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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.



Ref: GB/5130







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