Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

High Museum of Art
1280 Peachtree Street, NE
February 16–May 15, 2011

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
July 24–October 3, 2010

MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
April 11–June 21, 2010

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
151 Third Street
March 17, 2010–January 30, 2011

Curated by Peter Galassi

Long canonized through his street photographs’ articulation of the “decisive moment,” pioneering photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is now the subject of a three-hundred-print retrospective. Although he documented many of the social shifts around the world between the 1930s and the ’70s, it is primarily his portrait of the quotidian life of postwar Europe, imbued with charm and sentiment, that has seemingly endured. The exhibition’s inclusion of his reportage from China, India, and elsewhere promises to expand our understanding of his oeuvre, but it is just one of the opportunities the show offers to renew HCB’s legacy in a present whose most innovative photography is premeditated and straddles fact and fiction.

— Stephen Frailey

“Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917”

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
March 20–June 20, 2010

MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
July 18–October 11, 2010

Curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro and John Elderfield

The formula is virtually ideal: Subject a landmark painting to long, deep analysis both historical and forensic—with the close collaboration of the conservation studio—and use those findings to reinterpret a crucial body of the artist’s work. If the painting in question is Henri Matisse’s Bathers by a River, which the artist reworked multiple times between 1909 and 1917, the results promise to be thrilling. Well over a hundred objects from the 1910s in all media will be assembled for this joint project between the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. No shortage of ingenuity and expertise will be lavished on a sustained consideration of the artist’s working process, characterized during this phase by searching, self-critical analysis of his slow progress.

— Jeffrey Weiss