The exhibition is one of those that are not lost. From 3 March to 26 June in Turin, the result of the collaboration between the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Masi in Lugano and Camera will be exhibited at the Italian Center for Photography. Thanks to this work it will be possible to admire 230 absolute masterpieces made between 1900 and 1940 which are part of the Thomas Walther collection of the MoMA in New York.
The exhibition, in fact, presents for the first time in Italy the shots of well-known and lesser-known authors who have redefined the canons of photography making them assume an absolutely central role in the development of the avant-gardes of the beginning of the century.
A creative ferment that was born in Europe to land in the United States, which enthusiastically welcomed intellectuals fleeing the war, becoming in the 1940s the main center of world artistic production.
It is the peculiarity of these decades that pushed the collector Thomas Walther to collect, between 1977 and 1997, the best photographic works produced in this period, bringing them together in a unique collection in the world, acquired by MoMA in part in 2001 and in part in 2017. .
The big names on display
Alongside the Americans Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Walker Evans or Edward Weston, Europeans such as Karl Blossfeldt, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész and August Sander. But also many women photographers – who have been central in the contribution of a disenchanted if not revolutionary eye of photographic art – with works by Berenice Abbott, Marianne Breslauer, Claude Cahun, Lore Feininger, Florence Henri, Tina Modotti, Irene Hoffmann, Lotte Jocobi, Lee Miller, Germaine Krull, Lucia Moholy, Leni Riefenstahl and many others.
From Bauhaus to Futurism
In addition to the masterpieces of Bauhaus (László Moholy-Nagy, Iwao Yamawaki), of constructivism (El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodčenko, Gustav Klutsis), of surrealism (Man Ray, Maurice Tabard, Raoul Ubac), the futurist experiments of Anton Giulio Bragaglia are also exhibited and the abstract compositions by Luigi Veronesi, two of the Italians present together with Wanda Wulz and Tina Modotti.