Reading List: Adventures of the Black Square

Category: Reading List — Published: 3 Mar 2015

Reading List
Adventures of the Black Square

A selection of books guiding you through 100 years of geometric abstraction – from the development of the movement from it’s origins in pre-revolutionary Russia in 1915, to its impact across the globe up to the present day. Happy World Book Day!

1/
Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925:
How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art

Edited by Leah Dickerman (Museum of Modern Art New York and Thames & Hudson, London 2012)

2/
Malevich

Edited by Achim Borchardt-Hume (Tate Publishing, London 2014)

3/
Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991:
A Pelican Introduction

By Orlando Figes (Penguin, London 2014)

4/
Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939

Edited by Christopher Wilk (V&A Publishing, London 2006)

5/
Radical Geometry

Edited by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro (RA Publications, London, 2014).

This exhibition catalogue documents how geometric abstraction was taken up by artists across Latin America after the Second World War across Latin to express their deeply held beliefs about art and its power to change the world around them.

6/
Documents of Contemporary Art: Abstraction

Edited by Maria Lind (pub. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and Whitechapel Gallery, London 2013).

This anthology in the Documents of Contemporary Art series offers useful writings by artists, critics and curators on formal and social and political abstraction in modern and contemporary art. Includes contributions from Liam Gillick and Peter Halley.

7/
Documents of Contemporary Art:
The Everyday

Edited by Stephen Johnstone (Documents of Contemporary Art)
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and Whitechapel Gallery, London 2013).
This anthology includes writings which explore the role of everyday material culture in modern and contemporary art, one of the four central themes in the exhibition.

8/
On Abstract Art

By Briony Fer (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT 2000)

Briony Fer, Professor of History of Art at University College London, focuses on how 10 particular artists have used abstraction in painting and sculpture from Malevich and Mondrian to Eva Hesse, all of whom are included in the exhibition.

9/
Merz to Émigré and Beyond:
Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century

By Stephen Heller (Phaidon Press, London 2014) describes the development of avant-garde magazines from across the world through typography, design and dissemination.

10/
Chromophobia

By David Batchelor, Reaktion Books, London 2000