Henri Cartier-Bresson and Italy: the most important monographic exhibition comes to Italy

 

Palazzo Roverella in Rovigo hosts a large monographic exhibition on French master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) and his relationship with Italy.

 

The exhibition, also consisting of numerous vintage works from the Fondation Cartier-Bresson, traces the stages of a relationship that began very early, as early as the 1930s, and continued until the moment Cartier-Bresson abandoned photography in the 1970s.

 

From Cartier-Bresson’s first Italian trip in the 1930s, in the company of his friend André Pieyre de Mandiargues, poet and writer, and his companion, the painter Leonor Fini, on which he took some of his most famous images, to his second trip in the 1950s to Abruzzo and Lucania in the footsteps of Carlo Levi, continuing with the reports for illustrated magazines of the time, including ‘Holiday’ and ‘Harper’s Bazaar’, dedicated above all to Rome, Naples and Venice, to conclude, once again in Matera, a true return to the places frequented twenty years earlier, in which it is easy to read the advance of modernity and the persistence of local identities.

 

200 photos and many documents – newspapers, magazines, volumes, letters – document, for the first time, the relationship between the man who has been defined as “the eye of the century” and Italy in an exhaustive and in-depth manner.