November 2008

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‘Omnivorous photomania’ is how Matthew Witkovsky, of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, defines the phenomenon underlying the production of the images that he has selected for this exhibition, which opened in Edinburgh, its final venue, last month. What he took upon himself was a Herculean labour. The 166 numbered exhibits, as well as a selection of period publications that crucially supplemented them in the exhibition’s showing in Washington, and the many other works illustrated in the catalogue, are a small distillation of an almost limitless body of work produced in the interwar years in five countries. This is a whole world in its manifold manifestations, and it is represented by a multitude of styles.

In addition to Germany, Witkovsky has chosen to survey countries that until 1918 formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Poland but not the Balkan states or Romania. One result of tackling an entire region, rather than a single country or group of artists, is that we are given a revealing overview of cultures with strong links between them, as well as contradictory trends in a period of stridently polarised political forces. On the other hand, most photographers are represented by only one or two, sometimes scattered, works. Many of these are practitioners – some principally active in other media – who are unknown to western viewers, and one is left wishing one could see more.

The exhibition documents the wide-spread view, strongly expressed at the time, that photography was the visual medium suited to modern life. As an art form that was inseparable from the general rush to modernity led from Berlin, its development was of course influenced by Bauhaus personalities and the Russian constructivists, who receive their due here, but significant contributions came from elsewhere, and Czech personalities are given pride of place. Programmatic, avant-garde modernism is covered as part of the larger concept of modernity. The so-called ‘New Vision’ gets much attention.

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