikin, the shadow, and the mirror as metaphors of human reality’  (cf. Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1983, pp. 117-120).

Author Meyer Levin (1905-1981), from whose collection this photograph originally comes, would later become known for such novels as Compulsion (1956) and The Settlers (1972).  Before his career as a best-selling author, however, he founded the Marionette Studio in Chicago, in 1926, where he and collaborators Louis Bunin (see Lot 41) and Elleanor Lee staged contemporary experimental plays.   Levin also attended the 1929 conference of puppeteers in Liége, and there staged his original marionette play, The Doll.   Inspired by Hasidic tales, the play made particular use of the notion of divine intervention, with the puppeteer's hands standing in for God (cf. Alisa Solomon, 'The Marionette Theatre of Meyer Levin,' Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1983, pp. 105-6).

Kertész chose to incude marionette images in his first American exhibition in December 1937 at the PM Gallery on West 37^th Street.