Guggenheim Museum Presents Modernity In Central Europe

The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and was curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky, Assistant Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery, where it premiered from June 10 to September 3, 2007. Valerie Hillings, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, is coordinator for the New York presentation. Following its presentation at the Guggenheim, the exhibition will tour to the Milwaukee Art Museum from February 9 to May 4, 2008, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, from June 7 to August 31, 2008.

This exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Support provided in part by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, and Czech Center New York.

In the 1920s and 1930s photography became a phenomenon of immense proportions across Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Poland. It fired the imagination of hundreds of progressive artists, provided a creative outlet for tens of thousands of devoted amateurs, and became a symbol of modernity for millions through its use in magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and books. Most crucially, as this exhibition will argue, it was in interwar central Europe that the history of photography as a modern art form was established.

Through a series of thematic sections, this survey explores the uses and theory of modernist photography in 170 original works and printed materials from the central European region. This groundbreaking exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., is the first to bring together recognized masters such as El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, and Hannah Höch with their lesser well-known contemporaries Karel Teige, Jaromír Funke, Stefan Themerson, and Kazimierz Podsadecki, amongst others, attesting to the range and dynamic output of the era. -- www.guggenheim.org