Michael Taylor

In 1912, in several European cities, a handful of artists--Vasily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Francis Picabia and Robert Delaunay--presented the first abstract pictures to the public. Inventing Abstraction , published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, celebrates the centennial of this bold new type of artwork. It traces the development of abstraction as it moved through a network of modern artists, from Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp to Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, sweeping across nations and across media. This richly illustrated publication covers a wide range of artistic production--including paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, film, photography, sound poetry, atonal music and non-narrative dance--to draw a cross-media portrait of these watershed years. An introductory essay by Leah Dickerman, Curator in the Museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture, is followed by focused studies of key groups of works, events and critical issues in abstraction’s early history by renowned scholars from a variety of fields.

“Vivid with a Mesozoic bestiary” (Tom Holland), this on-the-ground, page-turning narrative weaves together the chance discovery of dinosaurs and the rise of the secular age. When the twelve-year-old daughter of a British carpenter pulled some strange-looking bones from the country’s southern shoreline in 1811, few people dared to question that the Bible told the accurate history of the world. But Mary Anning had in fact discovered the “first” dinosaur, and over the next seventy-five years―as the science of paleontology developed, as Charles Darwin posited radical new theories of evolutionary biology, and as scholars began to identify the internal inconsistencies of the Scriptures―everything changed. Beginning with the archbishop who dated the creation of the world to 6 p.m. on October 22, 4004 BC, and told through the lives of the nineteenth-century men and women who found and argued about these seemingly impossible, history-rewriting fossils, Impossible Monsters reveals the central role of dinosaurs and their discovery in toppling traditional religious authority, and in changing perceptions about the Bible, history, and mankind’s place in the world. 40 illustrations