André Kertész (often typed Andre Kertesz) made small pictures with big structure. A fork resting on a plate, a staircase in a painter’s studio, a square of snowy paths seen from a window: each is an everyday scene arranged into a few strong shapes. For designers who crop, frame and compose for a living, his photographs are a long lesson in finding a layout that already exists in the world.
A note on images: none of the André Kertész records in the collection databases of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Cleveland Museum of Art is flagged as public domain, so this guide shows no pictures of his work and describes it in text. For images that are cleared for reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was André Kertész?
The Met records him as American, born in Budapest in 1894 and died in New York in 1985; the Art Institute of Chicago gives the same years. Several biographies give his birth date as 2 July 1894, and the Getty Museum dates his first photographs to 1912, when he was working as a clerk at the Budapest stock exchange.
He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and kept photographing. The Cleveland Museum of Art records that he was wounded in 1915 and sent to Esztergom to recover, and it holds pictures from those years, including Forced March to the Front, which it dates to 19 July 1915.
In 1925 he moved to Paris. The Art Institute of Chicago says illustrated magazines such as Vu, Voilà and Regards were then gaining readers and turned to him, along with photographers including Germaine Krull, Man Ray and Brassaï. His first exhibition was held at the Paris gallery Au Sacre du Printemps in 1927. In 1936 he moved to New York, where he lived for the rest of his life; the Getty Museum ties the move to a job offer from the Keystone agency. The Museum of Modern Art gave him a solo exhibition in 1964, and in 1985 the Art Institute of Chicago staged André Kertész: Of Paris and New York, which travelled to the Met.
What to look at: viewpoint and geometry
Kertész often climbed above his subject. Shadows of the Eiffel Tower (1929, Cleveland Museum of Art) looks down so steeply that the street becomes a flat pattern of lines, and the Cleveland museum links this kind of bird’s-eye view to the lighter cameras of the 1920s. Paris from My Window (1926) and, decades later, Washington Square, Winter (1954) use the same trick: a high window turns people, benches and paths into marks on a page.
From that height, the frame behaves like a grid. Paths become diagonals, chairs become a row of repeated shapes, and a single figure becomes the accent that gives the grid its scale. Chairs, Luxembourg Gardens (1926) and Chairs, the Tuileries (1927), both at the Art Institute of Chicago, show how much a designer can draw from repetition plus one break in the rhythm.
His geometry is loose rather than rigid: lines are rarely square to the frame, which keeps the picture feeling observed rather than staged, a useful counterweight to stricter modernist grids. Our guide to Bauhaus design covers that stricter tradition, and László Moholy-Nagy shows the high and low angles of the same years pushed toward abstraction.
Light and shadow as drawing
In Kertész’s work a shadow is often as important as the thing that casts it. In Shadows of the Eiffel Tower the tower itself is barely present; its silhouette, stretched across the ground, carries the picture. The Cleveland Museum of Art describes Tisza-Szalka (1924) as a farmyard scene turned into a play of low sun and deep shadow, and Bocskay Tér, Budapest (1914) as an early night picture in which a single light gives a man a dark twin.
For designers, this is a lesson in value. If you sample a composition you admire with an image colour picker, you can map that tonal structure onto your own palette, keeping the proportion of darks to lights even when the hues change.
The found still life: Fork, Mondrian and Clock and Rope
Several of Kertész’s Paris pictures are tiny arrangements of ordinary things. Fork (1928) shows a fork leaning on the rim of a plate, its shadow repeating the tines. The Art Institute of Chicago records that it was shown in Paris at the Salon Indépendant de la Photographie in 1928 and at the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929. The Cleveland Museum of Art describes Clock and Rope (1928) as a still life he found in the offices of a Paris newspaper.
In early 1926 he visited the studio of the painter Piet Mondrian. The Art Institute of Chicago says the resulting Chez Mondrian was not published until 1943, and that the round hat on the rack belonged to Michel Seuphor, who went with him. Kertész later said the studio’s symmetry set the composition. What he added were the curves Mondrian kept out of his paintings: a staircase, a vase, the brim of a hat. Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe (1926) does the same on a white table. For the painter’s side of the story, see our guide to Piet Mondrian.
Distortions, Disappearing Act and playing with the picture
Kertész also bent the photograph itself. In 1933 the humorous magazine Le Sourire commissioned a series that became the Distortions: figure studies of two models reflected in curved funhouse mirrors of the kind found in amusement parks. The Art Institute of Chicago says he made almost two hundred images and that twelve appeared in the magazine. The bodies stretch and pool into abstract, rubbery shapes, closer to drawing than to portraiture.
Disappearing Act (1955), held by the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago, and Broken Bench, Long Island (1962) at the Met show the same eye for a visual joke inside an ordinary scene. Late in life he also worked in colour; the Met holds a 1980 silver dye bleach print of a blue vase lying on an album page in sunlight.
Formats: postcards, magazines and later prints
Kertész printed for several kinds of page. The Art Institute of Chicago notes that in the 1920s he often printed on postcard stock, one of his preferred formats, and that for Quartet (1926), a publicity photograph of a string quartet, he cropped hard to an orthogonal composition around the sheet music. Satiric Dancer, his picture of the dancer Magda Förstner on a sofa in the studio of the sculptor Étienne Beöthy, is dated 1926 by the Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago dates its variant to 1927 and records a version published that year in the Berlin magazine Die Dame.
Many prints in museums today were made decades after the negatives. The Met and the Cleveland Museum of Art both hold sets printed around 1978 to 1980 from Paris and Budapest negatives, so check the print date as well as the picture date when you compare tones.
How designers can borrow Kertész’s ideas today
- Change your height before you change your crop. A higher or lower viewpoint can flatten a scene into pattern.
- Treat shadows as shapes. When you art-direct a still life, light it so the shadow does part of the drawing, as in Fork.
- Use repetition plus one exception. Rows of chairs with one figure, or a grid of identical tiles with one rotated, give a layout rhythm and a focal point at once.
- Bend the image with purpose. The Distortions show that warping a familiar form can turn it into a graphic shape. Use it sparingly.
- Design in values first. Block out darks and lights before choosing colour; a strong greyscale skeleton survives any palette.
Kertész’s photographs are in copyright, so learn from his methods rather than reusing his pictures. To see how a younger Paris photographer built on the same street vocabulary, read our guide to Henri Cartier-Bresson; the Art Institute of Chicago credits Kertész with a strong influence on both Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï.
Frequently asked questions
What is André Kertész known for?
André Kertész is known for photographs that turn ordinary scenes into clear compositions: Paris street views and shadows, found still lifes such as Fork (1928), Chez Mondrian (1926), the Distortions of 1933 and his views of Washington Square in New York.
Where did André Kertész live and work?
He worked in Hungary until 1925, in Paris from 1925 to 1936 and in New York from 1936 until his death in 1985. The Cleveland Museum of Art records that from 1952 he lived in an apartment near Washington Square, photographing the park from above with a telephoto lens.
What camera did André Kertész use?
The Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art both link his style to light, portable handheld cameras, which let him photograph quickly and from unusual vantage points.
Can I use André Kertész photographs in my design?
His photographs are not flagged public domain by the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Cleveland Museum of Art, so treat them as in copyright. Study his compositions freely, but do not reproduce the images without permission.
