Art Review : Kertesz: Picturing Truth : Getty’s Sensitive Selection Pays Tribute to the Photographer

Andre Kertesz is one of the great classic figures of modern photography. “Andre Kertesz: A Centennial Tribute” at the J. Paul Getty Museum celebrates the 100th anniversary of his birth in Hungary in 1894.

The show consists of about 50 images drawn from some 160 owned by the Getty, and they are crafted into another of those impeccable exhibitions we’ve come to expect from curator Weston Naef. It’s accompanied by a pocket-size paperback monograph that has the intimate feel of those first art books we all treasured as kids.

The sensitive selection of these shows causes visitors to linger, pensively. They raise the old blue-sky questions about how, and why, this is so good. Here we get answers.

Kertesz was a master at making the commonplace appear unexpected. One of his first signature images is “Underwater Swimmer,” a World War I period picture of a young man taking pool therapy for a battle wound. The water distortions in the bird’s-eye view make him look headless. Absurdist wit is tinged with Dada violence and Surreal vision, but the picture is primarily an autobiographical response: Kertesz was himself wounded in the Great War. Photographs that suggest maiming continue in images of manikins and artificial limbs leading to his unforgettable “Arm and Ventilator,” where a man’s arm looks as if it’s about to be severed by an industrial-strength fan.

Kertesz certainly became artistically sophisticated when he moved to Paris in 1925. Among others, he eknew Mondrian and shared some of the painter’s pristine vision. Beginning here it’s possible for the artistically literate to find references to modernist styles. Kertesz’s “Distortion 150,” an image of a female nude, looks like a Henry Moore. The collage “Going for a Walk” was influenced by Cubism. “Martinique,” which depicts a silhouette of a figure behind glass contemplating the ocean, is reminiscent of Rene Magritte’s brand of Surrealism. Such observations may have value but they miss the point. The “ism” is never the first thing you see in a Kertesz photograph. What you do see is a snippet of the real transformed by a particular poetic sensibility.

He had the kind of restraint that clarifies expression. “Mrs. Hubbell” wears a conservative suit, but her slight smile and the lovely fall of her hand make her sexier than Marlene Dietrich.

Naef makes his curatorial point by emphasizing early and later works that bracket the Paris period. Every photographic amateur knows the 1921 “The Circus, Budapest” with its couple peeking through a knothole. This unique exercise in amused tolerance owes nothing to anyone except the temperament that produced it.

Less familiar, perhaps, is the magic of early photographs as small as oversized postage stamps or never quite as large as a postcard. They express an innate artistic grasp of scale more often ascribed to poets and painters than photographers.

“The Dancing Faun” captures one of those fairy-tale moments of youth in an oval format not 2 inches wide. It shows Kertesz’s brother’s naked silhouette dancing among foliage delicate as ferns. Later Kertesz varied the theme in Parisian scenes, where giant smokestacks or the Eiffel Tower become as intimate as dreams.

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Like thousands of other Europeans beleaguered by the onslaught of World War II, the artist fled Europe, settling in New York in 1936. His pictures do not complain of Manhattan’s sometimes overwhelming monumentality or the refugee’s problems of making a new life except in the most oblique and endearing way. In “The Lost Cloud,” a wonderful little puff of atmosphere floats by a skyscraper. “Puddle, New York” captures the grit and grandeur of Manhattan by reflecting the Empire State Building in melting snow.

Kertesz had a remarkable understanding of the formalities that make imagery powerful, an innate grasp of style and a wonderful gentleness of expression. Maybe the most important quality of his pictures is that they make you like him.

His temperament puts you in mind of Jean Renoir. Both come across as men with no illusions and who love life anyway. Both their works leave you with the sense of having been seduced by someone who just wants to tell the truth.

Kertesz’s photographs make you glad he lived to be 91.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu; through Sept. 5; closed Mondays, advanced parking reservations required (310) 458-2003, in Spanish (310) 458-1104.