The period between the two world wars saw some of the greatest ferment in the history of the West, in terms of both the geopolitical and technological and the artistic and cultural perspective. Twentieth century avant-garde principles, including Dadaism and surrealism, which originated in the eclectic circles of Parisian intellectuals and then spread to major European capitals, and Russian constructivism, led by the strong desire for social and political change that was also the foundation for the 1917 revolution, were established and affirmed. In addition, the Bauhaus movement that sprang from Dessau, Germany in 1919 included some of the most important intellectuals of the time, while in Italy futurist artists made modernity their poetic fulcrum.
Planes, automobiles, trains, telegraph and radio not only radically changed how individuals related to each other, collapsing geographical distances and boundaries, but also offered new ways to look at reality. The transatlantic circulation of ideas, images, objects and people also reset international cultural balances. In addition to the incredible possibilities offered by the new means of transport, the events that shook Europe on the eve of the Second World War in fact caused more and more intellectuals to flee to the United States, which shifted the world’s artistic center from Paris to New York. Photography and cinema proved to be the most adequate languages for expressing the significance of the transformations underway, which were also the result of the push for progress that was revolutionizing the world. Cameras were becoming increasingly smaller and lighter, permitting an agility and freedom that had previously been unthinkable, while improvements in typographic reproduction techniques made widespread distribution of illustrated magazines possible, laying the foundation for a new way to use images in mass communications. The richness and complexity of this particular moment in history is uniquely captured by the photographs in the Thomas Walther Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Assembled by the Swiss collector since 1970 and acquired by the New York Museum of Modern Art between 2001 and 2017, this collection contains some of the most important works by key players in the avant-garde movement of the first half of the 20th century, as well as photographs by lesser known artists. Alongside iconic images from American photographers like Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Walker Evans and Edward Weston, and Europeans like Karl Blossfeldt, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész and August Sander, the Walther collection highlights the central role of women in early modern photography, with works by Berenice Abbott, Marianne Breslauer, Claude Cahun, Lore Feininger, Florence Henri, Irene Hoffmann, Lotte Jocobi, Lee Miller, Tina Modotti, Germaine Krull, Lucia Moholy, Leni Riefenstahl and many others. In addition to masterpieces of Bauhaus photography (László Moholy-Nagy, Iwao Yamawaki), constructivism (El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodčenko, Gustav Klutsis), and surrealism (Man Ray, Maurice Tabard, Raoul Ubac), we also see futuristic experimentation by Anton Giulio Bragaglia and the abstract compositions of Luigi Veronesi, two of the Italians in the show, along with Wanda Wulz and Tina Modotti.
