Selections from the Daniel Cowin collection The years between the World Wars witnessed a burst of extraordinary innovation in visual culture, nowhere more so than in the realm of photography. Enthusiasm for the advent of an urban, technological civilization reached a peak during this period. By the late 1920s, in both Europe and America, a host of inventive young photographers—often allied with such avant-garde movements as Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and the New Objectivity—had created an

André Kertész (1894-1985) has been hailed as one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. Working intuitively, he captured the poetry of modern urban life with its quiet, often overlooked incidents and odd, occasionally comic, or even bizarre juxtapositions. He endeavored "to give meaning to everything" about him with his camera, "to make photographs as by reflection in a mirror, unmanipulated and direct as in life." Combining this seemingly artless spontaneity with a soph