Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925

Celebrates the centennial of modernism's most important innovation: abstraction

Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925 explores the development of abstraction from the moment of its declaration around 1912 by pioneering figures such as Vasily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka and the Delaunays, through its establishment as the foundation of avant-garde practice in the mid-1920s. This 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.