Quartet

André Kertész arrived in Paris from his native Hungary in 1925 knowing almost no one. Within a few years, he had developed a circle of artist friends, forged contacts with magazine editors who would publish his photographs, and earned budding acceptance for his newly honed vision. In early 1926 Kertész was invited to photograph Piet Mondrian’s home and studio, and was impressed by the formal rigor of the famous abstract painter. Later that year, the violinist Feri Róth asked him to make some publicity photographs of his new quartet, and he made five photographs, including this one. Influenced by Mondrian, Kertész radically cropped this image to suggest an orthogonal geometric composition centering around the sheet music; he then printed it on postcard stock, one of his preferred presentation styles in the 1920s.