Exhibition "André Steiner. Le corps entre désir et dépassement" at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme

André Steiner came to photography out of a passion for his future wife and for the sport he loved, and expressed his talent by capturing nude bodies in motion in Paris between the wars.

Born in Hungary in 1901, he was one of the very first users of a Leica in 1924, entrusted to him as part of his scientific training at Vienna's prestigious Technische Universität. He produced a series of nudes of Léa Sasson, known as Lily, his future wife. In 1928, he left Vienna for Paris due to the rise of anti-Semitism in Austria.

Having abandoned his work as a sound engineer, André Steiner chose to devote himself entirely to photography, exploring its possibilities to the full. He opened a studio and began collaborating with the press. His modern experimentation with the medium made him one of the proponents of the Germanic "New Vision" aesthetic, which he helped to disseminate in France.

A decathlon champion at the 1928 World University Games, and a swimming coach in Vienna at the Jewish sports club Hakoah ("Strength" in Hebrew), André Steiner devoted himself in Paris to sports photography, as yet little explored. He became a specialist in the moving body and the nude. A follower of the communist ideal - he took part in Hungary's short-lived Republic of Councils in 1919 - he saw the photographed body as both an individual and social manifesto. In the 1930s, this moral conception of the body was shared by VU, for which André Steiner took photos of sport and dance, helping to forge the magazine's singular style.

In 1939, the photographer enlisted in the French Air Force. Demobilized in 1940, threatened as a Jew and a foreigner, he left Paris for the Midi, then joined the Resistance. After the war, André Steiner became a French citizen. Back in Paris, he specialized in photography applied to technology and science. He died in Paris in 1978.

Presented as part of the Cultural Olympiad, this exhibition is made possible by exceptional loans from the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône and the Musée national d'art moderne - center Pompidou.