Milwaukee Art Museum: Modernity in Central Europe

The Milwaukee Art Museum is hosting a exhibition focusing on photography in central Europe in the intra-war years. Being a photo buff, I took it in today over lunch, and was pretty disappointed. In reading about the exhibition, one is lead to believe it's an exhibition showing how European culture in this period was captured by photography.

Within this context, photography emerged as a consummate expression of central European cultural expectations in the early twentieth century. In the dominant central European view, culture should be instructive and critically engaged with the issues of its day. The photographic image, mechanically generated, reproducible, and reusable, served as the ideal vehicle to promote or question new standards of living, aesthetics, and consciousness. Themes and styles spread through photography became “lessons” in the value of modernity to a public unsure of what modernity might mean or what it held in store.

The first thing you see going into the exhibit is a map showing Europe before and after World War I. As the co-worker I went with noted, there was a lot of change. The 20's and 30's were a very turbulent period in European history, with empires falling, dictatorships rising, Communism taking hold among the workers, economic chaos, political chaos, social upheaval, and on and on. One would think photography would be a perfect medium to capture these times.

I'm sure photography did exactly that, but that's not shown in this exhibition. Instead, we're presented with an eclectic collection of photographs, ranging from abstract to portraiture to fashion, with no discernible theme to tie them together other than that they were shot by Central Europeans in the right time frame. To be sure, there are some very good photographs in there. But all in all, very disappointing.