It might seem paradoxical, even perverse, that the man regarded as the world's greatest living photographer shows no real interest in the medium. He is much happier discussing painting and drawing, art forms that, in their figurative aspect, once appeared threatened by the arrival of the camera. But when Henri Cartier-Bresson refers to photography as instant drawing, he is not being merely dismissive but inviting us to connect to the core of his artistry.
Some years ago, the late Robert Doisneau said: "Henri likes people to think that he has abandoned photography for painting, but I suspect he pops up from behind his easel now and then with his camera in hand." It's a playful image, typical of Doisneau, whose joyful photographic confections provided an often comic counterpoint to the rigour of Cartier-Bresson's compositions.
But it is typical, too, of Cartier-Bresson, who, in life as in art, has a deadpan wit and dry humour that can wrong-foot those who try to pin him down. Not for nothing does he often sign himself "En Rit", with its Gallic pun on laughter. His humour is also the most charming evidence of the evasiveness with which he guards his privacy and sidesteps the embarrassment of adulation.
At 93, Cartier-Bresson resembles a retired businessman. This is, of course, only the latest of the disguises he has adopted over the years to deflect attention from himself and guard the "invisibility" so crucial to his art. Casually and neatly dressed, with youthful skin, soft blue eyes and a ready smile, he moves slowly now, but still with something of the balletic grace that characterised his method of taking photographs: camera at the ready, he would literally dance, often on tiptoe, into position for a shot.
When you arrive at his Paris apartment, a few brisk steps from the Louvre, he greets you with a jokey evasion. "I'm afraid I don't speak English," says this Cambridge-educated gentleman, in perfect English. A smile, a courteous wave to a chair and we settle beside the apartment's generous window.
The pretext for meeting is the publication of Landscape/Townscape, a rich collection of photographs made in town and country, each one a masterpiece of compositional grace. But Cartier-Bresson is not eager to discuss photographs. "I don't much like looking at photographs," he says with a shrug. "I like taking them, but then it's done."
He points at the walls of the apartment. "Do you see any photographs hanging here?" There is a small painting by Max Ernst, Cartier-Bresson's favourite among the surrealists - "surrealism is just literature, really," he says, and you can feel his resistance to being contained by the movement's tiresome theories. There are some sketches by the Flemish expressionist Constant Permeke and a striking portrait of Samuel Beckett by Cartier-Bresson's friend Avigdor Arikha. But, apart from an invitation card for an exhibition by his fellow Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt, there are no photographs in sight.
Through the window is the Parisian landscape that Cartier-Bresson knows best. The Tuileries Garden stretches out before us and, beyond, just across the Seine, the MusΘe d'Orsay, once a railway station, stands in splendid isolation. The soft October light, with its pale yellow tints, has just given way to the hammered silver of November, rendering the scene in shades of grey.
It is a view familiar from Cartier-Bresson's photographs and, even more so, from the many drawings he has made of it, reminiscent of the photographs AndrΘ KertΘsz made of Washington Square from the window of his New York apartment. But whereas KertΘsz was recording the familiar in a photograph, Cartier-Bresson was caressing it with a drawing, exploring that which he might already be expected to know by heart. "Yes," says Cartier-Bresson, "a drawing is a completely different way of using time. It's a meditation, really."
Sitting on a low table is a book that had a significant influence on the formation of Cartier-Bresson's graphic sensibility. It contains On Landscape and On The Figure, two treatises by the painter and theorist AndrΘ Lhote, who taught Cartier-Bresson in the 1920s. Lhote was a cubist whose works, though often charming, are not widely known today. "He was not really a great painter," says Cartier-Bresson, "but he was a very great teacher, and that's already something very rare."
I ask if Lhote's theories imposed an academic viewpoint on Cartier-Bresson's sense of composition. "Not academic, no - I associate that word with something sterile. But he taught a respect for classicism, and showed its continuation through CΘzanne and beyond. He was a great inspiration, and much loved by his students."
Lhote's perceptive analysis of paintings was allied to his concern for the rhythm of composition and the creative play of light and shade. He wrote, for example, about "screens", his term for alternating planes of darkness and light that build up to create a sense of depth in a painting. Cartier-Bresson's understanding of how one plane can act upon another is evident throughout Landscape/Townscape. Shortly before his death, Lhote told Cartier-Bresson: "Everything comes from your training as a painter." The former pupil would probably not entirely disagree.
Above all, Cartier-Bresson knows that photography and drawing have a common point of departure: the act of looking. "Have you ever watched people in an art gallery? Most of them have no idea how to look. They spend a moment before a painting and think they have seen it." He points to his impressive shooting stick. "With that, I can comfortably sit in front of a Chardin at the Louvre for a half an hour. I like to copy the masters, especially Rubens; it's very important to do that. Alberto [Giacometti] copied a great deal." And, presumably, he modified what he copied. "Of course - you have to. Otherwise, it's just a literal transcription. Totally dead."
When Cartier-Bresson talks about painters, he speaks with a childlike excitement. It is a little surprising that this master of the black-and-white image has a special passion for Matisse and Bonnard, two of the great colourists of the 20th century. "Colour is something else, of course, but it all comes back to the eye," he says. "Once, when I was photographing Bonnard, he asked me: 'Why did you press the shutter just then?' And I pointed to one of his paintings and said: 'Why did you place that hint of yellow just there?' He laughed, because he understood about the eye."
To Cartier-Bresson's delight, Monet was a frequent visitor to his apartment building, and also did studies of the Tuileries. "And CΘzanne also came here. Sometimes, as I leave, I caress the newel post of the staircase - there was no lift in Monet's day - just for luck." He laughs at himself. "And, do you know, I once saw Degas in the street, the rue de Lisbonne; my father pointed him out to me. There are so many wonderful anecdotes about Degas - how he had this giant compass which would terrify his models as he measured them."
It is a remark that recalls Leonardo da Vinci's insistence that an artist must have compasses in his eyes. It seems Cartier-Bresson must have compasses, protractors, set squares and any number of measuring instruments in his eyes to be able to seize the compositional moment so quickly in his photographs. "It's a matter of geometry," he says at one point, drawing imaginary patterns across the surface of a photograph.
But the training of that geometric eye surely comes from his devotion to drawing. When certain critics regard Cartier-Bresson's drawings as insignificant compared with his photographs, it seems the equivalent of ignoring the written calculations of a great mathematician or physicist. The intense energy of Cartier-Bresson's photography is cooled by his drawing, which refreshes and recalibrates his incomparable eye.
Those who consider him old-fashioned are simply not looking at his work - by comparison, the compositions of such contemporary favourites as Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky and Sam Taylor-Wood are extremely academic and dated.
Later, at lunch with Cartier-Bresson's wife, the photographer Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson stares, apparently aimlessly, into the middle distance. For a moment you are touched by the sight of this elderly man, lost in his own world. But it is a disguise. Cartier-Bresson raises his hand and softly asks an assistant: "Can you remove the yellow envelope from that shelf? It doesn't respect the shelf's form."
The envelope is removed, but, rather than appearing stiffly formal, the arrangement of the shelf's contents now seems relaxed, even spontaneous. At one side is a foot-high African sculpture. "I brought that back from the Ivory Coast, 70 years ago," says Cartier-Bresson.
He gazes at the sculpture, doing what he has spent a lifetime doing, with or without camera or pencil, and it is what every aspect of his work encourages us to do, as if for the first time. He is looking.
Landscape/Townscape, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, is published by Thames & Hudson, £50 in UK
