Curated by Leah Dickerman

It’s been one hundred years since Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian abandoned the depiction of objects in the world. With due fanfare, the Museum of Modern Art will reexamine the beginnings of abstraction, at once marking the centennial of that watershed moment and inadvertently reminding us of the subsequent backlash, as “Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925” will be—surprisingly—the first large-scale survey of its kind at MoMA (the very bastion of modernism) since Alfred Barr’s “Cubism and Abstract Art” in 1936. Marshaling four hundred works, both canonical and obscure, and a catalogue with two dozen scholarly texts, the exhibition will bring us modernism as an open, sundry, thrilling affair: Abstraction developed over time, resonant with its era, and on an international scale; its media exceeded painting to include environments, film, photography, poetry, music, and dance. Following her rigorous Dada and Bauhaus exhibitions, Dickerman promises to deliver another one for history.

— Christine Mehring