Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2008)
ANNUAL REPORT • A 2008. ÉV - PÉTER BAKI: Soul and Body: Kertész to Maplethorpe through the Eyes of the Greatest Masters of Photography
André Kertész [Andor Kertész], László Moholy-Nagy, Brassai' [Gyula Halász], and Robert Gapa [Endre Ernő Eriedmann] are still a guarantee of success anywhere in the world, and their works are regarded as icons of photography in the interwar period. The displayed photographs presented the work of these artists from the years preceding World War I to the years after World War II. The exhibition also documented the kind of photographic context in which the careers of these photographers developed in Hungary. We w r ould not be able to understand the roots of these artists without the work of contemporaries, such as Rudolf Balogh, Károly Escher, Olga Máté, József Pécsi József and Dénes Rónai, and their works could not be fitted into the universal history of photography without knowing the work of other contemporary artists' in an international context. This is why some works from public collections abroad which represent points of reference for this branch of art anywhere in the world were woven into the fabric of the exhibition. Such a wealth of material made it possible to draw parallels between the photographs of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, Martin Munkácsi and Henri Cartier-Bresson, or between the painterly period of Alfred Stieglitz and the work of József Pécsi, who was active in Hungary. The exhibition also displayed w r orks that are not photographic icons, but fitted in with one of the thematic units, by artists who were outstanding figures in photographic history, such as Lewis Hine, Imogen Cunningham, Tina Modotti, Sebastiào Saigado, Berenice Abbott, Use Bing, Werner Bischof, Yousuf Karsh, Dorothea Lange, Joan Myers, Helmut Newton, Alexander Rodchenko and Cindy Sherman. In addition to all of these the photographic artists of the last few decades were also included in the displayed material, as were contemporary works. In examining the works of Robert Mapplethorpe and György Tóth, or Yousuf Karsh and Olga Máté, for example, a conceptual kinship can be discovered which can only be seen if Hungarian photographic art is shown through the world's photographic history. Péter Baki
