Beaubourg & Henri

It's JGN's last day and we ventured across the river to the Centre Pompidou (aka Beaubourg), Paris's museum of modern and contemporary art.  There is a big show of the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson there now, with some 500 photographs (and some drawings and paintings) from the entire span of his career from the 1920s to the 1990s.  It was a pretty nice day, too, it's slowly warming up.  Below is a view of Montmartre from the top floor of the museum.

Here are some of our favorite photographs from the show.  The first three are of course among his most famous (behind the Gare St. Lazare, when he was experimenting with surrealism; the Shanghai bank run of 1948, which was published in LIFE; and the cyclist, in his geometric phase.) The last is not so well known, it was taken in the 1930s on his first trip to Africa.  He refused to photograph the "exotic" but chose instead everyday scenes--here, children playing on a beach--that are at once alive and abstract in composition.