Customer Reviews

Drawing from The Modern, Volume I: 1880-1940

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I purchased book 1 & 2 from Amazon. The illustrations are far too small to be a professionally represented art book from MOMA I've decided to save my money rather than pay out for the 3rd edition. It sounds a good buy from its description but I don't consider this trilogy to be very satisfactory.

This is not a good artbook. The images are way too small to be satisfying. This book could have been great, but falls way short of its potential. Don't buy it, you will be disappointed.

DRAWING from the MODERN is the first of a three part series published by MOMA as catalogue to accompany the chronologically arranged exhibitions of their drawing collection; in part, celebration of the seventy fifth anniversary of the founding of the Museum.

This first book looks at the late nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth. Care and preservation of these drawings dictate that they are displayed infrequently, paper being a delicate medium, subject to fading, discoloration and brittleness. The publication of this series then allows us to have at hand a history of drawings seldom seen, and a visual education demonstrating how problems of that era both evolved and worked themselves out.

The introduction by Jodi Hauptman is broad and well worth reading. Aside from her entertaining "end of art" stories, she addresses artists and process leading to the dissolution of prevalent notions: relationship of "mark" to "ground", took new form; spatial notions of an orderly page, questioned; the element of chance, explored as process; the ego relationship of an artist to work, dissolving. New imagery happened: collage, abstraction, grids, enhanced emotions, metaphors of feeling, the sublime re-imaged. New subjects explored brutalities of war, notions of "city", identity, the spiritual, and the abstract.

As perhaps with all process of art, the uncertainty of change brought forth much that is new. The 139 plates of drawings both demonstrate and give testimony by leading artists of the time to new era in process. Drawing as subject matter is fascinating. To be expected, the book is well printed. Of course, what is book one without book two and three?

Nancy Gutrich