FOTO: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1948

Willi Ruge... Arno Boettcher (1927, Gelatin-silver print, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek). From the Guggenheim Museum presentation of FOTO: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1948 (Previously at the National Gallery of Art). "...In the 1920s and 1930s, photography became an immense phenomenon across Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and Poland. It fired the imagination of hundreds of progressive artists, provided a creative outlet for thousands of devoted amateurs, and became a symbol of modernity for millions through its use in magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and books. It was in interwar central Europe, as well, that an art history for all photography was first established. Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945 aims to recover the crucial role played by photography in this period, and in so doing to delineate a central European model of modernity."