Source
Brassaï — Encyclopædia Britannica
Citation
| Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. “Brassaï | French Photographer, Surrealist & Sculptor.” Encyclopædia Britannica online edition. Accessed 2026-05-09. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Brassai |
Tier justification
Tier 3 per CREDIBILITY.md (“Encyclopedia entries with named authors and visible references (Grove Art, Encyclopedia Britannica)”). Encyclopedia entries are explicitly NOT Tier 2 even when carefully edited.
Relevance
Pointer / corroborating biographical anchor for pher-brassai in data/photographers.csv. Brassaï has six plates in The Family of Man per strict-match grep against data/photographs.csv (2026-05-09). Used in this round to corroborate the day-month-resolution birth/death tokens (which the Tier-1 ICP page only provides at year resolution).
Key excerpts / pages
Lead paragraph (verbatim, fetched 2026-05-09):
- “Brassaï (born September 9, 1899, Brassó, Transylvania, Austria-Hungary [now Romania]—died July 8, 1984, Eze, near Nice, France) was a Hungarian-born French photographer, poet, draughtsman, and sculptor, known primarily for his dramatic photographs of Paris at night. His pseudonym, Brassaï, is derived from his native city.”
“Quick Facts” panel (verbatim, fetched 2026-05-09):
- “Original name: Gyula Halász”
- “French: Jules Halasz”
- “Born: September 9, 1899, Brassó, Transylvania, Austria-Hungary [now Romania]”
- “Died: July 8, 1984, Eze, near Nice, France (aged 84)”
Body excerpts (verbatim, fetched 2026-05-09):
- “Brassaï trained as an artist and settled in Paris in 1924. There he worked as a sculptor, painter, and journalist and associated with such artists as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and the writer Henry Miller.”
- “His pictures were published in a successful book, Paris de nuit (1933; Paris After Dark, also published as Paris by Night), which caused a stir because of its sometimes scandalous subject matter.”
- “His next book, Voluptés de Paris (1935; ‘Pleasures of Paris’), made him internationally famous.”
- “When the German army occupied Paris in 1940, Brassaï escaped southward to the French Riviera, but he returned to Paris to rescue the negatives he had hidden there.”
- “The Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a retrospective exhibition of Brassaï’s work in 1968.”
Notes
- Perspective: encyclopedia / general-reference; named editor team (“Britannica Editors”) rather than a single named scholar.
- Place-of-death discrepancy with
src-wikipedia-brassai-pointer(in repo): Britannica says “Eze, near Nice”; Wikipedia infobox says “Beaulieu-sur-Mer”. Both are communes on the French Riviera near Nice (Eze and Beaulieu-sur-Mer are adjacent communes on the same coastal stretch). Recorded as discrepancy; not adjudicated in this round. - Paris de nuit publication-year token: Britannica gives 1933 — agreement with Wikipedia (also 1933) and disagreement with
src-icp-brassai-archive(which renders “1932”). The 1933 date is the more frequently corroborated. - Britannica also names the 1968 MoMA retrospective — distinct from the 1956 MoMA Brassaï exhibition mentioned in
src-wikipedia-brassai-pointer. Both are plausible; Britannica focuses on the 1968 retrospective. - The page does not name The Family of Man. The connection is made via the MoMA Master Checklist (src-moma-exh-0569-master-checklist, in repo) at the plate level.
- Verified against fetched source on 2026-05-09 via
curl(HTTP 200) into.scratch/brassai_britannica.html.