Masterpiece Theater Redux: “Chefs-d’œuvre photographiques du MoMA : la collection Thomas Walther”, Jeu de Paume, September 14, 2021 to February 13, 2022

Anmerkungen

[1] Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the long-planned colloquium had been postponed several times. Thus, when it was finally able tobe convened, the exhibition at the Jeu de Paume had already opened. The only, albeit distant, overlap between the colloquium and exhibition was the virtual contribution of Mitra Abbaspour, who during her previous tenure at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was involved in an ambitious multi-directional digitalization of the photographs MoMA had acquired from Walther. Her contribution was among a four-part, or rather, four-person presentation discussing ongoing digitalization projects within four institutions.Search in Google Scholar

[2] Quentin Bajac, Michel Frizot, Sarah Hermanson Meister: Chefs-d’œuvre photographiques du MoMA : la collection Thomas Walther / Photographic Masterpieces of MoMA. The Thomas Walther Collection, exh. cat. Jeu de Paume, Paris, September 14, 2021 – February 13, 2022, Paris: Les presses du réel 2021. The collector is tobe confused with the German Artur Walther, whose fortune was acquired during his years at Goldman Sachs and who, after his retirement, acquired a massive collection of German and subsequently, African photography, now housed in his private museum in Neu-Ulm (Burlafingen).Search in Google Scholar

[3] Officially, the Jeu de Paume is La Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, a non-profit association (L’association loi de 1901) supported by the French Ministry of Culture. From 2006 to 2018, between 60–70 % of its budget came from the Ministry and public resources; the remainder from its own resources (sponsorship, bookstore and ticketing). As opposed to this structure, the dodgy financing and tax arrangements of François Pinault’s contemporary museum at the Bourse de Commerce, for example, have been examined in Le Monde. See Jean-Michel Tobelem: “Collection Pinault : ‘Le choix d’une fondation aurait été plus en phase avec un projet muséal qui s’affiche comme généreux et désintéressé’ ”, in: Le Monde, June 24, 2021, https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2021/06/24/collection-pinault-le-choix-d-une-fondationaurait-ete-plus-en-phase-avec-projet-museal-qui-s-affichecomme-genereux-et-desinteresse_6085569_3232.html (last accessed 15.03.2021).Search in Google Scholar

[4] Which ironically rhymes with Moholy-Nagy’s “Photography was invented a hundred years ago, but has only just been truly discovered,” – I quote from one of the exhibition’s wall labels.Search in Google Scholar

[5] One of the colloquium’s contributors, Isabella Seniuta, an assistant curator at the Centre Pompidou, made no mention of these connections in her paper on the role of the Zabriskie Gallery which had branches in Paris and New York and contributed to a heightened interest in surrealist photography in the 1970s and 1980s. (Rosalind Krauss, one of Virginia Zabriskie’s friends, who was a major force in its re-evaluation, possibly profited from Zabriskie’s photographic collection just as reciprocally, Zabriskie might have profited from Krauss’ research and scholarship.)Search in Google Scholar

[6] Uniquely among the visual arts, the medium is thought to produce singular (by which I mean individual) masterpieces, even anonymous ones.Search in Google Scholar

[7] See my essay “Calotypomania. The Gourmet Guide to Nineteenth-Century Photography”, in: Abigail Solomon-Godeau (ed.): Photography at the Dock. Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practices, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1991, pp. 4–27.Search in Google Scholar

[8] Correspondence with the MoMA, November 2021.Search in Google Scholar

[9] “Introduction”, in: Quentin Bajac, Michel Frizot, and Sarah Meister (ed.): Masterworks of Modern Photography 1900– 1940. The Thomas Walther Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, exh. cat. Jeu de Paume, Paris, September 14, 2021 – February 13, 2022, Mailand: Silvana 2021.Search in Google Scholar

[10] For Artur Walther, in shopping expeditions for Chinese photography and videos, he had as his Cicerone the historian of photography Christopher Phillips; when his interests turned to African photography, he was accompanied in his travels by the late curator Okwui Enwezor.Search in Google Scholar

[11] I am assuming it is hardly necessary to reiterate Newhall’s role in the institutional shaping of photographic history, but Christopher Phillip’s now foundational essay on the subject is readily accessible. See Christopher Phillip: “The Judgement Seat of Photography”, in: Richard Bolton (ed.): The Contest of Meaning. Critical Histories of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1989, pp. 15–48.Search in Google Scholar

[12] After Chéroux’s departure from the Centre Pompidou, the museum hired Florian Ebner, then the photography curator at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, from 2012 to 2017.Search in Google Scholar