In "An Atlas of Drawings: Transforming Chronologies," MoMA curator Luis Pirez-Oramas has taken note of several key themes and motifs in the increasingly prominent field of contemporary drawing--faces, movement, tectonics, digital, figures and constructions--and tracked them back through The Museum of Modern Art's incomparable collection of drawings, examining each theme from a non-chronological viewpoint, exploring visual relationships between recent and classic artworks, and presenting his findings in six stand-alone accordion-folded portfolios. Each full-color section emphasizes repetition, seriality and the persistence of themes, and together they offer a view of the practice of drawing based exclusively on the selected works themselves, without the traditional dependence on interpretation through artistic movements, tendencies and influences. The flexibility of the accordion format conceptually and visually conveys the book's shifting chronologies, allowing the viewer to experience more works juxtaposed with one another than a traditional binding would. It also creates an ersatz work in itself, ideal for display. Along with one bound booklet including an essay by Pirez-Oramas and a slipcase that unifies them all, its unusual format makes "An Atlas of Drawings" a notable object in itself, ideal for collecting or gift-giving.

To encourage the pleasures of unexpected connections and comparisons, explains Glenn D. Lowry (director of the Museum of Modern Art, NY) in his brief foreword, the 2006 exhibition (for which this publication is the catalogue) presented drawings dating from 1886 to 2004, organized by theme rather than by chronology. As the exhibition departed from the conventional, so does the catalog: instead of a binding, a folded cardboard box houses the material. First, a pamphlet, with an essay by curator Luis Perez-Oramas, a checklist of the exhibited drawings, a few photos of the exhibition, and a bibliography. The drawings themselves are presented in six accordion-folded booklets (unbound, 7x9"), which can be stretched out to display the works side by side. Each is devoted to a theme--tectonics, faces, digital, figures, constructions, and movement--and each theme is represented by 25 to 30 drawings. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)