NEW YORK - The Museum of Modern Art presents Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century, through June 28, 2010. The exhibition is the first major retrospective in the U.S. in more than 30 years of one of photography’s most original and influential masters.
It 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.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an original interactive website that enables visitors to explore the 300 photographs included in the exhibition, together with detailed maps of Cartier-Bresson’s travels, audio from the Acoustiguide tour, interpretive texts, and biographical information. The site is produced by Second Story and will launch on April 11, 2010. MoMA.org/cartierbresson.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century will travel to The Art Institute of Chicago (July 24-October 3, 2010); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (October 30, 2010-January 30, 2011); and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (February 19-May 15, 2011).
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Public Information:
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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.