In 1938, Robert Capa was defined by the prestigious English magazine Picture Post as “The world’s best war photographer.” Without doubt, war experience was at the center of his activity as a photographer: he began as a photojournalist during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), continued by documenting Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion (1938), World War II (1941-1945) — including his documentation of the Normandy landing — and later the first Arab-Israeli conflict (1948), and the French conflict in Indochina (1954), during which he died, killed by a landmine, at only 40 years of age.

His fame allowed him to publish in the most important international magazines, including Life and Picture Post, with that powerful and touching photographic style, without any rhetoric and with such urgency that led him to shoot just a few meters from battlefields, right into the heart of conflicts; his famous declaration in this regard was: “If your photos aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” These photographs are now part of the iconographic cultural heritage of the last century.

But Robert Capa’s work was not limited exclusively to witnessing dramatic events; it also ranged into other dimensions not attributable to the suffering of war. This is where this exhibition project at the Villa Bassi Rathgeb Museum in Abano Terme begins, aiming to explore parts of this famous photographer’s work that are still little known.

This exhibition focuses our attention on Capa’s lesser-known reportages, to discover his photography away from war, and explores his relationship with the cultural world of his time through portraits of famous figures such as Picasso, Hemingway, and Matisse, thus showing his ability to penetrate deeply into the lives of the immortalized people.

At the same time, there will be a section dedicated to his reportages on period films. After the end of the Second World War, it was the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman who introduced Capa to the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, where he ventured for the first time as a set photographer. Within a very few years, Capa worked with cinematic legends such as Humphrey Bogart and John Huston; he immortalized the beauty of Gina Lollobrigida and the intensity of Anna Magnani. He then made the choice, congenial to his sensibility and to the privileged object of his artistic research, to engage with the great masters of neorealism. Extraordinary, therefore, are the images captured on the set of Bitter Rice, with breathtaking portraits of Silvana Mangano and Doris Dowling.

Cover: Pablo Picasso con Françoise Gilot e il nipote Javier Vilato sulla spiaggia, Golfe-Juan, Francia, agosto 1948 © Robert Capa / International Center of Photography / Magnum