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 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)