PHOTOGRAPHIC MASTERPIECES FROM MOMA THE THOMAS WALTHER COLLECTION

The Thomas Walther Collection, presented at the Jeu de Paume, is one of the most important acquisitions of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This exceptional photographic collection of nearly 350 photographs reflects a key moment in This exceptional collection of nearly 350 photographs reflects a key moment in the history of the discipline, through a hundred or so emblematic figures of the European avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Berenice Abbott, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun, André Kertész, Germaine Krull, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Edward Weston. The Thomas Walther Collection invites both specialists and amateurs of the photographic medium to grasp in a new way a period of collective innovation, now celebrated as one of the major episodes of modern art.

THE AUTHORS

Sarah Meister has a degree in art history from Princeton University. She She joined Moma's photography department in 1997 and became its curator in 2009. She is currently the director of the Aperture Foundation. Quentin Bajac is a graduate of the Institut d'études politiques de Paris. He became curator of photography at the Musée d'orsay in 1995, then joined the Centre Pompidou in 2003. Centre Pompidou in 2003. He was chief curator of photography at MOMA from 2013 to 2018. Today, he is the director of the Jeu de Paume, he directs the Jeu de Paume.

Michel Frizot is a historian specialising in photography, having worked at the CNRS, the École du Louvre and the EHESS. He has made a major contribution to the recognition of all

In 2001 and 2017, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired over 350 photographs from Thomas Walther's collector. This collection, which today constitutes one of MOMA'S modern collection pillars, is presented for the first time in France in an exhibition of some 230 images. This collection, which is now one of MOMA'S modern collection pillars, is presented for the first time in France in an exhibition of some 230 images.

Comprising iconic works from the first half of the twentieth century, the ensemble allows us to write a history of the European and American photographic avant-gardes. Through the pieces of a hundred or so photographers, from Berenice Abbott to Karl Blossfeldt, Claude Cahun to El Lissitzky, Edward Weston to André Kertész, and between masterpieces lesser-known images, the collection traces the history of the invention of modernity in photography. Mixing genres and approaches (architecture and urban views, portraits and nudes, reportage, photomontages and experimentation), the exhibition explores the artistic networks of the inter-war period, from the Bauhaus to Surrealist Paris, via Moscow and New York. Through its radical visual invention, the exhibition perfectly captures the utopian spirit of those who wanted to change images to change the world and makes it possible to fully understand the words of the photographer and theoretician Lazlo Moholy-nagy, who, a century ago, stated that

"The illiterate of the future will not be the illiterate but the ignorant in matters of photography."

Curators: Sarah Meister and Quentin Bajac.

Lucia Moholy-nagy, in her close-up portrait of Florence Henri, abandons the psychological portrait in favour of a more object-like image, more concerned with matter and texture than with expression or interiority. In one of the overprints of the period.