Peder Lund Art Advisory Associates is pleased to announce the placement of twenty-seven photographs from André Kertész's "Distortions" series into an important private collection. We consider this the most significant private holding of the series anywhere in the world.
André Kertész (Budapest, 1894 – New York, 1985) occupies a position at the very foundation of modern photography. Moving to Paris in 1925 against his family's wishes, he entered the city's artistic milieu on his own terms — moving among figures such as Mondrian, Léger, and Chagall without formally attaching himself to any movement. He published breakthrough work with Vu, the pioneering French illustrated magazine, and his solo exhibition at the Galerie au Sacre du Printemps in 1927 confirmed his standing within the Parisian avant-garde. Both Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï acknowledged the decisive influence of his example. In 1936, Kertész emigrated to New York, where he spent decades working in relative commercial isolation until John Szarkowski's landmark retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964-65 repositioned him as one of the foundational modernists of the medium — an artist of, in Szarkowski's words, "formal intelligence of the highest order."
The "Distortions" were conceived in an intense, concentrated campaign in Paris in 1933, when the magazine Le Sourire commissioned Kertész to produce a series of nude figure studies. Working with two models — Najinskaya Verackhatz and Nadia Kasine — and a parabolic mirror as his sole instrument, he produced more than two hundred negatives. The premise was almost theatrical in its simplicity. The results were among the most radical images in the history of the medium. Limbs lengthen into impossible arabesques; torsos collapse into organic masses; flesh becomes abstract without ever ceasing to be bodily. The figure is dissolved and reconstituted as pure photographic form.
The series is the most consistently Surrealist body of work produced by an artist who never joined the Surrealist movement. Kertész shared studios, friendships, and exhibition spaces with figures from the Breton circle, and the "Distortions" inevitably invite comparison with Man Ray's solarized nudes and Hans Bellmer's Poupées (1934). Yet his achievement is categorically distinct: where Bellmer reassembled the body physically before photographing it, and Man Ray intervened in the chemistry of the print, Kertész worked through optics alone. Photography's own mechanism of faithful transcription becomes the agent of transformation. As David Travis wrote in the 1985 Metropolitan Museum catalogue, he "borrowed the Surrealists' license to deform without accepting their programmatic irrationalism, and brought to the distorted nude the formal control of a constructivist." Hilton Kramer, in his introduction to the 1976 Knopf monograph, identified the series' sculptural ambition with equal precision: "The body, in being dismembered and reconstituted, acquires the formal sovereignty of a Brancusi or an Arp." The series has since received sustained scholarly attention from Sandra S. Phillips, Øivind Storm Bjerke, and the philosopher Bence Nanay, whose 2012 essay "Anti-Pornography: André Kertész's Distortions" (Oxford University Press) argues that the works systematically transform the body into a problem of form rather than an object of recognition — making them structural opposites of pornographic imagery and among the most rigorous photographic investigations of the relationship between representation and perception.
The present collection of twenty-seven works spans the full compositional range of the series — from intimate close-up fragments to full-figure mirror compositions — across three historically distinct print generations. Seven prints were produced between 1946 and 1952, during the most difficult years of Kertész's New York exile; these are the rarest category in the collection, and carry direct physical evidence of his studio practice: handwritten titles and dates, estate stamps, and, in the case of Distortion #70, a credit stamp bearing the Union Square, New York address where Kertész was based. A further group of approximately eighteen prints was produced by the artist in the early 1960s as reference material for the landmark 1976 Knopf monograph — working objects through which the series passed from the studio into published form, and carrying the crop marks, pagination notations, and layout annotations that record this historical passage. A smaller group of later exhibition prints belongs to the final decades of Kertész's career, when his reputation had undergone its decisive critical reappraisal. All twenty-seven works are documented in Nicolas Ducrot's authoritative volume "Distortions: André Kertész" (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1976).
The exhibition history of the series is among the most distinguished of any single body of photographic work produced in the twentieth century. The "Distortions" were first presented in Le Sourire in 1933 and appeared in the Museum of Modern Art's landmark survey "Photography: 1839–1937" (1937), marking Kertész's first major American institutional exposure. In 1946, the Art Institute of Chicago mounted what is generally identified as his first American museum solo exhibition. The 1964–65 MoMA retrospective, curated by Szarkowski, transformed earlier intermittent recognition into art-historical authority. A major retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, followed in 1977, and the definitive career survey "André Kertész: Of Paris and New York" was jointly organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984–85. The series is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, among others.
The collection of twenty-seven prints presents what we consider an unparalleled private holding of one of photography's canonical series — materially rich, historically differentiated, and comprehensively documented. Peder Lund Art Advisory Associates is honored to have facilitated this placement on behalf of a distinguished private collection.