Cubism and Abstract Art

New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936. Origianl Edition April 1936. Hardcover. VG a solid and tight, internally clean copy with light soiling and age-toning to the covers and fading to the spine, tiny ding to top edge of front cover. Tan cloth with red-orange lettering. 249 pp. 223 BW plates. Catalogue of 386 works, with brief biographies of the artists, extensive bibliography, and 180-page essay by Alfred Barr, Jr. Covers topics such as Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Neo-Pasticism, Purism, abstract art in Paris, Russia, Germany, Holland. Also includes sections on abstract films, photography, Dadaism, abstract tendencies in (truncated) Surrealist art, the Bauhaus, and Brancusi. 3000 copies printed. This copy includes a photocopy of the front panel diagram from the original dustjacket and a photocopy of an article from 1966 detailing the inadequacies of the original edition as well as the reprint edition of this (an other) volumes by MOMA. Exceptionally scarce, a very nice copy with very light soiling and light foxing to the covers. Also includes a photocopy of the original errata sheet. "Arraying words and arrows in an art historical 2-space, Alfred Barr's famous diagram illuminated the influential exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. Set in appropriately modern Futura type, the art chart simultaneously served as a beautiful cover for the catalog, a table of contents for the show, an organizing history of the art displayed in the museum, and a symbol of the entire enterprise. Barr, then Director of the Museum of Modern Art, imaginatively replaced the conventional typographic catalog-cover with a provocative flow chart, a didactic genealogy of interacting isms" (Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, p.65). (Inventory #: 176583)