This course will explore the advent of abstraction in western art in the early 1910s and map the first decade and a half of its history across the media, including not only painting, sculpture and drawing, but also music, poetry, cinema, non-narrative dance, spatial constructions and public monuments. We will study works by Vassily Kandinsky, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Arnold Schoenberg, Guillaume Apollinaire, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, Rudolph Laban and Hans Richter among others, and will explore the broad range of imperatives that brought abstraction into being and led it to become the lingua franca of the avant-garde in the 1920s. Students will learn to think not only as art historians but also as curators, as the course reflects on the landmark exhibition held at MoMA in 2012 to celebrate the centennial of abstraction. We will explore all stages of curating a historical museum exhibition, from developing the concept, to conducting research, requesting loans, preparing a publication, planning the display and creating educational programs. Class instruction will be supplemented with visits to museums and guest lectures. Students are responsible for two brief in-class presentations of assigned readings, a midterm, and a final research project, presented in class and submitted as a paper.