Modernism in Central Europe

Janusz Maria Brzeski - Metal

(Modernism in Central Europe - Exhibition at the Washington National Gallery)

No copies were preserved from a movie made by Janusz Maria Brzeski in 1933. The title was Beton, emblematic for the spirit animating the Avant-Garde of the Twenties in Central Europe. It was a great generation: Bauhaus and Constructivism, Devetsil, the experimental films trying to find new structures for the cinematic language, the huge achievements in photography, the search for a new synthesis in art...

The photo-exhibition currently on view at the Washington National Gallery is impressive - four rooms with tens and tens of art works gathered from galleries and collections all over Europe.

I'd start the talk with Karel Kasparik and his gorgeous Proz, and I'd go on with a Still Life of Josef Sudek, who believed in photography love for banal objects.
And then it would be the place for the Abeceda, as it was reinvented by the Surrealists from Devetsil.

• Karel Kasparik
• Josef Sudek
  
• Devetsil
• Innemann, Miller, Kminek - the Czech Way of Reinventing the Fairy Tales
  
• Jaromir Funke
• Miroslav Hak
• Frantisek Cermak
• Zdeněk Rossmann - Zivilisierte Frau
  
• Vilem Reichmann
  
• FiFo - Film und Foto Ausstellung, Stuttgart, 1929
  
• John Heartfield
• Max Burchartz
• Dr. Paul Wolf
• Umbo
• Sasha Stone
• Lotte Jacobi
• Herbert Bayer
  
• Atelier Manasse
  
• Albert Renger-Patzsch
• Kata Kalman
• Eva Besnyo
• Imre Kinszki
• Martin Munkacsi
• Jindrich Marco
• Kazimierz Podsadecki and Janusz Maria Brzeski
• Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) - Selfportrait
• Rudolf Kopitz - Heavy Burden, Edward Hartwig - Accordion
  
• Land Without a Name
  

(Avangarda 20)