Henri Cartier-Bresson. Le Grand Jeu

Palazzo Grassi presents ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson. Le Grand Jeu’, co-organised with the Bibliothèque nationale de France and in partnership with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Download the digital exhibition guide

Based on a project conceived and coordinated by Matthieu Humery, the exhibition looks at how the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004) is viewed by five different curators, focusing particularly on the ‘Master Collection’, a selection of 385 images that the artist himself chose in the early 1970s, upon the request of his friends and collectors Jean and Dominique de Menil, as the most significant of his work. Today there are five copies of this extraordinary set.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz, film director Wim Wenders, writer Javier Cercas, the General Conservator and Director of the Prints and Photography Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Sylvie Aubenas, and collector François Pinault have been invited to select fifty works each from the original ‘Master Collection’.

Through their selection, each curator shares his or her vision of this major artist’s photography and work. The scope of this unique project is thus to renew and enrich our view on Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work through the respective ones of five personalities.

The exhibition ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson. Le Grand Jeu’ will be presented at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Paris, in spring 2021.