January 28, 2010
MoMA to mount major Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition
The Museum of Modern Art will stage a major retrospective of the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson from April 11 to June 28, the museum announced this week.
The exhibition, “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century,” will include 300 prints from 1929 to 1989, “at least one fifth of them previously unknown to the public,” MoMA promises. Of those, 220 of the prints will be on loan from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, which was established two years before the photographer’s death in 2004.
The esteemed photojournalist used the term “the decisive moment” to refer to the unstaged, unedited, fleeting moment that can reveal deeper insight into the pictured subject.
The exhibition will be divided into 12 parts, according to the outline provided by MoMA:
The first is devoted to the early 1930s, when the young Surrealist rebel used the quickness and mobility of the handheld Leica camera to invent a new brand of creative magic.
The second section, on the aftermath of World War II and the postwar political and social transformations of Asia, introduces Cartier-Bresson’s long career in photojournalism.
The remaining ten parts are thematic rather than chronological. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters explore the photographer’s loving evocations of age-old patterns of life in the East, the West, and in his native France.
Sections on the United States and the Soviet Union are followed by extended photo-essays on China’s “Great Leap Forward” and the daily routines at Bankers Trust Company in New York. A selection of 34 outstanding portraits reveal Cartier-Bresson as one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century.
The exhibition concludes with sections devoted to encounters and gatherings of all kinds in the lively theater of the street, and to the often unlovely rise of modernity—mechanization, industry, commerce, consumerism, and leisure—around the globe.
In 2007, a smaller exhibition at New York’s International Center of Photography focused on Cartier-Bresson’s work from 1932-46.
Picture credit: Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Hyères, France. 1932
Gelatin silver print, 7 11/16 × 11 7/16” (19.6 × 29.1 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
© Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos
Republished with permission from MoMA
January 28, 2010 7:18 AM in Midtown, Museums
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