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In the 1920s and 1930s, photography fired the imagination of hundreds of progressive artists in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and Poland ; 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. In this lecture, Matthew Witkovsky aims to recover the crucial role played by photography in this period, and in so doing to delineate a central European model of modernity. In conjunction with the exhibition Graphic Modernism from the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910–1935, this series of lectures introduces and explains the complex historical and political events and artistic movements of the first four decades of the 20th century in eastern Europe.
Shadows (1826). NYPL Art and Architecture Collection.
One of 700,000 pictures in the NYPL Digital Gallery
