Books published by publisher The Museum of Modern Art

Art Making with MoMA, from the educators at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presents 20 interactive activities that encourage kids (and adults!) to discover how modern and contemporary artists experiment with materials and techniques. Drawing on over 15 years of research and hands-on experience engaging families in multi-sensory programs at MoMA, this colorful activity book provides opportunities for creative exploration and art making at home, in a group or alone, while providing real examples of the tools, techniques, and ideas used by contemporary and modern artists whose works can be found in MoMA’s collection. Each project is inspired by a particular artist, movement, or design concept, and features full-color reproductions of artwork from the likes of Diego Rivera, Vassily Kandinsky, Berenice Abbott, and Charles and Ray Eames. Step-by-step instructions, handy tips and open-ended questions encourage kids to think like artists and develop their own techniques and ideas for art making.

Growing up in the mountains of Japan, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) dreamed of becoming an artist. One day, she had a vision in which the world and everything in it—the plants, the people, the sky—were covered in polka dots. She began to cover her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and even her body with dots. As she grew up, she traveled all around the world, from Tokyo to Seattle, New York to Venice, and brought her dots with her. Different people saw these dots in different ways—some thought they were tiny, like cells, and others imagined them enormous, like planets. Every year, Kusama sees more of the world, covering it with dots and offering people a way to experience it the way she does. Written by Sarah Suzuki, a curator at The Museum of Modern Art, and featuring reproductions of Kusama’s instantly recognizable artworks, this colorful book tells the story of an artist whose work will not be complete until her dots cover the world, from here to infinity.

Nearly 6 million riders use the New York City subway every day. How do you make a map that helps all of them get to where they are going? The Great New York Subway Map, written and illustrated by Emiliano Ponzi and published by The Museum of Modern Art, in association with the New York Transit Museum, tells the fascinating story of the map’s creation in 1972 by the great Italian designer Massimo Vignelli and his team, and introduces young readers to the idea of graphic design as a way to solve problems and shape our world.

Since its first publication in 1937, this lucid and scholarly chronicle of the history of photography has been hailed as the classic work on the subject. No other book and no other author have managed to relate the aesthetic evolution of the art of photography to its technical innovations with such an absorbing combination of clarity, scholarship and enthusiasm. Through more than 300 works by such master photographers as William Henry Fox Talbot, Timothy O'Sullivan, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eugène Atget, Peter Henry Emerson, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Man Ray, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan, Minor White, Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, author Beaumont Newhall presents a fascinating, comprehensive study of the significant trends and developments in the medium since the first photographs were made in 1839. New selections added to the fifth edition include photographs made in color, from hand-tinted daguerreotypes of 1850 to turn-of-the-century autochromes by Edward Steichen, to works by contemporary masters such as Eliot Porter, Ernst Haas, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz.Beaumont Newhall (1908–1993) was an influential curator, art historian, writer and photographer. In 1935 he became the Librarian at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1940, he became the first Director of MoMA's Photography Department. He served as Curator of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House from 1948 to 1958, then as its Director from 1958 to 1971. While at the Eastman House, Newhall was responsible for amassing one of the greatest photographic collections in the world.

One day, the French artist Henri Matisse cut a small bird out of a piece of paper. It looked lonely all by itself, so he cut out more shapes to join it. Before he knew it, Matisse had transformed his walls into larger-than-life gardens, filled with brightly colored plants, animals, and shapes of all sizes! Featuring cut-paper illustrations and interactive foldout pages, Matisse’s Garden is the inspiring story of how the artist’s never-ending curiosity helped turn a small experiment into a radical new form of art.

Originally published in 1973, this marvelous collection of photographs with accompanying texts by the revered late Museum of Modern Art photography curator John Szarkowski has long been recognized as a classic. Reissued in 1999-with new digital duotones-this volume is now available to a new generation of readers."This is a picture book, and its first purpose is to provide the material for simple delectation," says Szarkowski in his introduction to this first survey of The Museum of Modern Art's photography collection. A visually splendid album, the book is both a treasury of remarkable photographs and a lively introduction to the aesthetics and the historical development of photography.Since 1930, when the Museum accessioned its first photograph, it has assembled an extraordinary and wide-ranging collection of pictures for preservation, study and exhibition. Among the outstanding figures represented here are Hill and Adamson, Cameron, O'Sullivan, Atget, Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, Weston, Kertész, Evans, Cartier-Bresson, Lange, Brassaï, Ansel Adams, Shomei Tomatsu, Frank, Arbus and Friedlander.Some of these photographs are classics, familiar and well-loved favorites, many are surprising, little-known works by the masters of the art.

