Preview our SPRING 2026 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
FUNDACIÓN JUAN MARCH
Genealogies of Art, or the History of Art as Visual Art
Edited by Manuel Fontán del Junco, José Lebrero Stals, María Zozaya Álvarez. Text by Astritt Schmidt-Burkhardt, Uwe Fleckner, Eugenio Carmona, Manuel Lima.
How artists, historians and theorists have diagrammed art’s lineages, from the Middle Ages to Fluxus
A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2020
Genealogies of Art analyzes the visual representations of art history made by artists, critics, designers, theorists and poets alike, from the genealogical trees of the 12th through the 15th centuries and the Renaissance to more recent information graphics, including paintings, sketches, maps, plans, prints, drawings and diagrams.
The conceptual core of the book is the famed chart that Alfred H. Barr, first director of the Museum of Modern Art, composed for the cover of his landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art in 1936, which sought to trace the origins of abstract art from 1890 to 1936. Around this paradigmatic chart is gathered a tremendous pageant of works by great polymaths and thinkers, including Guy Debord's situationist maps; the Guerrilla Girls' "Guerrillas in the Midst of History"; Athanasius Kircher's baroque-era trees of knowledge; George Maciunas' Fluxus diagrams; André Malraux's Museum without Walls; Otto Neurath's charts and isotypes; Ad Reinhardt's collaged histories of art; Ward Shelley's Who Invented the Avant-Garde?; Maurice Stein, Larry Miller and Marshall Henrichs' Blueprint for Counter Education; Aby Warburg's legendary Mnemosyne Atlas; and many others.
Across 450 pages, Genealogies of Art reproduces more than 500 images. In addition to these, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt contributes an essay titled "The Diagrammatic Shift," following by Manuel Lima's "Trees of Knowledge: The Diagrammatic Traditions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance," both of which contextualize the relevance of this form throughout history. Uwe Fleckner explores the use of diagrammatic visualization in curatorial and collecting activities, as in the cases of Carl Einstein or Aby Warburg; and the Picasso specialist Eugenio Carmona looks at Alfred H. Barr's conception of Picasso's work, in his text "Barr, Cubism and Picasso: Paradigm and ‘Anti-paradigm.'"
Featured image is reproduced from 'Genealogies of Art, or the History of Art as Visual Art.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
National Review
Brian T Allen
liberating, radical and commonsensical…. Brilliant.
ARLIS/NA Reviews
Genealogies of Art will inspire readers who work at organizing knowledge, in digital humanities, exhibition design, or linking data on the World Wide Web, and it belongs in libraries covering subject areas in modern art, museology, design, history, or philosophy, where a “diagrammatic turn of mind” might indeed stimulate other minds.
New York Times
Jason Farago
In 1936, MoMA’s first director Alfred H. Barr Jr. drew a famous diagram of modern art’s development, with arrows leading from Cézanne to Cubism, thence to de Stijl and Dada, and triumphantly to abstraction. This catalog for an ingenious exhibition in Madrid arranges dozens of modernist paintings, plus African sculpture and Japanese woodblocks, in the exact order Barr mapped them — revealing the ambitions, and also limitations, of a teleological art history. It also presents other efforts, from the 17th century to today, to chart painterly styles; these family trees and flow charts turn art history from a science of images to an image itself.
At more than 480 pages and featuring well over 500 illustrations, Genealogies of Art, or the History of Art as Visual Art—with its die-cut cover, day-glo endpapers that shine through and numerous refined text and image papers inside—is a deluxe, must-have resource for any practicing artist, art historian, teacher or collector. Gathering genealogical trees, charts, maps, allegories, diagrams and other visual representations of a seemingly infinite variety of histories of art—from sixteenth-century trees of knowledge to twenty-first-century histories of electronic music, grotesques and street art—this volume naturally takes off from and expands upon Alfred H. Barr's famous 1936 chart tracing the origins of Cubism and abstract art from the late 1800s to the date of its publication. Scholarly essays are by Manuel Fontán del Junco, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Manuel Lima, Uwe Fleckner and Eugenio Carmona. continue to blog
Featured photograph, by Maurice Jarnoux, is of French novelist and art theorist André Malraux in his studio in Boulogne-sur-Seine working on his book, The Imaginary Museum (1953). It is reproduced from Genealogies of Art, or the History of Art as Visual Art, published by Fundación Juan March. Other visual histories of art in the chapter spanning 1936–2019 include Alfred H. Barr's 1940 "Italian Painting and Sculpture, 1300–1800," Ad Reinhardt's 1961 "How to Look at Modern Art in America, 1946–61," Guy DeBord's "Psychogeographic Guide of Paris: Discourse on Love's Passions," George Maciunas' 1979 "Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and 4 Dimensional, Aural, Optic, Olfactory, Epithelial and Tactile Art Forms' and the Guerilla Girls' 1998 "Guerillas in the Midst of History." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 11.25 x 13.25 in. / 450 pgs / 500 color / 60 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $75.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $105 GBP £65.00 ISBN: 9788470756610 PUBLISHER: FUNDACIÓN JUAN MARCH AVAILABLE: 3/17/2020 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD Except Spain
Genealogies of Art, or the History of Art as Visual Art
Published by FUNDACIÓN JUAN MARCH. Edited by Manuel Fontán del Junco, José Lebrero Stals, María Zozaya Álvarez. Text by Astritt Schmidt-Burkhardt, Uwe Fleckner, Eugenio Carmona, Manuel Lima.
How artists, historians and theorists have diagrammed art’s lineages, from the Middle Ages to Fluxus
A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2020
Genealogies of Art analyzes the visual representations of art history made by artists, critics, designers, theorists and poets alike, from the genealogical trees of the 12th through the 15th centuries and the Renaissance to more recent information graphics, including paintings, sketches, maps, plans, prints, drawings and diagrams.
The conceptual core of the book is the famed chart that Alfred H. Barr, first director of the Museum of Modern Art, composed for the cover of his landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art in 1936, which sought to trace the origins of abstract art from 1890 to 1936. Around this paradigmatic chart is gathered a tremendous pageant of works by great polymaths and thinkers, including Guy Debord's situationist maps; the Guerrilla Girls' "Guerrillas in the Midst of History"; Athanasius Kircher's baroque-era trees of knowledge; George Maciunas' Fluxus diagrams; André Malraux's Museum without Walls; Otto Neurath's charts and isotypes; Ad Reinhardt's collaged histories of art; Ward Shelley's Who Invented the Avant-Garde?; Maurice Stein, Larry Miller and Marshall Henrichs' Blueprint for Counter Education; Aby Warburg's legendary Mnemosyne Atlas; and many others.
Across 450 pages, Genealogies of Art reproduces more than 500 images. In addition to these, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt contributes an essay titled "The Diagrammatic Shift," following by Manuel Lima's "Trees of Knowledge: The Diagrammatic Traditions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance," both of which contextualize the relevance of this form throughout history. Uwe Fleckner explores the use of diagrammatic visualization in curatorial and collecting activities, as in the cases of Carl Einstein or Aby Warburg; and the Picasso specialist Eugenio Carmona looks at Alfred H. Barr's conception of Picasso's work, in his text "Barr, Cubism and Picasso: Paradigm and ‘Anti-paradigm.'"
