This essay situates the publication of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents in the context of an expanding global interest in modern Arab art as well as the study of modern Arab art as an academic discipline. The essay first examines the implications of the cultivation of a new museum and gallery infrastructure for modern Arab art in the Arab Gulf. It then considers how the academic study of modern Arab art has faced institutional barriers, due largely to the overwhelming academic focus on Ancient Studies and Islamic art. Finally, it suggests that Modern Arab Art in the Arab World provides scholars with a comprehensive textual archive that calls for a historicized approach to theorizing the emergence of modernist aesthetics in Arab visual cultures.

The anthology of primary sources presented in Modern Art in the Arab World reveals a wealth of ideas, attitudes, hopes, fears, and concerns surrounding the many facets of modernism and art. The essays therein provide first-hand accounts of developing art scenes from across the Arab world and their relationships to their audiences on local, national, transnational, and global scales. These documents, many of which have been translated from Arabic or French into English for the first time, offer individual, in situ insights into a broad range of issues pertaining to art in the twentieth century while furnishing readers with numerous threads that connect these geographies with changes through time. Four matters in particular – the centrality of translation, print media, art, and image management to modernization – permeate this anthology's content and will be explored further in the following essay.