BWW Reviews: Photography at Peak Innovation with the THOMAS WALTHER COLLECTION

Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection is not for the faint of intellect. Exhaustive and at times exhausting, this work showcase deals with an indispensable subject--experimental photography between 1909 and 1949, the first real Golden Age of the medium. Some of the exhaustion can be attributed to sheer volume: almost 300 photographs, a 400-page accompanying publication, and an accompanying web site that carries an aura equal parts elegance and endlessness. Volume, however, only explains so much. The photographers on display-Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and André Kertész among the biggest names-were tireless in committing the modern condition to film. They entered into dialogue with each other, with the artistic past, with the dynamics of the modern city, with the complexities of physics and perspective. They pursued methods, subjects, and networks of knowledge that will make your eyes twirl and your wits implode. Even after poring over this material in college and returning to some of these photographers year after year, exhibition after exhibition, I walked out of the latest offering from the Museum of Modern Art feeling blissfully depleted.

Just don't think I'm too awestruck to make objections; though this is an overpowering exhibition, it really isn't that much of a curatorial feat. In essence, all organizers Quentin Bajac and Sarah Hermanson Meister really needed to do was to find a half-decent way of presenting a lot of top-quality material. The way they decided on is an unadorned, loop-through-the-galleries arrangement that neither hurts nor helps the contents of the Thomas Walther Collection. There are of course other, more evocative possibilities-an setup that is more spacious and meditative; an exhibition-long dialogue between photography and the other burgeoning artform of the early 20th century, film. Yet the exhibition we have begins heavy and builds mercilessly-just you, and those photographers, and the weight of modernity.

Before the years treated in this exhibition, photographers turned their cameras on both the conditions of society (Matthew Brady, Charles Marville, Jacob Riis) and the phenomena of motion (Eadweard Muybridge, most famously). Modern Photographs begins by ignoring the first of these concerns--sorry, photojournalists--and diving right into the second. Among the early highlights are Gustav Klutsis's jaunty sporting postcards, Willi Ruge's aeronautic footage, and Leni Riefenstahl's photographs of athletes and sailboats. (Riefenstahl's political allegiances are not in evidence here; they aren't a subject that this show is equipped to treat anyway.) Most stunning of all, though, are two diving photographs from Alekksandr Rodchenko, which together form a diptych of both clarity and complexity-the light sky and the compact diver's body of the first paired against the dark pool and the diver's outstretched arms and legs in the second.

Yet motion, shadow, and perspective aren't anything. The most astonishing photographs here are rich in these properties, but are not reducible to them-are equally rich in brilliant intangibles. Artists such as Edward Weston and Karl Blossfeldt tried to impart a monolithic aura to sights from nature. In raising photography to something like painterly abstraction, these men absolutely failed-but in bringing forth images of eerie and exacting beauty, they absolutely succeeded. Photography only pushed further into the domain of other media-and at times of dream and nightmare-with the output of Edward W. Quigley, Aurel Bauh, and Oskar Nerlinger, all of whom used stark whites and ghostly fades to jar both viewer and medium.

Greater historical context only gives Modern Photographs a sharper looking-glass quality: photographs of artists, artists' colleagues, artists' lovers, and artists' residences can be found throughout the show-collaboration upon collaboration, reflection upon reflection. Respects must be paid to the most iconic shots here: Irene Hoffmann's interior-to-exterior view of Bauhaus, Berenice Abbot's portrait of a lounging James Joyce. The showstopper, though, is Kertész. His portraits are well organized but not really remarkable, but his absolutely depopulated photographs-artists' studios, building exteriors, forks, eyeglasses-these are where his talents lie. With postcard-size photos such as Léger Studio, Chez Mondrian, At Zakdine's, and Latin Quarter, Kertesz doesn't so much capture scenes as burrow into them: the intimate size of these photographs makes them seem more like tiny, lovingly carved reliefs than like anything else.

Modern Photographs finishes off with a uniquely prophetic gallery-photographs of the cities of the early 20th century. The subjects can seem ponderous and lonely-so many abandoned avenues, so many soaring scaffolds, and so, so many shadows-yet all these urban photographs are, unmistakably, the work of dashingly nimble artists. In some cases, artists better known for other media excel in new ways: with Ford Plant, River Rouge, painter Charles Sheeler captured an industrial scene more disjointed and more powerfully ominous than most of the scenes he committed to canvas, while with Berlin Radio Tower, installation artist László Moholy-Nagy positioned his camera well above the earth, committing to film a fearsome vertigo. Through it all runs a fascination with the highly regularized forms, as evidenced by everything from Moholy-Nagy's latticed radio tower to Jiri Lehovec's regimented apartments to Semyon Fridlyand's covered, glass-paned gallery. With the last of these, the Thomas Walther Collection offers up one of its most sublime compositions: there is little more here than a receding arcade and a few darkened figures on a walkway, and yet that is enough to capture the loneliness, the anxiety, and the exhilaration that so many of the modernists must have felt In the face of technology. That so many of us still feel.

So it is that this final room presents photographer upon photographer at the commanding height of his powers, and MoMA at the height of its own. Even in its thoroughgoing black-and-white, the Thomas Walther Collection is more racy, more vertiginous, and, yes, more wholly modern than more relentlessly contemporary, more determinedly vivid bodies of work. (To compare Modern Photographs to the big and colorful The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting for an Atemporal World is only to raise the latter show to new heights of disappointment.) We may need a show like this even more in the months to come: with marquee exhibitions such as Björk and Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, MoMA is poised to deliver all kinds of funny-strange experiences and-probably-to completely alienate its most conservative visitors. But with those 300-odd photographs, MoMA proves once again that it is the best place to see the best art of the modern era. Complain all you want about modernism's chaotic aftermath; it all ceases to matter when you are faced with the beautiful chaos that was modernism itself.