Re-Reading the Manual of Travelling Exhibitions

The Manual of Travelling Exhibitions, published by UNESCO in 1953, was a handbook on organizing touring exhibitions. It was conceived by Elodie Courter Osborne out of her work as head of the Department for Circulating Exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Aiming her book at museums and other public institutions, Courter formulated a "grammar" of exhibitions, ranging from organizational questions to reflections on exhibition design. Re-reading the Manual of Travelling Exhibitions reproduces the page spreads of the original, annotating them in its margins and adding contemporary critical commentary. In the information the book includes (and leaves out), its design and the photographic logic of its images, the manual now reads like the manifesto of a modernity whose continuity was still unbroken in the immediate postwar period.