The Leader

Issue date: 2/20/08 Section: Features/News

So, I know what you are thinking: What the heck could people in the 1920s possibly know about "modernity," and just how modern are we actually talking?

As a 20s-era fanatic, I had high hopes going into the exhibition that this article would not have to be reduced to my own personal opinions about how great the period was. Well, guess what: you have been spared from my slanted views because this collection is actually quite electrifying!

During the period between World War I and II, photographic artists developed a hankering to "get rid of old habits of seeing the world," by way of new technological innovations in the camera. The exhibition, which is the latest edition to the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM), showcases these daring expressions. Containing over 160 original artworks as well as illustrated books and magazines, the Milwaukee venue is one of only three cities that the exhibition will visit in the United States.

"Foto" takes us back to an age of chaos in Europe when society was perplexed by the need to end its nostalgic antics along with the anxiety of sudden change. A charismatic tour through the unfamiliar images and places of both the masters and lesser-known contemporaries, it effectively takes you back in time. It drops you right in the "cradle of modern photography": central Europe spanning through Germany, Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

Through suggestive prints, photomontages and portraits, artists exemplified the themes of optimism and fear that plagued a generation. However, their impact went well beyond that.

The exhibition focuses on how extensively the pieces and artists have participated in the development of the world of media culture. The illustrated print used in books and magazines bought these avant-garde ideas to the mainstream public, which spread to countries such as the United States.

"Our American culture has been deeply fertilized by the European visuals of this period," said MAM Assistant Curator Lisa Hostetler.

Altogether, the ground-breaking Foto exhibit contains eight different sections. The two which I found most invigorating were titled New Women-New Men and The Spread of Surrealism. The first focused on the neue Frau or New Woman that had been iconified after the war. The latter expanded on the phenomenon that surprisingly developed in central Europe in which artists engaged in a variety of image-making methods.

Also for all you who need to be more thematically stimulated, there are four short films looped in the screening room of the exhibition from which you can get the cinematic presentation of the period.

What might make the exhibition even more attractive is its juxtaposition to UW-Milwaukee. To boost the Foto exhibit, the Milwaukee Art Museum has teamed with UWM to display an external film program featuring short and full-length movies. They will alternate between MAM's Lubar Auditorium and the Union Theatre. A full schedule is available at www.mam.org/FOTO/film.htm.

Whatever your motivation for viewing the exhibit might be and by whichever means possible, it is genuinely something worth seeing. It could be enlightening to see the origins of the modern debacle that we call our "mass media culture."

Did I also mention that some of the subject matter focuses on erotica?

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