Masterworks of Modern Photography from Moma - The Thomas Walther Collection

This portfolio of the exhibition at Jeu de Paume collects a panorama of the visual inventions of the photographic avant-gardes, in the heart of MoMA's modern photography collection.

In 2001 and 2017, The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired more than 350 photographs from the collector Thomas Walther. This collection, which is now one of the pillars of MoMA's modern collection, is presented for the first time in France in an exhibition with 230 images, documented in this publication. Comprising iconic works from the first half of the twentieth century, the exhibition provides a history of the European and American photographic avant-gardes.

Through the works of a hundred or so photographers, from Berenice Abbott to Karl Blossfeldt, from Claude Cahun to El Lissitzky, from Edward Weston to André Kertész, this fusion of masterpieces and lesser-known images traces the history of modernity in photography. Mixing genres and approaches—architecture and urban landscapes, portraits and nudes, reportage, photomontage, experimentation, etc.—the exhibition delves deep into the artistic networks of the inter-war period, from the Bauhaus to Surrealist Paris, via Moscow and New York.

In their visually radical inventiveness, these images capture perfectly the utopian spirit of those who wanted to change images in order to change the world; now we fully understand the words of the photographer and theoretician Lázló Moholy-Nagy who, a century ago, stated that "the illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the camera and the pen alike."