Published alongside the Neue Nationalgalerie’s rehang of its twentieth-century collection, Prisms: Extended Perspectives it looks at migration, colonialism, race, gender, sexuality and the movement of forms across borders, through the lens of modernism. 

Its essays and object studies move across the Nationalgalerie’s collection from 1900–1945, placing familiar figures such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Hans Bellmer and Emil Nolde beside artists including Tarsila do Amaral and Renée Sintenis. Particularly strong are the interventions into the colonial underside of European modernism: ethnographic collections, appropriated non-European forms and racialised ideas of the “primitive” are treated not as incidental influences but as structures through which modern art was made and understood. The result is a compact, well-designed piece of revisionist art history—less a conventional exhibition catalogue than a series of lenses for looking again at the canon.

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2021. First edition. Illustrated paperback. English-language edition, edited by Jessica Aimufua. Light shelf and handling wear to covers, with minor rubbing at edges and corners. Internally clean and bright; binding firm. Near fine condition.