Books published by Museum of Modern Art

The authors are all curators at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Shifts the dialogue about modernist photography from an emphasis on the subject and the image to the actual photographic object, created by a certain artist at a particular time and present today in its unique physicality.

Design and Violence.

In 2022, The Museum of Modern Art and the Statens Museum for Kunst will present an ambitious dossier exhibition focusing on Henri Matisse's Red Studio from 1911. The large painting depicts the artist's work environment in Issy-les-Moulineaux, crowded with his own canvases, sculptures, furniture and decorative objects. Matisse's radical decision to saturate the work's surface with red has continued to fascinate generations of scholars and artists. Yet much remains to be explored in terms of the painting's genesis and history. This show presents a unique opportunity to assess Matisse's painting anew. The first gallery of the exhibition will reunite The Red Studio - in MoMA's collection since 1949 - with the works depicted in it (three of them belong to the Statens Museum for Kunst). Ranging from 1898 to 1911, they span the artist's career up to that date and combine both familiar and lesser-known pieces. The second gallery of the exhibition will retrace the painting's complex history, from the artist's studio in the Parisian suburb to its subsequent international travels and reception. We will explore, for example, how The Red Studio was originally conceived for the Muscovite collector Sergei Shchukin; how it was later included in the famous 1913 Armory Show; how it was on display for fifteen years on the walls of a London social club; and its eventual acquisition by MoMA. A rich selection of archival materials such as photographs, catalogues, letters, and press clippings will join artworks by Matisse and others on display.

Towards the end of her life, Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) remarked that "all photographs-not only those that are so-called 'documentary,' and every photograph really is documentary and belongs in some place, has a place in history-can be fortified by words." Though Lange's career is widely heralded, this connection between words and pictures has received scant attention. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this catalogue provides a fresh approach to some of her best-known and beloved photographs, highlighting the ways in which these images first circulated in magazines, government reports, books, etc. An introductory text by curator Sarah Hermanson Meister will be followed by plates organized according to "words" from a variety of sources that expand our understanding of the photographs. The featured photographs will range from Lange's first engagement with documentary photography in San Francisco in the early-mid 1930s, including her iconic White Angel Breadline (1933), to landmark photographs she made for the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) such as Migrant Mother (1936), powerful photographs made during World War II in California's internment camps for Japanese-Americans, major photo-essays published in Life magazine on Mormon communities in Utah (in 1954) and County Clare, Ireland (in 1955), and quietly damning photographs made in the Berryessa Valley in 1956-57, before the region was flooded by the construction of a dam intended to address California's chronic water shortages. Exhibition opens December 2019.

"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.

Having trained with modern masters from the late 1940s to mid-1950s, Lygia Clark was at the forefront of Constructivist and Neo-Concretist movements in Brazil. This title examines Clarks output from her early abstract compositions to the biological architectures and relational objects she created late in her career.

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

What is a print? This title intends to answer that question by exploring the four basic printmaking techniques - woodcut, intaglio, lithography and screenprint - that have been used to create some of the most iconic images in modern art, from Paul Gauguin's "Noa Noa" to Andy Warhol's "Marilyn Monroe".

Offers a generational perspective on the 20th century's most influential experiment in artistic education. This book brings together works in a broad range of mediums, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre and costume design, and painting and sculpture.

Foreword by Arthur Drexler. Introduction by Vincent Scully.

Just Above Midtown, or JAM, was an art gallery and self-described laboratory for experimentation led by Linda Goode Bryant that foregrounded African American artists and artists of color. Open from 1974 to 1986, it was a place where an expansive idea of contemporary art flourished and debate was cultivated. The gallery offered early opportunities for artists recognized as pivotal figures in late-20th-century art--including David Hammons, Butch Morris, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady and Howardena Pindell--as well as a nonhierarchical approach to art that welcomed artists without stylistic proscription. Published in conjunction with the first museum exhibition to focus on this gallery and its ongoing impact, this book showcases rarely seen material from JAM's history--artworks, ephemera and photographs--that collectively document the gallery's communal and programmatic activities. It includes essays that contextualize JAM and consider its legacy, a conversation between Goode Bryant and Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, a complete exhibition chronology written by MoMA and Studio Museum staff with nearly 50 annotated entries, and excerpts from oral histories with JAM staff and artists conducted especially for this project.

