Selected by Henri Cartier-Bresson towards the end of his life, the photographs in L’expérience du paysage show the artist approaching an element that is not just a simple background for observing human beings, but a subject in its own right. Each image, taken between the 1930s-1990s in Europe, Asia and America, illustrates the photographer’s construction of landscape, natural or urban. It’s worthwhile to gaze at landscapes by Giovanni Bellini, Hokusai, Poussin, Corot, Cézanne, Bonnard, and so many others, before going out into the world, pencil-in-hand. Cartier-Bresson began his long career with painting and drawing. Early on at André Lhote’s atelier, he was taught the watchword of the Académie de Platon, later applying it to photography: “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter.”

His work, which inspired many artists to come, is characterized by composition, juxtaposition of planes, respect for proportionality, and pursuing balance between forms. Unlike nature in its “unprocessed form”, the notion of landscape is relative to a subject–that of the observer with a certain point of view. From this order among the components of reality, Cartier-Bresson found poetics and pleasure. Landscapes are not just frames enclosing a subject but seemingly timeless patterns interacting with human figures. He decided on this selection of images shortly before his death in 2004, even though he had abandoned photography in favor of drawing since the early 1970s. These photographs bear witness to the experience of landscape, which, like drawing, is close to meditation. In this 70-photograph selection, Cartier-Bresson implicitly unveils the self-portrait of an artist in the process of questioning his relationship to the world. The exhibition culminates in a selection of drawings by the artist found in the Fondation HCB’s collections, for a journey through the œuvre of Henri Cartier-Bresson along a contemplative path. Curator Agnès Sire, Artistic director, Fondation HCB.