The first startling thing I noticed upon entering “Andre Kertesz and the Paris Avant-Garde” exhibition is how small his picture “Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe” is: 3-by-3.5 inches, less than half the size of a standard one hour photo store snapshot print. The famous picture from 1927 is used on the gallery postcard announcing the exhibition; there it is reproduced at 4.75-by-4.5 inches. Even the thumbnail on the gallery’s excellent Web site enlarges, when you click on it, to 4-by-3.5, and the work is frequently reproduced in books considerably larger. Kertesz himself made bigger prints from his negative, but in an era of Richard Avedon billboard-size portraits it is startling to see how beautiful a relatively confined image can be.

“Avant-garde” has come nowadays to signify programmed tedium, but once it really did mean something. Much that passes for new in contemporary photography is simply bigger, but what made Kertesz’s picture of Piet Mondrian’s personal accessories new 80 years ago was not its dimensions but its sensibility. The austere simplicity of the two pairs of glasses, the pipe, and the bowl it rests in are a portrait through personal belongings: The man who wears and smokes items of this refined design must be such and such a man. The white corner of the table they sit on is offset against a black background, which wittily mimics the geometry of one of Mondrian’s own paintings. The modernity is in what is cut away, the absence of fuss, the elimination of everything except what is necessary. The art is that what is left is elegant and touching. It is content, not size, that’s relevant.

What also got cut was the goopy sentimentality and fustian of much art photography from before the Great War. All but two of the photographs on display are from the 1920s or 1930s, and by then even Kertesz had forgone the lyrical pastoralism of earlier pictures taken in his native Hungary for an urban sophistication. This was not yet the dark vision of a later generation, but the sharp eye of the flaneur for the incidental pleasures of the city. “Chairs, Paris” (c. 1925), just 3.75-by-4.75-inches, is a tiny example: The haphazard arrangement of simple, metal park chairs provides more pleasure than a description would suggest. The chairs are like line drawings, not substantial furniture, and they decorate an empty space of pebbles as they anticipate sitters.

One of the hallmarks of the avantgarde was their willingness – their eagerness – to experiment with their medium. Both Kertesz and Man Ray took distortions. There are three of Kertesz’s funhouse mirror nudes, female bodies randomly shrunk and distended, swollen thighs and calves that end in weensy feet, “Distortion” (1933), or perfectly attractive breasts that droop from disproportionately large shoulders, “Nude Distortion No. 52, Paris” (1933). These should be grotesque, and they certainly border on the grotesque, but they seem instead to illustrate that the beauty of the female figure is indestructible: Perhaps because they were shot in a spirit of good humor and affection, no matter how the bodies of these women are bloated and squeezed, they never lose their charm.

Man Ray shot himself in a warped mirror: We see him holding the camera with one hand and a shutter release cable with the other as he contemplates his swollen head and its crooked features. He also experimented with solarization, a technique that exposes film or printing paper to light while it is being processed and reverses some of the tones (as in “Solarized Portrait of Mary Gill” (1931). I find these interesting but never really satisfying: The process alters the picture but not to much purpose. But his “Self Portrait as Fashion Photographer” (1936), shot without tricks, is an endearing and successfully sly satire on the profession in which he earned enough money to subsidize the art for which he is famous.

Of the 40-odd pictures in this exhibition, two-thirds were taken by photographers who were not native Frenchmen but came to Paris after the War to be avant-garde artists. Kertesz and Brassai came from Hungary, Man Ray from America, Ilse Bing from Germany, and Brancusi from Romania. (All but the last were Jewish; Kertesz and Bing later fled to America in advance of the Nazis.) There are two pictures by Eugene Atget, who was certainly French but hardly considered himself an artist, and assuredly not an avant-garde artist. He was designated as such by Andre Breton, who is himself represented as a photographer in “Self Portrait, Photomaton” (c. 1929), if two shots with your eyes shut taken in an amusement park photo booth qualify one as an avant-garde photographer. The two pictures taken by Jacques-Henri Lartigue in 1912, when he was 18, don’t seem to really qualify as avant-garde, and Brancusi limited his photography to pictures of his own sculptures. But quibbles aside, Paris in this period was a great place to be loose with a camera and heroic ambitions.

The only pictures at Houk not taken in Paris are three by Henri Cartier-Bresson from Spain in the early 1930s. Cartier-Bresson spent time with Breton and the Surrealists at their cafes and absorbed much of their ideology. The pictures from Spain all have surreal elements, as do so many of his pictures. Because of his success as a photojournalist, and the high regard almost all photographers had for him, Cartier-Bresson was instrumental in making the avantgarde gestures of Paris normative: They became part of the ordinary vocabulary of photography everywhere.

The Cartier-Bresson pictures on display are all well known, and they are frequently seen in larger formats, but here the biggest are only 8-by-10-inches, and one is smaller. HCB always had his negatives printed full-frame – that is, with nothing cropped – but miraculously there is never anything that doesn’t belong. Unlike the mammoth contemporary pictures you can view in a museum without breaking stride, these prints draw you in. You want to get close, study the details, savor the whole, become intimate with the subtlest nuances of tone. Like the exhibition as a whole, they give evidence that little gems can throw off enormous brilliance.

Until June 4 (745 Fifth Avenue, between 57th and 58th Streets, 212-750-7070).