Henri Cartier-Bresson has always shunned the limelight, preferring his remarkable photographic record of the mid-20th century to speak for him. He has never liked giving interviews, agreeing at most to ''a conversation.'' He long resisted being photographed, believing it stripped him of the anonymity essential to his work. In the mid-1970's he even abandoned photography as a profession to devote himself to his first love, drawing.
But now, just months short of his 95th birthday, the master of the ''decisive moment,'' as he once described his art, is himself the reluctant object of celebration. Coinciding with a major retrospective of his work at the French National Library here, Mr. Cartier-Bresson, his wife, the photographer Martine Franck, and their daughter, Mélanie Cartier-Bresson, have created the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, the first private foundation dedicated to photography in France.
Mr. Cartier-Bresson's bright blue eyes and mischievous smile confirm his good health, although he is now hard of hearing, uses a cane and complains of memory loss. What has not changed is his lack of interest in discussing photography. Over lunch recently, he enthusiastically recalled characters he met in Mexico in the 1930's, but on matters of art he was brief. ''All that matters is knowing how to draw properly,'' he said.
Still, he worked with Robert Delpire, who organized the show at the new National Library, in selecting some 350 images. They range from his earliest work done in France, Spain and Mexico in the 1930's, through his postwar travels in India, China and Indonesia up to the afterthought of a bucolic Provençal landscape shot in 1999. The exhibition also includes a score of his drawings and the odd painting.
Yet it is at the foundation, housed in a renovated 19th-century building at 2 Impasse Lebouis in the Montparnasse district of Paris, that Mr. Cartier-Bresson has presented a different side to his art -- the photographers whom he most admires and who have influenced him. For the foundation's opening show, ''Henri Cartier-Bresson's Choice,'' he has picked 93 images by 85 fellow photographers.
Along with images by Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour, with whom Mr. Cartier-Bresson founded the Magnum photo agency in 1947, there are works by leading 20th-century photographers, from Brassaï to Sebastião Salgado. Also on display is Martin Munkacsi's ''Black Boys on the Shore of Lake Tanganyika,'' the 1931 photograph that first inspired Mr. Cartier-Bresson to become a photographer.
With the gift of Mr. Cartier-Bresson's personal collection of his photographs to the nonprofit foundation, his heirs can avoid donating a good many of them to the government in place of estate tax. ''See what happened to André Breton,'' Ms. Franck said, referring to the recent auction of the Surrealist leader's art and book collection. ''We wanted to avoid dispersal of Henri's work.''
While the foundation will deal with the mechanics of Mr. Cartier-Bresson's legacy, it is through the images on display at the National Library through July 27 that he will best be remembered. The show looks at the man as well as his work. It opens with childhood snapshots in a prosperous Parisian home, school photographs and a 1926 portrait of him as an 18-year-old doing military service. By then, he was already interested in painting. During a yearlong stay in the Ivory Coast in 1931, he took up photography. His work was characterized by his ability to capture the ''decisive moment,'' whether it is a man and his shadow stepping into a flooded street (''Behind the Gare St.-Lazare''), a beefy family picnicking beside a river (''On the banks of the Marne''), a heavily built man in a hat walking among children playing in Madrid, or a couple entwined in love-making in Mexico.
''Shooting a picture is recognizing an event,'' he later explained, ''and at the very instant and within a fraction of a second rigorously organizing the forms you see to express and give meaning to that event. It is a matter of putting your brain, your eye and your heart in the same line of sight. It is a way of life.''
In the late 1930's Mr. Cartier-Bresson worked in cinema, as an assistant on Jean Renoir's ''Day in the Country'' and ''The Rules of the Game'' and making two documentaries about the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. When World War II broke out he joined the French Army, but was captured in 1940 and held in a German labor camp until he escaped, at the third attempt, in February 1943.
Back in Paris he joined the underground, helping prisoners and escapees, and also resumed his photography, which included memorable portraits of the painters Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. In August 1944 he recorded the liberation of Paris, and the following year he directed a documentary about returning prisoners of war. He traveled to New York in 1946 to work on what had been planned initially as a posthumous exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art.
Only after the creation of Magnum in 1947, however, did Mr. Cartier-Bresson move closer to photojournalism. In Asia he did not cover events as such -- although he happened to be present when Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 -- but rather the human impact of great social movements. He was in China for six months before and after the Communist victory over the Kuomintang. In Indonesia, where he met his first wife, Ratna Mohini, he followed the country's troubled steps toward independence in 1949.
The exhibition at the National Library includes many of his portraits of writers and artists, from Sartre to Picasso. But he took the most portraits of his friend Alberto Giacometti, whose sculpture ''The Man Who Walks'' is in this show, as if it were intended to personify the tall slim photographer himself in pursuit of an image.
But Mr. Cartier-Bresson is probably more honored for his insights into ordinary people, whether in Harlem, Texas or the Soviet Union, where in 1954 he was one of the few Western photographers allowed to work.
No less than the photographs chosen for the foundation's show, those at the National Library remind one of Mr. Cartier-Bresson's attachment to people. He also photographed landscapes and crowd scenes, yet the ''decisive moments'' are those that capture human instants -- girls in Bali preparing to dance, a prisoner thrusting a fist and leg out of his cell door, children peeping over the Berlin Wall, old priests awaiting midnight Mass in Italy.
Then in 1975, Mr. Cartier-Bresson decided to put down his Leica -- although not to put it away, because he still occasionally takes portraits -- and turn his energy to drawing. ''Photography is a sketchbook,'' he explained in an interview with The New York Times in 1994. ''Drawing is meditation. Today everyone talks about photography. I spent 50 years taking pictures, but how many that I did can you look at for more than three seconds? Maybe 50? 100? It's about all.''
From the sidewalk, then, he switched his workplace to the Louvre, where he spent long hours copying works by Géricault, Dürer and Goya. He hired models for nude drawing and he peered at himself for self-portraits. The view from his apartment overlooking the Tuileries Gardens was also sketched.
Yet in his home, there is no evidence of either the photographer or the artist. The walls are decorated with paintings and drawings but nothing by Mr. Cartier-Bresson, as if he were embarrassed by his fame. Certainly, after the agitation of the openings of the foundation and the retrospective, he seems happy to be back with his pencil and sketchbook. ''The rest doesn't matter,'' he said. ''I have forgotten it already.''