Cartier-Bresson

“I remember when we sold a Cartier-Bresson for $350 — it was a big celebration,” recalls David Fahey, who worked with Hawkins for a decade before creating his own Fahey/Klein Gallery in 1986.

In the following decades, they purchased artwork at galleries and auction houses in New York, California, Chicago and Europe, scooping up paintings by famed and historic artists like Titian and Jan Lievens as well as 20th-century photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn and Andy Warhol, plus contemporary art by living painters like Amy Sherald, Cecily Brown, Tomma Abts and Rashid Johnson.

In its first year, along with to-be-expected exhibitions of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s reportage in the Soviet Union, portraits of Chicago workers attributed to Lewis W. Hine, and W. Eugene Smith’s pictures of mercury-poisoning victims in Minamata, Japan, the ICP mounted an early show of holography and a survey of color Polaroids.

In a body of work spanning seven decades, Erwitt proved a master of what his mentor, Henri Cartier-Bresson, called seizing the “decisive moment” — being trigger-quick to observe the extraordinary in the ordinary and turn it into compelling art.

The photo exhibitions were at their best in the Elysée’s contribution to a districtwide exhibition on trains in art, showing photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Nan Goldin and others.