on reading - a photographic exhibition

On Sunday we had the pleasant surprise of coming across a photography exhibit at the Carlsbad Dove Library of Andre Kortesz called "On Reading".

André Kertész: On Reading

Feb. 21 – April 18, 2010

William D. Cannon Art Gallery

at the

Carlsbad Dove Library

A prominent member of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s circle in 1920’s Paris, André Kertész created a series of photographs in Europe and the US, examining the power of reading as a universal pleasure. These 104 stunning photographs are drawn from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago.

Known for his extended study of Washington Square Park and his distorted nudes of the 1930s, Andre Kertesz was a quiet but important influence on the coming of age of photojournalism and the art of photography. For more than seventy years, his subtle and penetrating vision helped to define a medium in its infancy. Though he spent most of his life in the United States, his European modernist sensibility is what made him great, and that is what he is remembered for today.

For nearly twenty years his gifts remained relatively unrecognized in New York. It was not until 1964, when John Sarkowski, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, organized a one man show that Kertesz’s career was reawakened. Over the preceding years, art photography in the United States made serious leaps and began to recognize the advances of earlier European artists. It was this renewed interest that eventually brought an otherwise forgotten genius back into the public eye. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Kertesz was shown regularly at the major international museums — having one-man shows in Paris, Tokyo, London, Stockholm, Budapest and Helsinki. In 1983 the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor, and the following year he passed away in his New York home. Very few artists are able to witness the formation of their own artistic medium. Kertesz was not only able to witness much of the beginnings of hand-held photography, but had a profound effect on it. With subtle and whimsical artistry, he took full advantage of a medium not yet sure of its own potential, and for that, contemporary photography remains in his debt.

In January 1999 he was the subject of the PBS series American Masters.

The book about the exhibit was re-released in 2008 and is available at Amazon.