E. Csorba Csilla: A kamera poétája. Adré Kertész-fotó a Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum gyűjteményeiből (Budapest, 2019)
E. Csorba Csilla: A kamera poétája. André Kertész fotói a Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum gyűjteményeiben / Csilla E. Csorba: The Poet of the Camera Photographs by André Kertész in the Collections of the Petőfi Literary Museum
The banquet of the members of the Les Belles Perdrix takes place in the Lapré restaurant on rue Drouot. As viewers, we can participate at the beginning of the dinner, when the toast is raised, when champagne is served while the waiters and the chef are busying themselves, but we cannot see the courses, the well-guarded treasures of the restaurant. Presumably Kertész himself could not be an eyewitness to the women’s exciting, epicureal remarks. They expected him to be present during the discourse while sipping coffee, saying farewell and the exchange of satisfied opinions at the end of the dinner when the ladies revived the beauty of their toilette, hats, furs, coats, jewellery and make-up. At the end of the banquet, Emile Gallerand, a prominent sommelier of the Lapré restaurant, read some of his drinking songs to the members of the society.39 The series is about the joy of life, liberated and intimate moments suggesting satisfaction, but Kertész’s eye also finds unusual individuals and he also sensitively depicts various states of mind, from melancholy to bursting out with laughter. At the end of his life, in an interview with Erzsébet Vezér, he remembered this series of scenes with humour.40 Faces of friends Kertész must have taken several photographs of Bölöni and his wife. Their double portrait in the PIM’s Art, Relics and Photography Collections conveys the couple’s harmonic relationship and balanced middle-class way of life. The Bölönis moved back to Paris in 1923, and György Bölöni’s wife, Itóka, took a very active part in the French literary and art scene, similarly to an earlier period spent abroad. Fler book Promenades d’Anatole France (Walks of Anatole France)41 was published in French under the pseudonym Sándor Kémen in 1927. It had already appeared in Plungarian in 1924 with the title Anatole France sétái42 Around 1927-28, Itóka began collecting material for a book about the life of the noted, elderly sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. Visage de Bourdelle was published after the master’s death in 1931.43 In her diary, she renders a detailed account of the visit when, at her request, André Kertész took photographs in the studio. “I and the artist photographer Kertész are going to look at Bourdelle’s studio. I would like especially beautiful and especially inventive shots for my book,” she writes.44 She animatedly gives an account of how Kertész kept taking a statue from one corner of the studio to another, looking for suitable light: "Fie distributes the light on the 55
