Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925 explores the development of abstraction from the moment of its declaration around 1912 to its establishment as the foundation of avant-garde practice in the mid-1920s. The book brings together many of the most influential works in abstraction's early history to draw a cross-media portrait of this watershed moment in which traditional art was reinvented in a wholesale way. Works are presented in groups that serve as case studies, each engaging a key topic in abstraction's first years: an artist, a movement, an exhibition or thematic concern. Key focal points include Vasily Kandinsky's ambitious Compositions V, VI and VII; a selection of Piet Mondrian's work that offers a distilled narrative of his trajectory to Neo-plasticism; and all the extant Suprematist pictures that Kazimir Malevich showed in the landmark `0.10' exhibition in 1915.

Author Biography

Leah Dickerman has been Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art since 2008. Her scholarship on the historical avant-garde appears in a broad range of publications. She earned her doctorate in art history from Columbia University, and has held faculty teaching positions at Stanford University and the University of Delaware.