Cubism and Abstract Art

Modern Art #1

by Alfred H. Barr Jr.

Originally published in 1936, in this classic account of the development of abstract art Alfred Barr analyses the many diverse abstract movements which emerged with bewildering rapidity in the early years of the twentieth century, and which had an impact on every major form of art. Barr traces the history of nonrepresentational art from its antecedents in late nineteenth-century painting in France – Seurat and Neo-Impressionism, Gauguin and Synthetism, and Cézanne – through abstract tendencies in Dada and Surrealism. He distinguishes two main trends in abstract the geometrical, structural current as it developed in Cubism and later in Constructivism and Mondrian, and the intuitional, decorative current running from Matisse and Fauvism through Kandinskt and, later, Surrealism. He shows how individual movements influenced one another, and how many artists experimented with more than one style. Barr also discusses the involvement of a number of abstract movements in architecture and the practical arts – the Bauhaus in Germany, de Stijl in Holland, Purism in France, and Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia.

Genres: Art, Architecture, Nonfiction, Design

258 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. (28 January 1902 -15 August 1981) known as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was an American art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

From that position, he was one of the most influential forces in the development of popular attitudes toward modern art; for example, his arranging of the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition of 1935, in the words of author Bernice Kert, was "a precursor to the hold Van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination."

Reviews

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an intelligent, insightful, focused look -- by a master, Alfred H. Barr -- at the development of Abstract Art from Modernism. It is well illustrated (though in black and white), so that his selections often make the points with greater clarity than his text -- though that, too, is fabulous. The book is short, heavily annotated and bibliographed.

5-stars hardly does it justice.