Books in the MoMA One on One Series series

During the 1920s, Georgia O'Keeffe became widely-known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, and these canvases arguably remain her most iconic today. But she regularly returned to abstraction?the language of her breakthrough drawings from the 1910s. Executed in 1927, Abstraction Blue retains the glowing color, careful modulation, and zoomed-in view of the artist's contemporaneous blooms, while foregoing any obligation toward representation. In this volume of the MoMA One on One series, curator Samantha Friedman considers how these and other factors converged in the creation of this composition.

The latest addition to MoMA's One on One series.

"In the mid-1950s Robert Rauschenberg began making what he called "Combines"--Radically experimental works that mix paint and other art materials with things found in daily life. These hybrid creations offered a dramatic counterpoint to the gestural abstraction that prevailed in contemporary American painting. Canyon (1959), one of the artist's best-known Combines, is a large canvas bearing paint, a postcard, a man's shirt, photographs, newspaper clippings, wood, a flattened metal can and paint tube, a piece of glass, and, thrusting out from its surface, a stuffed bald eagle. Leah Dickerman's essay examines the genesis of this startling and enigmatic work and positions it within a key period in Rauschenberg's groundbreaking career."--Publisher's description.

New in MoMA's 'One on One' series, this book focuses on Betye Saar's Black Girl's Window (1969) and a selection of the artist's prints from the 1960s and early 1970s . Betye Saar made Black Girl's Window in 1969. It is a deeply autobiographical picture that alluded to her African-American heritage along with her interest in mysticism and astrology. The black girl named in the title appears in the lower half of this found window frame. The girl's facial features are hidden. The only thing there are these surprisingly bright blue eyes, which appear to open and close if you shift back and forth in front of it. The work encourages us to think about connections between eyes, that are often said to be windows on the soul, and pictures, that have been said to be windows on the world. Saar herself once said that she considers windows to represent a means of traveling from one level of consciousness to another. If you continue to look at the girl, you can see that her hands are covered with yellow and red symbols. Some of these same symbols, in particular the crescent moon and the stars, are echoed in the nine small vignettes created in the spaces outlined by the intersecting crossbars of her found window frame.

A dancer, designer, puppet maker, sculptor and painter at the heart of the Zurich Dada movement, Taeuber-Arp made Head in the wake of World War I, during a time of profound political and cultural self-questioning. Almost a century later, her witty wooden figure has lost none of its punch as an investigation of art across aesthetic and material boundaries rather than within them.

A close reading of Helen Levitt's famous photograph of three children at play on a New York stoop

An abiding image of American racial segregation from 1950s New Orleans

Delves into various aspects of the artist Henri Rousseau's oeuvre and places the work in a broader social and art-historical context.

Diane Radycki is an art historian (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1993) and specializes in European art from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Her scholarship focuses on the work of women artists in this period.

"Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditaion on a single work from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art"--Front cover, inside flap.

Roberts' essay moves between the public and the private as it situates Kahlo's painting in the context of the Mexican Revolution's legacy, the Surrealist tradition and the artist's own life to explore the ways in which Kahlo constructed and reconstructed her own identity.