Foam, Amsterdam

Foam presents a retrospective exhibition of the photographer, filmmaker and graphic designer William Klein. His work had an great influence on photography during the second half of the twentieth century. The exhibition gives ample coverage to Klein’s ground-breaking work in New York in the 1950s while also displaying work made in Rome, Moscow and Tokyo.

William Klein (1928) was a great innovator in the field of fashion photography. His early experiments with abstract photography, and his more recent large-scale, painted-on contact prints will be on view at Foam. A selection of Klein‘s feature films and documentaries will be shown in Foam‘s 3h library space.

In the years following the Second World War, William Klein settled in Paris, where he studied with Fernand Leger. He later met Alexander Liberman, the legendary art director of the American magazine Vogue. Via Libermann, Klein went to work for Vogue and earned a name for himself with his ambivalent and ironic view of the fashion world. Much of this work was just as ground-breaking and controversial as his so-called independent work, which he was doing at the same time, and is now considered one of the milestones of fashion photography.

William Klein has also been innovative and influential in the field of film. Since the 1960s he has made many feature films and documentaries, such as Who Are You, Polly Magoo, Cassius the Great, Mr. Freedom and Le Couple Témoin. He also has directed more than 250 commercials. Klein has received a number of prestigious awards for his work, including the Prix Nadar, the Hasselblad Award and last year the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award in the annual Sony World Photography Awards. William Klein’s work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries worldwide, such as in Italy, France, Russia, Spain and Germany. A retrospective exhibition of his work was on show at the Tate Museum in London until the beginning of this year.

• Artists:
  William Klein
•  
• Open:
  Friday, 20 December 2013
• Close:
  Wednesday, 12 March 2014
• Address:
  Foam, Keizersgracht 609, 1017 DS Amsterdam
• Mail:
   info@foam.nl
• Phone:
  +31 20 5516500
• Web:
  Foam
• Opening hour:
  Open daily 10 am – 6 pm, Thu | Fri 10 am – 9 pm
• Photo credits:
  William Klein: Smoke + Veil, Paris 1958 © William Klein, Gun 1; William Klein: NY 1955 (painted 2005) © William Klein