The Machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age
Item date(s): 1968
K. G. Pontus Hulten
Pages: 216pp Size: 245mm
Sub-type: Art monograph
Place publication: New York Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
Additional notes: With die-stamped metal covers and hinge.
Unusual bookbinding
Extract from Simms Read catalogue:
50. HULTEN, Karl Gunnar Pontus.
Arranged in a rough chronological order, 'The Machine as Seen at the
End of the Mechanical Age' presents artists and works that have
engaged with the concept of 'the machine'. Commencing with Leonardo,
the catalogue takes us via Dürer, Bracelli and Filippo Morghen to
nineteenth-century caricaturists like Cruikshank and Daumier, onward to
the Lumière Brothers, Eadweard Muybridge, thence to Fuutrism, the
Vorticism of Epstein and Wyndham Lewis, Cubo-Futurism
(Goncharova), Suprematism (Malevich, Tatlin, El Lissitzky), Duchamp,
Robert Delaunay and Picabia, Berlin Dada, Paul Klee, Berlin Dada and
Surrealism, Buckminster Fuller and Alexander Calder to the final artist /
machinist group of Jean Tinguely, Richard Stankiewics and Robert
Watts. Each entry is illustrated extensively and analysed textually. The
final section of the catalogue, printed in a cyan-dominated blue, is
devoted to the work of more modern and contemporary artists, engaged
extensively with technology and the engineers who helped realise their
visions.
As might be expected from a catalogue devoted to such a subject, the
catalogue itself is both futuristic and machine-like. Although the Futurists
had made metal books in the 1930s, they tended to suffer condition
problems due to the nature of the material and the printing on it, this
rather more successful catalogue also features metal boards with
enamel relief, here by Anders Osterlin after a photograph by Alicia Legg.
With hinged boards and the leaves bolted at the spine this is an
excellent example of a mechanical book. (46683) £450.
Designers & Books
Question Everything: A Conversation with OK-RM’s Rory McGrath
By Wes Del Val January 26, 2021
WVD: Can you share times a book has truly wowed you design-wise?
RM: When we first saw the catalogue (in metal) for the Pontus Hultén-curated 1968 MoMa show The Machine: As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, we thought it was very impressive. Yes it was a catalogue, and it was a good catalogue—it told you everything you needed to know, but it was also communicating something you couldn’t have known unless you saw the show, which was the conceptual resonance, where the object and idea are in synthesis. From there we looked more deeply into Hultén and we discovered [Swedish graphic designer] John Melin, who always seemed to be involved in these books. Usually the graphic designer in that era wasn’t even named. Maybe the cover would be, but there were very few designers listed in the books, which generally were typeset by craftsmen.