Brassaï

Brassaï was born Gyula Halász in Brassó, Transylvania in 1899. In 1924, after studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest and the Academy of Fine Arts at Charlottenburg in Berlin, he moved to Paris where he began working as a journalist and, eventually, a photographer. He took the pseudonym of his hometown in 1932 and the next year published his first photobook, the landmark Paris de Nuit. Widely considered one of the most important artists of the interwar period, Brassaï worked actively through the late 1960s; he died in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France in 1984. His work has since been the subject of several major retrospectives, including Brassaï at the Centre Pompidou, Paris and Hayward Gallery, London in 2000 and Brassaï: The Eye of Paris at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC in 1998. Brassaï's solo exhibition at Higher Pictures, Language of the Wall: The Tapestries, 1968, was held in 2016.