"Places," as one might expect, explores locations that are both real and imagined through photos, architecture, and painting. Here again, artists practicing during the decades of nascent modernism--van Gogh, Gaugin, and art nouveau designer Hector Guimard, to name a few--are heavily represented. And here, too, later artists are mixed in to follow the trajectory of an idea: First Dream, a 1981 Bill Viola video set in the woods, is placed as a direct descendent of Eugène Atget's early-1920s images of trees in a suburban Parisian park.

"Things" is filled with objects raided from the museum's formidable design collection: Wright and Mackintosh chairs, a fireplace grille by Gaudí, a Tiffany lamp, a meat slicer designed by Egmont Arens in 1935, and Meret Oppenheim's fur-covered teacup set, along with representations of objects by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, and, much later, Michael Craig-Martin. This innovative method of looking at relatively well known images will stimulate readers to rethink the artistically fertile period of the early 20th century and its continued relevance to today's art. ModernStarts is a thick volume stocked with many more artworks than can be described here--over 450 in all--and serves as an excellent record of the era in which artistic modernism found its footing. --Jordana Moskowitz