The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art
Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) is one of the
most original, accomplished, influential, and beloved figures in the
history of photography. His inventive work of the early 1930s helped
define the creative potential of modern photography, and his uncanny
ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with "the
decisive moment”—the title of his first major book. After World War II
(most of which he spent as a prisoner of war) and his first museum show
(at MoMA in 1947), he joined Robert Capa and others in founding the
Magnum photo agency, which enabled photojournalists to reach a broad
audience through magazines such as Life while retaining control
over their work. In the decade following the war, Cartier-Bresson
produced major bodies of photographic reportage on India and Indonesia
at the time of independence, China during the revolution, the Soviet
Union after Stalin’s death, the United States during the postwar boom,
and Europe as its old cultures confronted modern realities. For more
than twenty-five years, he was the keenest observer of the global
theater of human affairs—and one of the great portraitists of the
twentieth century. MoMA’s retrospective, the first in the United States
in three decades, surveys Cartier-Bresson’s entire career, with a
presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged
thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books. The exhibition
travels to The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art (SFMOMA), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
The exhibition is organized by Peter
Galassi, Chief Curator, Department of Photography.
The exhibition is supported by The William Randolph Hearst Endowment
Fund.
Additional funding is provided by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation,
Robert B. Menschel, and Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis.
Tomado de:
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/968