BARR, Alfred H., Jr, Cubism and Abstract Art

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936

4to; pp. 249, numerous text illustrations

The exhibition 'Cubism and Abstract Art' itself was a wide-ranging survey of modern art, with some 400 works, including a sculpture by Calder suspended outside the entrance to the museum. This volume has become famous for Barr's diagrammatic representation of the various 'isms' of the avant-garde. Here is Edward Tufte, historian of graphic representation:

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 (Beautiful Evidence, p. 65).

We have found that the jacket exists in two states. This first state has no arrow between 'Machine Esthetic' and 'Futurism', but this defect has been remedied with a red pencil arrow, as in all copies that we have seen, including the archive copy of the book in MoMA's own collection, where the correction is itself circled with pencil, likely indicating the mistake for the printer in preparation of the (more common) second state.

The jacket is in excellent condition with only some slight age-toning, fading to the spine, and a flattened crease to the rear cover; there are three very small closed nicks along the front bottom and rear upper edge; but see photographs for a better sense of the condition; internally bright and clean throughout, noting only some bleed from the glue holding the errata slip (which is now loose); very faint spotting to fore-edges. Copies of the catalogue with the dustjacket are scarce in any condition: this copy's dust-jacket the best we have ever seen on the market.