MoMA Presents Retrospective of Henri Cartier-Bresson 'The Modern Century', 4/11-6/28
The Museum of Modern Art presents Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century, the first major retrospective in the U.S. in more than 30 years of one of photography's most original and influential masters, from April 11 through June 28, 2010.
The exhibition comprises 300 photographs dating from 1929 to 1989, at least one fifth of them previously unknown to the public, and focuses on the photographer's most productive decades, the 1930s through the 1960s. Also included is a generous selection of original issues of Life, Paris Match, and other magazines in which many of the photographs first appeared. Cartier-Bresson's uncanny talent for seizing lasting images from the flux of experience, long identified with the title of his book The Decisive Moment (1952), made him a leading figure both in photography's experimental modernism of the 1930s and the very different realm of photojournalism after World War II. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century offers a fresh overview of that complex achievement by drawing upon a great deal of previously inaccessible information and images from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, which was established in 2002, two years before the photographer's death at the age of 95, and which has generously lent 220 prints to the exhibition.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century is organized by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.
Peter Galassi states: "Cartier-Bresson's exhibition at MoMA in 1947-his first museum exhibition-was the beginning of a very fruitful relationship that we are now pleased to continue with the Cartier-Bresson Foundation, who have enabled MoMA to organize the first retrospective based on its extensive collection and archive."
For more information, visit www.moma.org
Image: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Juvisy, France, 1938. Gelatin silver print, printed 1947, 9 1/8 x 13 11/16" (23.3 x 34.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer. © 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.
