Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, Hungary
André Kertész American, born Hungary
Not on view
This tiny but iconic masterpiece of twentieth-century photography is the second earliest work in the exhibition, and a gem in the Tenenbaum and Lee collection. Made while André Kertész was convalescing from a gunshot wound received while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, it prefigures by some fifteen years his renowned mirror distortions produced in Paris. Displaying both Cubist and Surrealist influences, the photograph reveals the artist’s commitment to the spontaneous yet analytic observation of fleeting commonplace occurrences—one of the essential and most idiosyncratic qualities of the medium.
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