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Weekend Excursion
German native Thomas Walther began collecting modernist photography in 1979. Over 20 years, he assembled a diverse body of works and published his own book of amateur snapshots titled Other Pictures. Now, the 328 modernist works in Walther's collection as well as a group of photographs including those featured in his book are all on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.The acquisition, a partial gift from Walther and a partial purchase, consists of photographs taken between the two World Wars, an era called "one of the great episodes of 20th-century art" by Museum Director Glenn D. Lowry. The collection includes pictures by Andre Kertesz, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, as well as works by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Steichen.
The collection, like the collector, is a combination of the Old World and the New. The largest selection of photographs represents the European experimental photography of the '20s and '30s, incuding photographs by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Jacques-Andre Boiffard, Claude Cahun, Jaromir Funke, Florence Henri, Lotte Jacobi, Edmund Kesting, Lee Miller, Lucia Moholy, Josef Pesci, Leni Riefenstahl, Hajo Rose, Kaethe Steinitz, and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. The American photographs demonstrate the progression from turn-of-the-century pictorialism to the modernism of the '20s and '30s, including pictures by Anne Brigman, Gertrude Brown, Johan Hagemeyer, John P. Heins, and others.
The scope of the collection is a boon for the Museum. It is, Lowry said, "one of the Museum's most important acquisitions of the past two decades." Certainly it is exciting that the public can now garner the benefits of Lowry's past two decades. —Diana M. Aleman
The Museum is located at 11 West 53 St., between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It is open 10:30 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. daily; 10:30 a.m. to 8:15 p.m. Friday; and closed Wednesday. $6.50 for students with ID, free for members. Friday 4:30 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. is pay-what-you-wish. For more information, call (212) 708-9400 or visit www.moma.org.
All materials © 2001 The Yale Herald, Inc., and its staff.
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