Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light
© 2011 The Museum of Modern Art
Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light – MoMA New York The Museum of Modern Art presents ‘Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light’, a major critical reevaluation of the heralded career of Bill Brandt (British, b. Germany, 1904-83) from March 6 to August 12, 2013.]]>
Source: The Museum of Modern Art
A founding figure in photography’s modernist traditions, Brandt ranks among the visionaries who, in the diversity of their approach, establishedthe creative potential of photography based on observation of the world around them. Brandt’s distinctive vision—his ability to present the mundane world as fresh and strange—emerged in London in the 1930s, and drew from his time in the Paris studio of Man Ray. His visual explorations of the society, landscape, and literature of England are indispensable to any understanding of photographic history and, arguably, to our understanding of life in Britain during the middle of the 20th century. Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light is organized by Sarah Meister, Curator, with Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography.
The impressive breadth of Brandt’s career, which suggests his restless experimentalimpulse, and the dramatic transformations of his printing style have often confounded thoseseeking to understand the link between the highly celebrated and seemingly unrelated chapters ofhis oeuvre. The exhibition brings together more than 150 works divided into six sections, eachcorresponding with a distinct aspect of Brandt’s achievement: London in the Thirties; NorthernEngland; World War II; Portraits; Landscapes; and Nudes.
Beginning with a highly selectivedisplay of albums and prints made around the European continent as Brandt was forming hisartistic identity, the exhibition presents an opportunity to understand Brandt in a new light: onethat establishes a chronological trajectory of his career, with an expanded consideration of hisactivity during World War II. In addition, a closer look at his printing methods with the finestknown prints from across the range of Brandt’s career will clarify how the artist, whose early workis characterized by the muted, wistful portrait of a young housewife scrubbing the threshold to herhome (“East End Morning”, 1937), would come to create a bold and unpredictable series of nudeson the rocky English coast (“East Sussex Coast”, 1957).
Through a rigorous analysis of each chapter of Brandt’s career across a half century ofwork, the exhibition clarifies the achievement of this towering figure in photography’s modernisttradition.
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