"The photographer Ming Smith has practiced her craft for more than fifty years, producing a body of work distinguished by its uncanny merging of subject and style. Her Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere (1991) was made in the depths of winter. Depicting a lone figure whose form dissolves into the ink-black shadows of a frigid city street at night, the photograph testifies to the artist's lifelong entanglement with the truths and tensions that animate African American experiences. This latest volume in MoMA's One on One series invites readers to discover, through the close reading of one picture, Smith's ethereal yet enduring contributions to the history of photography."-- Page 4 of cover.

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 Ivorian artist Frâedâeric Bruly Bouabrâe created an unmistakable and entirely unique body of work, first as a writer and linguist, and then in a dazzling series of colorful drawings on a multitude of subjects, from his native Bâetâe culture to the urban milieu of Abidjan to the all-encompassing themes of fraternity, equality and global understanding. All but unknown even in his home country of Cãote d'Ivoire, Bouabrâe found international recognition in 1989 when he participated in the landmark Paris exhibition Magiciens de la terre, and his work has since been the subject of solo and group exhibitions around the world. Published to accompany the first museum survey of Bouabrâe's work in North America, this catalog offers a vivid account of the artist's long and multifaceted career, including a detailed chronology of his life and reproductions of more than six hundred of his drawings. An essay by curator Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi introduces Bouabrâe to a new audience, illuminating his significance as both an important African creator and one of the most intriguing artists of the 20th century."--Page 4 of cover.

South Asia holds a unique place among the many regions of the world where modern architecture was understood as both a tool for social progress and a global lingua franca in the second half of the 20th century. Following the end of British rule in 1947-48, architects in the newly formed nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh (East Pakistan until 1971) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) proposed a novel understanding of modernity, disrupting the colonial hierarchy of center and periphery by challenging modernism's universalist claims. Architecture offered multiple ways to break with the colonial past. Through the establishment of institutions that embodied the societal aspirations of the period, and the creation of new cities and spaces for political representation, South Asian architects produced a body of work in dialogue with global developments while advancing the theory and practice of low-cost, climatically and socially responsive design. Anchored by a newly commissioned portfolio of images from architectural photographer Randhir Singh, this catalog features essays by the curators and scholars in the field on subjects such as the politics of concrete, institution-building, higher education, housing, infrastructure and industry, landscape and design, as well as presentations of 17 projects from around the subcontinent. While several of the architects appearing in these pages have in recent years received monographic exhibitions, The Project of Independence marks the first attempt to consider their work within the ideological frameworks of its creation and the political context of the region as a whole.--Dust jacket.

Published to accompany a major traveling exhibition, this small volume presents the 34 drawings Rauschenberg made for each canto of Dante's Inferno. Between 1958 and 1960, Robert Rauschenberg made drawings for each of the thirtyfour cantos, or sections, of Dante's fourteenth-century poem Inferno by using a novel technique to transfer photographic reproductions from magazines or newspapers onto paper. Acquired by The Museum of Modern Art soon after it was completed, the resulting work is his most sustained exercise in the medium of drawing and a testament to Rauschenberg's desire to bring his experience of the contemporary world into his art. The drawings weave together meditations on public and private spheres, politics and inner life. Above all, they pay homage to creativity in dialogue: each drawing is a conversation with Dante across the centuries. This volume includes newly commissioned poems by Robin Coste Lewis and Kevin Young that offer contemporary responses to Rauschenberg's celebrated series and an essay by MoMA curator Leah Dickerman that explores its making in depth.