Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945

Jindřich Štyrský... Cover for Fantômas (The Dead Man Who Kills) (by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, 1929, Photolithograph of photomontage). From the exhibition Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945, February 9 - May 4, 2008 at the Milwaukee Art Museum. "...In the 1920s and 1930s, photography became an immense phenomenon across Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and Poland. It fired the imagination of hundreds of progressive artists, provided a creative outlet for thousands of devoted amateurs, and became a symbol of modernity for millions through its use in magazines, newspapers, advertising, and books. It was in interwar central Europe as well that an art history for all photography was first established. Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918 – 1945 aims to recover the crucial role played by photography in this period, and in so doing to delineate a central European model of modernity."