You’re supposed to stop and smell the roses but truth be told it doesn’t take that long to smell them. You hardly have to stop. You can smell the roses and still have time to run all those errands before the sun goes down and it’s dinner time.Hurry Up and Wait is the second volume in a new series of collaborations between renowned artist and bestselling author Maira Kalman, New York Times bestselling writer Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. This time a whimsical collection of images captures people in motion—or not. In snapshots by some of the world’s most celebrated photographers, some people stride forth, dash across streets, race on bicycles, and jump over puddles, while others form snaking lines, daydream on park benches, and linger on sidewalks with friends. So what’s the rush? With 11 vibrant new illustrations by Kalman inspired by the photographs, and thought-provoking prose by Handler that ponders the merits of action, Hurry Up and Wait will charm readers of all ages.

Though he was deeply engaged with painting and drawing, Toulouse-Lautrec’s lasting contribution to artistic practice was as a graphic artist. Through his prints and posters, he brought the language of the late-nineteenth-century French avant-garde to a broad public, through editioned prints, advertisements and contributions in reviews and magazines. He ushered in the first print boom of the modern era; taking advantage of lithography’s new potential for color and scale, he made both posters for the streets of Paris and prints for the new bourgeois collector’s living room. During his short career, he created more than 350 prints and 30 posters, as well as lithographed theater programs and covers for books and sheet music. The Museum of Modern Art’s collection of this material is stellar, encompassing over 100 prints and posters, his most important book projects, and many magazines, journals and other examples of printed ephemera. A cultural nexus, Toulouse-Lautrec connected artists, performers, authors, intellectuals and society figures of his day, creating a bridge between the brothels and society salons of the Belle Epoque. His work allows entry into many facets of Parisian life of the period, from politics and economics to visual culture and the rise of popular entertainment in the form of cabarets and café-concerts. Featuring an overview essay by Sarah Suzuki, Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at MoMA, this publication presents thematically organized groupings of Toulouse-Lautrec’s prints from the Museum’s collection, each accompanied by an illuminating essay on the theme. Inserted into the book is a 20" x 17" poster titled "Mademoiselle Eglantine's Troupe."Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) is best known for his portrayals of late-nineteenth-century Parisian life, particularly working-class, cabaret, circus, nightclub and brothel scenes. He was admired then as he is today for his unsentimental evocations of personalities and social mores. His greatest contemporary impact was his series of 30 posters (1891–1901), which transformed the aesthetics of poster art.

Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), painter and textile, theater, and fashion designer, made enormous contributions to the development of abstraction in the early 1910s. In this new book, Delaunay and her six-year-old son Charles have a fantastical adventure in their car, modeled after her 1925 design for a Citroën convertible. They glide into a landscape of colors and shapes, as if they’ve driven into one of her paintings. Delaunay helps Charles understand her artistic process by asking him what shapes and colors he recognizes along the way, and Charles realizes that his mother’s thoughts about art permeate every aspect of their life.

Jake Makes a World follows the creative adventures of the young Jacob Lawrence as he finds inspiration in the vibrant colors and characters of his community in Harlem. From his mother's apartment, where he is surrounded by brightly colored walls with intricate patterns; to the streets full of familiar and not-so-familiar faces, sounds, rhythms, and smells; to the art studio where he goes each day after school to transform his everyday world on an epic scale, Jake takes readers on an enchanting journey through the bustling sights and sounds of his neighborhood.Includes a reproduction of an actual Migration series panel.

A man named René floats through the world of his dreams and imagination, fulfilling his desire to become a painter—of apples and hats, apple hats, apple-these and apple-thats. In his paintings, leaves are lips, baguettes are noses, the right side is never up, and the upside is never down. Award-winning author Klaas Verplancke mashes everyday objects and words together in ways that are guaranteed to make kids laugh and think. René Magritte (Belgian, 1898–1967), one of the world’s most beloved artists, created whimsical, subversive paintings that helped launch the popularity of surrealism. His works combined words and images in novel, thought-provoking ways, and used humor and ordinary subjects to inspire viewers to question the world around them.

The US was in the midst of the Depression when Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) began documenting its impact through depictions of unemployed men on the streets of San Francisco. Her success won the attention of Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), and in 1935 she started photographing the rural poor under its auspices. One day in Nipomo, California, Lange recalled, she "saw and approached [a] hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet." The woman's name was Florence Owens Thompson, and the result of their encounter was seven exposures, including Migrant Mother. Curator Sarah Meister's essay provides a fresh context for this iconic work.