Some exhibitions confirm your view of an artist. Others enlarge or alter what you thought you knew. And still others make you question what once seemed to be perfectly sound opinions. “Looking at Atget,” the modest but notably thoughtful photography exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until November 27, does all of these.[1] To begin with, the show is not simply another overview of Eugène Atget’s images, pleasurable as that might be, but rather an inquiry into how this mysterious artist’s work has been perceived, during his lifetime and after. The “looking” of the title refers particularly to the viewpoint of the two Americans most responsible for establishing Atget’s international reputation, the photographer Berenice Abbott and the collector-dealer-champion of Surrealism Julian Levy. Through an engaging mix of Atget’s signature images and less familiar ones,...

 

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