During the 1930s, contemporary art gains significant critical and commercial success, even in Italy. The growing need to document and disseminate the new artistic culture meets the parallel growth of the publishing market, triggering a crucial exchange. Milan constitutes a key observatory of these developments, an extraordinary laboratory for the elaboration of forms, genres, and models that would mark the profile of the art book industry in the decades to come.

This work traces a map of contemporary art publishing in its dawning moment, between experimental tension and confrontation with the first mass society. Addressing the major issues of the publishing chain, the emerging critical literary genres, and the reproduction of images in relation to the typographic page, the study offers the reader a reflection of unprecedented historiographical approach accompanied by the extensive catalog of publications.