The Modern Lens: International Photography and the Tate Collection surveys key developments in international photography from the 1920s to the 1960s. Featuring more than thirty pioneering artists from across Europe, the Americas and Japan, the exhibition explores how photographers sought to produce new visions of the modern world.

In the early twentieth century artists became ever more confident at working across different media. This led to shared interests between architects, designers, painters, sculptors, photographers, poets and musicians. Some of the most important artists studied and worked together in avant-garde groups, developing experimental approaches described now as ‘modernist’.

The Modern Lens presents many different strands of modernist art and explores its relationship to photography. It ranges from the dream-like imagery of surrealism and the experiments of camera-less photography to the precision of the ‘new vision’, through which photographers transformed the world around them into formal compositions of light and shadow. Modernism was a catalyst, an international tendency that allowed artists to view their own environments in new ways. It can be seen from St Ives to Japan, with schools such as the Bauhaus in Germany functioning as centres for these emerging ideas. Loosely arranged geographically, The Modern Lens demonstrates the significance of local perspectives within the universal agendas of modernism.

Tate Museum

Porthmeor Beach, St Ives
Cornwall TR26 1TG United Kingdom
Ph. +44 (0)17 36796226
visiting.stives@tate.org.uk
www.tate.org.uk

Opening hours

March - October
Tuesday - Sunday
From 10.00am to 5.20pm

November – February
Tuesday – Sunday
From 10.00am to 4.20pm

Admission

£7.00
£4.50 concessions
Free to 18s and under and Members

Related images
  1. Fernand Léger, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand, Les Objets à Réaction Poetique 1931 – 6, 25 photographs, gelatine silver print on paper, 5.4 x 5.4 cm, © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014
  2. Geraldo de Barros b.1923, Granada, Spain 1951, Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, 40 x 29.9 cm, Lent by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions, committee 2010, © Fabiana de Barros
  3. Claude Cahun 1894-1954, I Extend My Arms 1931 or 1932, Photograph, black and white, on paper, 21 x 15.6 cm, Tate, © The estate of Claude Cahun
  4. György Kepes, 1906-2001, Hand on Black Ground c. 1939-40, Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 30.4 x 25.4 cm, Tate, © estate of György Kepes
  5. Harry Callahan (1912 – 1999), Eleanor 1949, Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, 33.9 x 27.8 cm, Lent by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery 2012, © The Estate of Harry Callahan; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York
  6. György Kepes, 1906-2001, Leaf and Prism 1938, Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, 34.8 x 27.7 cm, Tate, © estate of György Kepes