The Modern Drawing; 100 Works on Paper from The Museum of Modern Art

New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1983. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Mali Olatunji. The format is approximately 9.75 by 12.5 inches. 215, [1]] pages. 100 Illustrations (most in full color). DJ has some wear and soiling. DJ has color illustrations front and back. This is an oversized book and if sent outside of the United States would require an additional shipping charge. Contents are Introduction, The Modern Drawing, and Index of Artists. Artists include Arp, Beckmann, Cezanne, Joseph Cornell, Dali, Degas, Robert Delaunay, Otto Dix, Jasper Johns, Paul Klee, de Kooning, Picabia, Picasso, Pollock, Kurt Schwitters, and others. Measures 10x12.5 inches. 216p. 100 Color illustrations. Large Plates. Essays about the works. John Elderfield (born 25 April 1943) was Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 2003 to 2008. He served as the Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator at the Princeton University Art Museum and Lecturer at Princeton University from 2012 to 2019. Elderfield received his Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1975. Elderfield joined the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as Curator of Painting and Sculpture in 1975. He served the Museum as Chief Curator at Large from 1993 to 2003. Elderfield had published studies of Henri Matisse, Kurt Schwitters, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, Howard Hodgkin, and Pierre-Paul Prud'hon. In 1986, Elderfield received the Eric Mitchell Prize for his book on Schwitters. Elderfield received the award of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French Government. In 2005, Time Magazine included Elderfield on their list of the 100 most influential people of 2005. Derived from a Christian Science Monitor review by Gene Langley found on-line. This is a Beautifully produced, generously sized, it's a gallery without walls, filled with 100 years of modern drawing. But, what is a modern drawing? Mr. Elderfield answers the question with the drawings in his book. He says, ''Of all our modern arts, drawing is most resistant to definition. The Museum of Modern Art simply calls every unique work on paper a drawing.'' The drawings in the book come in all mediums: pencil, ink, charcoal, watercolor, pastel, collage, and cutout. Elderfield begins with Georges Seurat's 1881 rendering of a stone breaker. Seurat's treatment of plane foreshadows the style we now call modern. Elderfield concludes with a 1977 Jasper Johns drawing done, in modern enough fashion, on a plastic sheet. Among the many interesting works in between is a van Gogh drawing with a brush, reed pen, and ink of 1888. To overstretch and oversimplify, one could say that the ''modern'' artist has invented a new hieroglyphics for us, seen in the power of cartoons to communicate ideas or of a Picasso doodle to capture new vistas. The book shows us a Matisse of 1905, in which the master was interested in a portrait likeness but achieved it with an openness and variety of line. Further on, we see Robert Delaunay's 1911 pen and ink of the Eiffel Tower, fragmented into dynamic forms played against the rooftops of Paris. Here again, simple lines create what he wanted us to see and allow us to enjoy the multiple views he found interesting. While the old masters worked with sculptural form and depicted objects, the modern artists shifted their interest to the picture plane itself and gave the line freedom to take off on its own....It was Paul Klee who said that a line is a dot taking a walk. Certainly the line is the basic element of drawing. Lines - grouped, cross-hatched, loosely scribbled, brought to a halt in stipple - are all beautifully employed in Picasso's 1911 Standing Nude in pen and ink .A few pages farther, we come a 1916 pen and ink with charcoal in which Lyonel Feininger sticks to a consistent crosshatch to express the planes - simple means for a Cubist-like picture. The changing ideas about drawing and picturemaking brought along with them a kind of humility, too. Artists became fascinated with the pictures all around them in newspapers and magazines. They started to incorporate these into their pictures and, in doing so, introduced the line to the collage. In 1922 Kurt Schwitters put together a collage called Santa Claus. He was turning old materials he had collected into a new art, restructuring the scraps of the past. Another expression of complexity is seen in the work of Jean Dubuffet. It seems a long way from van Gogh's dots, dashes, and curves to the Dubuffet drawing of 1950 we see here. In a series called Corps de Dame, Dubuffet was interested in playfulness, ornamentality, childlike picturemaking, even in graffiti and handwriting. At least these were the kinds of things behind this complex drawing, with its element of the grotesque. Near the end of the book, we come to a 1960 Claes Oldenburg work. Kudos should go to production manager Tim McDonough. Many of these works are in color, but the simplest black and white one has been carefully reproduced to show even the tint of the paper. This collection of drawings gives us a record of adventures with the line and the dot. It testifies to the acceptance of drawings as independent works of art, and to the idea of art as play.