Cubism and Abstract Art: Painting, Sculpture, Constructions, Photography, Architecture, Industrial Art, Theatre, Films, Posters, Typography.

Bookseller Notes

A lavish catalogue for an important exhibition - the publication principally of note from a design point of view for the curator's diagram on the dustjacket's front panel, charting the development of abstract art from the 1890s through to the present day.Edward Tufte, assessing it from an infographic point of view, writes: 'Arraying words and arrows in an art historical 2-space, Alfred Barr's famous diagram [...] 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 [...] imaginatively replaced the conventional typographic catalog-cover with a provocative flow chart, a didactic genealogy of interacting isms' (p. 65).This is the best example we have seen.