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20TH CENTURY MOVEMENTS

PUBLISHER
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9.5 x 12 in. / 312 pgs / 344 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2020 p. 66   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781633451087 TRADE
List Price: $75.00 CAD $108.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

New York, NY
The Museum of Modern Art, 05/10/20–09/12/20

THE FALL 2024 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG

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Preview our FALL 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
  

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented

1918–1938

Edited by Jodi Hauptman, Adrian Sudhalter. Text by Jenny Anger, Barbora Bartunkova, Barry Bergdoll, Benjamin Buchloh, Jane Cavalier, Masha Chlenova, Jean-Louis Cohen, Olivia Crough, Lee Ann Daffner, Noam Elcott, Katie Farris, Devin Fore, Maria Gough, Ilya Kaminsky, William Kentridge, Christina Kiaer, Juliet Kinchin, Iva Knobloch, Juliet Koss, Megan Luke, Ellen Lupton, Erika Mosier, Chris McGlinchey, Laura Neufeld, Libby Otto, Kristin Romberg, Jeffrey Schnapp, Martino Stierli, Jenny Tobias, Robert Wiesenberger, Andrés Zervigón.

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented

How the modernist avant-gardes from Dada to constructivism reconceived their roles, working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, graphic designers, curators and more, to create new visual languages for a radically changed world

“We regarded ourselves as engineers, we maintained that we were building things … we put our works together like fitters.” So declared the artist Hannah Höch, describing a radically new approach to artmaking in the 1920s and ’30s. Such wholesale reinvention of the role of the artist and the functions of art took place in lockstep with that era’s shifts in industry, technology, and labor, and amid the profound impact of momentous events: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of fascism. Highlighting figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, John Heartfield and Fré Cohen, and European avant-gardes of the interwar years—Dada, the Bauhaus, futurism, constructivism and de Stijl—Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented demonstrates the ways in which artists reimagined their roles to create a dynamic art for a new world.

These “engineers,” “agitators,” “constructors,” “photomonteurs,” “workers”—all designations adopted by the artists themselves—turned away from traditional forms of painting and sculpture and invented new visual languages. Central among them was photomontage, in which photographs and images from newspapers and magazines were cut, remixed, and pasted together. Working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, editors, architects, theater designers and curators, these artists engaged with expanded audiences in novel ways, establishing distinctive infrastructures for presenting and distributing their work.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition, Engineer, Agitator, Constructor marks the transformative addition to MoMA from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, one of the great private collections of political art. Illuminating the essential role of women in avant-garde activities while mapping vital networks across Europe, this richly illustrated book presents the social engagement, fearless experimentation and utopian aspirations that defined the early 20th century, and how these strategies still reverberate today.


Featured image is reproduced from 'Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented.'

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

ARLIS/NA Reviews

Barbara Ann Opar

Stunning rarely seen images and a well-constructed text about known and lesser known artists and works of the early twentieth-century avant-garde help shape this exhibition catalog [... ]the overall book manages to convey a cohesive picture of the collection, movements, and artists represented ...made art for a changing world through activism, agitation, propaganda, use of technological innovations, advertising, and marketing.

Architectural Record

Looks at the reinvention of the role of the artist and the functions of art that took place in tandem with historical shifts in industry, technology. and labor amidst the impact of World War I...

Wall Street Journal

Karen Wilkin

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, at the Museum of Modern Art, explores the ways, in the 1920s and ’30s, adventurous art was put into the service of politics and social change in Soviet Russia, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and elsewhere in Europe.

New York Times

Rachel Saltz

Superabundant and full of eye-opening creative churn.

New Yorker

Peter Schjeldahl

The scope is encyclopedic, surveying a time when individuals sacrificed their artistic independence to ideological programs of mass appeal [...]That needn't constitute a failure. It may be a clear-eyed choice made on principle.

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented

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