The time between World War I and World War II forced Central Europeans through a massive cultural shift. Artists caught in the landslide took advantage of their new world and turned to a new medium for expressing this change: photography.
"Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945," which opens Saturday, is the Milwaukee Art Museum's exhibition on the history of photography, the history of Central Europe and the art that fused both together.
"We are the third venue after the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. to win the bid for this showing," said Lisa Hostetler, "Foto" coordinating curator. "This is the last stop for the exhibition in America before making its final stop at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, Scotland. Work like this is sensitive to light so a maximum showing is only three or four venues."
Unlike Western avant-garde artists, those in Central Europe worked in the mainstream. Their work reflected issues the common citizen was affected by after the change from aristocratic governments at the end of World War I.
"Artists found a whole new way of living and thinking," said Hostetler. "They turned to the new art of photography —changing the world by how they saw it."
Surrealism, previously considered a mainly French art form, is a prevalent theme in "Foto." A portion of the exhibit titled "The Cut-And-Paste World: War Returns" displays works made from different parts of chopped up photos (called photomontage), which included exaggerated messages sometimes related to war and advancements of infrastructure. Hostetler believed this technique bears some resemblance to the modern use of Adobe Photoshop to digitally edit and enhance photos.
One of the pieces by Paul Citroen titled "Metropolis" is a true embodiment of this photomontage style. Citroen created a masterpiece by cutting out pictures of skyscrapers, elevated railways and other engineering marvels and pasted it all together to form a massive disarray of big city life.
"'Metropolis' has been reproduced many times before in art history books, but this is the original and seeing it in person is something to witness," Hostetler said.
Hostetler said she was dramatically impacted by her first walk through "Foto."
"The photos are visually exciting and overwhelming," said Hostetler. "You really get to see how rich Central European culture was."
The works on display document the beginnings of photojournalism, according to Hostetler. By using photography as more than an art form, photographers in "Foto" were able to capture their surroundings and share it with others who had never perceived it in such a visual way.
"Photojournalists went around the globe documenting all these different cultures and you could stand in one place and learn about them all," Hostetler said.
Some of the artists in "Foto" were also involved in short films. Accordingly, the MAM has a supplemental exhibition titled "Modernity and Tradition: Film in Interwar Central Europe." Films were also an emerging art and closely related to photography. Artists captured their cities, homelands and dreams with a new style and vision all by using a different sense of objectivity. The short films begin Feb. 20 and are playing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Union Theater and the MAM's Lubar Auditorium. A full schedule of showings can be found at the Milwaukee Art Museum's Web site.