Collecting as Modernist Practice

Braddock... neatly outline[s] the path of the modernist collection from provisional institution to mainstream culture to large institution in a cogent manner that may cause present-day museum professionals and collectors to consider the potential life cycle of their collecting and display practices.

Collecting as Modernist Practice, Jeremy Braddock's closely reasoned and well written examination of modernist collecting practices, demonstrates how attempts to define and regulate culture often reveal underlying structures of political and economic power...

Jeremy Braddock's Collecting as Modernist Practice makes a very productive expansion of the archival turn in modernist studies... Braddock's work on Albert Barnes and the Barnes Foundation is sure to elicit attention and further development in modernist studies.

Braddock pieces together a fascinating and important new cultural history of modernism. It is a marvelous achievement, one that will be amply praised for the way it places African American culture at the center of modernism.

With his kaleidoscopic analysis of the efflorescence of collecting in the first decades of the twentieth century, Braddock transforms the cartography of transatlantic modernism. His remarkably erudite reading of a wide range of practices demonstrates not only the prevalence of collecting but also its significance as one of the key modes of modernist aesthetics.

This is a terrific book that will add substantially to general accounts of early U.S. modernism by providing a finely drawn map of the emergence of some key collections. Just as importantly, it will bring into the open what has been hiding in plain sight: the multidimensional, generative role of the collection in modernism.

Meticulously researched and lucidly written, Collecting as Modernist Practice enriches the conversation about the spread of modernism into mainstream society and its pervasive presence in the West.