Brassaï valuation

Brassaï (1899–1984) was born Gyula Halász in Brassó, Transylvania, now Brașov in Romania, the town his name comes from. He studied painting and sculpture at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, served in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry in the First World War and worked as a journalist in Berlin before settling in Paris in 1924. He took up photography to record the city after dark, and his first book, Paris de nuit (1933), showed its streets, bridges, workers and nightlife. He photographed many of his friends among artists and writers, Picasso, Matisse, Dalí and Giacometti among them, recorded the graffiti scratched into the walls of Paris over several decades, published as Graffiti in 1961, and wrote Conversations with Picasso. He was also a sculptor, medallist, writer and filmmaker.

What comes to market is mostly gelatin silver prints, and when a print was made is the question that matters: prints from the 1930s and 1940s, made close to the negative, are treated quite differently from the larger prints made later in his life and any printed later still. A buyer will want the stamps, signatures and annotations on the reverse, the paper and the provenance. Prints should be checked for silvering, creases, scuffs and retouching. His drawings, sculpture and books also appear, and inscribed copies of the books are collected in their own right.