Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 How a radical idea changed modern art

Three quarters of a century after Alfred Barr, founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, mounted the landmark 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, MoMA curator Dickerman returns to the realm with a vast exhibition and comprehensive catalogue depicting the incipient stages of abstraction in the plastic arts. Situating the movement from representation toward abstraction as a synchronic historical moment, as well as one of modernism's principal activities, this Eurocentric organizational feat elaborates a network based on cross talk, spontaneity, and simultaneous development. The front endpapers of the catalogue offer a graphic spread that plays off Barr's legendary chart--the cover to his exhibition's catalogue--a canonical lineage of begotten isms. Dickerman's updated diagram turns readers' view to a distributed web of networks and memes in an endeavor that highlights connectivity over paternity. Even with its intended catholic approach, painting and the two-dimensional flattened spatial constructs of pictorial space overwhelmingly predominate. Music is accorded a seminal role; sculpture and film are underrepresented; typographic space and artists' books are thankfully recognized. A terrific collection of diverse short essays by nearly 30 scholars complement this intelligently edited, well-illustrated, and indispensable resource. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers. E. Baden Warren Wilson College