New York  The Museum of Modern Art's revelatory, expansive and
exhilarating new exhibition, "Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925,"
makes a persuasive argument that, while we may believe that by
now abstraction in art is kind of a no-brainer—something so
familiar we can take it for granted—a review session is in
order. Familiar artists such as Paul Klee and Georgia O'Keeffe
show up here in a context that demands our considering them
anew, alongside a number of artists, like David Bomberg and
Duncan Grant of Britain, or Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini of
Italy, too rarely on view.  'Localisation des mobiles graphiques
II' (1912-13) by František Kupka National Gallery of
Art/ARS/ADAGP  But was abstract art really "invented," or was it
"discovered"? We now organize so much of our vision around
sensibilities of abstraction—as in our fascination with Cycladic
and African sculpture, or in the way our eyes automatically
organize formal composition in Old Master paintings—that it's
difficult to work ourselves back to som