Preface by Lars Nittve

Preface

The City, Modernity and the Photograph – is this not the trinity that bears up the adventure that we call modern art?

It is the emergent metropolis that is the motor and medium of the modern avant-garde – a meeting place for people and a springboard for new ideas. The city and urban life have constantly made themselves felt in art since the middle of the century before last. It is from the city that we derive movement, straight lines, fragments and chequered patterns; one may indeed ask whether the new interest shown by landscape painters in nature in the wild was also a reaction to the inexorable artificiality of the modern city.

The city, its life and structure, had an influence on art – but our image of the city comes primarily from the photograph, that pictorial medium that obliged painters and sculptors to reappraise their activities. Paris, New York, Los Angeles – it is the photographers who have formed our image of these cities, of the boulevards with their cafés, of the burgeoning forest of skyscrapers and the unending pattern of squares that is the new city, megalopolis. And it is the photographers – Johannes Jaeger, Henry B Goodwin, K. W. Gullers, Lennart af Petersens and many others – who form our image of the city of Stockholm in a state of constant change; of the pompous, nationalistic buildings of the late nineteenth century, of the ever sunny welfare state and its murkier reverse: the architectonic purges, the uncontrolled demolition. But also of its people, of all the meetings – and the anonymity – which is the city’s contradictory signum.

It is a happy accident that the first preface I have occasion to write as director of Moderna Museet is for a photographic exhibition entitled “The city as space for living”. This marks, in a modest yet brilliant sense, the cultural and historical space that is Moderna Museet’s point of departure and its pre-condition. But it also marks an extremely important change in the museum since I was last here in the 1980s: photography is now a fully integral aspect of the museum’s collections and programme. We can now, side by side with the last century’s major painters and sculptors, view the photographs that revolutionized both art and our way of looking at and comprehending the world.

Lars Nittve
Director