CAMERA - Italian Center for Photography presents, for the first time in Italy , the exhibition “Masterpieces of modern photography 1900-1940. The Thomas Walther collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York " : in Turin from 3 March to 26 June 2022 an extraordinary selection of over 230 photographic works from the first half of the 20th century , absolute masterpieces in the history of photography made by the great masters of objective, whose images still appear innovative today. Just as the contemporaries Matisse, Picasso and Duchamp were able to revolutionize the languages of the plastic arts, so the authors on display, 121 between legendary names and surprising discoveries, have redefined the canons of photography making them assume an absolutely central role in the development of the avant-gardes of the beginning of the century. .

A creative ferment that began in Europe immediately after the First World War and then arrived in the United States, which increasingly welcomed intellectuals fleeing the Europe of dictatorships, becoming in the 1940s the main center of world artistic production .

Alongside iconic images by American photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Walker Evans or Edward Weston and Europeans such as Karl Blossfeldt, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész and August Sander, the Walther collection enhances the central role of women in the first modern photograph, with works by Berenice Abbott, Marianne Breslauer, Claude Cahun, Lore Feininger, Florence Henri, Irene Hoffmann, Lotte Jocobi, Lee Miller, Tina Modotti, Germaine Krull, Lucia Moholy, Leni Riefenstahl and many others.

In addition to the masterpieces of Bauhaus photography (László Moholy-Nagy, Iwao Yamawaki), of constructivism (El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodčenko, Gustav Klutsis), of surrealism (Man Ray, Maurice Tabard, Raoul Ubac) we also find the futurist experiments of Anton Giulio Bragaglia and the abstract compositions by Luigi Veronesi, two of the Italians present in the exhibition together with Wanda Wulz and Tina Modotti.