Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
The Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) was undoubtedly one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. After training as a painter with André Lhote in Montparnasse and moving in Surrealist circles in Paris he decided, when he was twenty-three, to embrace photography. As a pioneer of photo reporting—and his early use of 35 mm film—he popularized the use of the camera to capture surprisingly natural snapshots of people, events or even the gist of a character. In 1947 he was a founding member of Magnum Photos, the international agency with offices in Paris, London, New York, and Tokyo.
The exhibition arrived in Buenos Aires by means of the North American John Szarkowski (1925–2007), a lifelong photographer, curator, and art and history critic; he was the director of the photographic department at MoMA from 1962 to 1991. His catalogue production was considerable.
The exhibition of photographs from the MoMA collection that was held at the CAYC demonstrates the level of exchange in progress between these two institutions that was built on what had come before. In the early 1960s the academic and art theorist Jorge Romero Brest reached out to the Program for the Promotion of Modern Art in Latin America, a project run by MoMA’s international council.
