The exhibition "Berenice Abbott, Portraits of Modernity", proposes an exhaustive tour of the career of this American photographer. Her work, one of the most captivating of North American photography of the first half of the twentieth century, served as a bridge between the vanguard of the old continent and the growing artistic scene of the East Coast of the United States of the 1920s and 1930s.
Berenice Abbott (Springfield, Ohio, 1898 - Monson, Maine, 1991) was one of the most prominent American photographers of the first half of the 20th century, author of an urban and human radiography of the city of skyscrapers, New York.
 
Her portraits of contemporary artists and intellectuals and her vision of the transformations of the city of New York constitute an exceptional portrait of the modernity of the first half of the 20th century.
 
The idea of ​​modernity invades all of Abbott's work, from her portraits of the most avant-garde artists and intellectuals of the moment to her scientific-themed photographs (in which she captures the results of various phenomena and experiments) through her amazing views of the city from New York. It is an idea that is in turn a reflection of the modernity of the artist herself, with her avant-garde and audacious character, which allowed her to live her sexuality freely with her partner, the art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she would live for thirty years years.
 
The Mapfre Foundation exhibits in Barcelona 200 images (all vintage copies) of this photographer who captured the transformation of New York in the thirties and made impressive portraits.

The exhibition

The exhibition, structured in three thematic sections, covers her career through almost two hundred period photographs. In addition, eleven photographs by Eugène Atget, which were authored by Abbott herself at the end of the 1950s, are exposed in dialogue with her works.

The journey begins with the Portraits section, in which the images of the most groundbreaking characters of the time are integrated. Mainly, it portrays the life project of a group of which she is a part: that of the "new women", willing to live outside the conventions to safeguard their freedom. In the example of these portraits is the image of Janet Flanner in Paris.

In Cities, second group of photographs, Abbott's dazzling portrayal of New York during the 1930s is gathered. Before her goal, New York becomes a living being, an extraordinary character who discovers himself to his visitors with his Shocking skyscrapers, the bustle and its shop windows. She develops this project independently until, in 1935, she manages to finance it with the help of the Federal Art Project. These images are published in 1939 with the title Changing New York, achieving a great success of criticism and sales.

The last part of the exhibition concentrates her photographs of experiments and scientific phenomena. Abbott began working on them in the late 1950s when she was part of the Physical Science Study Committee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These photographs demonstrate, once again, the duality that runs through Abbott's work. Images that document physical phenomena but at the same time show the exquisite imagination and creativity of the photographer.

The exhibition's curator, Estrella de Diego, professor of Contemporary Art at the Complutense University of Madrid and member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, and Nadia Arroyo, Director of Culture of the Foundation, participated in the presentation of the exhibition. MAPFRE.

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Curator
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Estrella de Diego
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Dates
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Press conference.- February 19, 2019. Dates.- From February 20 to May 19
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Venue
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Fundación MAPFRE Casa Garriga Nogués, Carrer de la Diputació, 250. Barcelona.
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Production Coordinator
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Fundación MAPFRE
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Berenice Abbott. (Springfield, Ohio, 1898-Monson, Maine, 1991) begins her university studies with the intention of becoming a journalist. In 1918, she moved to New York and settled in the Greenwich Village, a stimulating meeting point for artists and intellectuals that facilitated her first contact with creators such as Marcel Duchamp, at this time she began to practice sculpture.

Three years later, she traveled to Europe and settled in Paris, where she began to work as an assistant in the studio of Man Ray and discovered her true vocation: photography. In the mid-1920s, Abbott met Eugène Atget and was impressed by his work; The qualities that she is able to perceive in her inspire from the beginning a deep respect for the French photographer and also provide her with an important reference in which to turn her aspirations as a photographer. After the death of the French photographer, Abbott buys all his personal file.

Her work is the subject of a retrospective exhibition in 1970 at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and in 1983 she became the first photographer admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1988 the French government named it Officier des Arts et Lettres and also received the Master of Photography award, granted by the International Center of Photography in New York.
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