"The translation and publication of these documents is particularly important for scholars. A problem with studying 20th-century Arab art has been lack of access to primary materials. Many of them are still in the hands of artists or their families, and have not been well-catalogued nor digitised – or are in Arabic and inaccessible to an English-dominated field. As study of Arab modernisms grows, projects like this allow artists’ voices to be heard, rather than others speaking for them." — Melissa Gronlund, The National
"This is a book to relish and dig into time and time again. Each article takes on a different meaning on further reading. . . . This book inspires a love for Arabic art history and should encourage further historical and contextual illustration that will illustrate the subject and render it more accessible." — Omar Kholeif, Critical Inquiry
"The constant awareness of both the possibilities and difficulties of speaking or writing about art and its potentially revolutionary mission makes this fascinating anthology a worthwhile contribution to the global conversation about art." — Raphael Cormack, Apollo
"A unique reference for students of modern Arab art and a fascinating window into cultural debates in the region." — Ursula Lindsey, Al Fanar Media
"The compelling format of Modern Art in the Arab World allows us to understand not only the various genres and histories, but also the multiple roles Arab artists often occupy in the context of the world at large. . . . I found myself wanting to converse with the texts, because they feel alive, contextualized, yet un-homogenized. The advancement of the arts, aligned to faceted histories of war and peace, conquests, manifestos, economic development, and technological advances, makes reading this book feel unburdened by issues of who did what first. Like a map, this work allows you to connect points of inception and departure, to gather parallel and random threads that reveal new intersections." — Doris Bittar, Al Jadid
"An unprecedented anthology of source material on modern art in the Arab world. . . . Modern Art in The Arab World provides not only a substantial archive, but also a liminal space of textual fluidity to revisit modernity outside of its North Atlantic core." — Golnar Yarmohammad Touski, Contemporaneity
“This is a unique collection of writings of extraordinary interest. The richness and variety of the documents allow you to listen in, across more than a century, to the debates among artists and critics about the nature, value, and political direction of art. Their manifestos, reflections, essays, dialogues, and letters capture a vibrant modernism as it was forged, elaborated, and contested.” — Timothy Mitchell, William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University
“This volume on Arab art is an important addition to MoMA’s remarkable Primary Documents series. It demonstrates how cumulative research raises the stakes and positions the colonial modern as a determinant within twentieth-century art, and how modernity is co-produced and thus embedded with contradictions that historicize it the more. With an excellent introduction by the editors, art writing from across Arab cultures is chronicled and debated in ways that change interpretive modalities: the pan-Arab imaginary—treated as trope, ideology, material practice—becomes, for instance, Arab meta-discourse on internationalism. This volume will precipitate discourse in contexts beyond the West and, like its predecessors in the series, change parameters within the discipline of art history.” — Geeta Kapur, critic, curator, and author of When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India