André Kertész's Melancholic and Surrealist Photography in Rome

The Hungarian Academy in Rome presents a major exhibition of André Kertész (Hungary, 1894 – New York, 1985) at Palazzo Falconieri. The show features a rich selection of works from the Kertész Memorial Museum, conveying a sense of melancholy comparable to Picasso's Blue Period. Kertész's photographs capture nostalgic realities: musicians, Roma performers, children, and the marginalized, often depicted with a fragile, isolated existence. A key image, 'The Blind Violinist' (Hungary, 1921), exemplifies his street reportage style using an ICA 4.5×6 camera. From 1925, after moving to Paris, Kertész explored surrealism through his 'Distortions' series, featuring female bodies reflected in deforming mirrors, evoking erotic and thanatological themes rooted in Freudian ideas. The exhibition also includes 'The Circus' (1920), showing a woman and man peering through a gap in a traveling shed, highlighting the intimate relationship between vision and the forbidden. Roland Barthes remarked on Kertész's clairvoyance: 'the photographer's clairvoyance consists not so much in seeing as in being there.' The exhibition underscores Kertész's role as a prophetic artist-photographer who sees the world with contemporary eyes.