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Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2006 by Nancy J. Troy, Geoffrey Batchen, Amelia Jones, Pamela M. Lee, Romy Golan, Robert Storr, Jodi Hauptman, Dario Gamboni
Krauss's caveat might have served as an epigraph for this book, in which the authors' value judgments as well as their theoretical predispositions are deliberately made apparent. (Typically for Krauss, the Picasso-Braque model of Cubism affiliated with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's private gallery trumps that of Salon Cubists Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, whom she dismisses as doctrinaire.) Privileging the high-art media of painting and sculpture, to which photography is added in a manner that explores its cultural position and integrates its history with the larger art historical narrative "for the first time in any survey" (p. 12), the authors engage with architecture and design only fleetingly (most directly in the entry on 1923, devoted to the Bauhaus, pp. 185-89), the possibilities offered by feminist analysis seem to play second fiddle to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, while the controversial subject of visual culture studies is entirely ignored. The accepted canon of European and American modernism remains largely intact (essays on two outliers--the Mexican mural movement, pp. 255-59, and the Harlem Renaissance, pp. 302-7--are contributed by a mysterious fifth author identified only as AD), although two unfamiliar figures, Polish artists Wladyslaw Strzeminski and Katarzyna Kobro, are given prominence alongside El Lissitzky in Bois's nuanced discussion of how Russian Constructivism was received in Berlin and Eastern Europe during the 1920s (pp. 226-31).
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But it would be disingenuous to judge Art since 1900 on the basis of the subjects it omits or those it includes; as the authors themselves point out, "Of course, with new orientations come new omissions" (p. 13). The book represents a welcome challenge to its users, who will need to assimilate the complexities of its discursive modes as they engage with the sophisticated model of a self-reflexive art history that the authors have set out. Instead of surveying art as a seamless succession of stylistic innovations whose historical embeddedness is often claimed but nevertheless remains insufficiently theorized, Foster, Krauss, Bois, and Buchloh invite us to debate a version of modern art's history that is internally divided, rich in historical contradiction, and ripe for intervention. It remains to be seen, however, if the authors' apparent success in rethinking the survey text and infusing it with intellectual ambition will place their book beyond the grasp of the introductory audience for which it was intended.
NANCY J. TROY is professor of modern art at the University of Southern California [Department of Art History, Von KleinSmid Center--VKC 351, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Calif. 90089-0047].
Notes
1. Henri Zerner, "Editor's Statement: The Crisis in the Discipline," Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 279.
2. Mitchell Schwarzer, "Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey," Art Journal 54, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 24.
3. Bradford Collins, "Art History Survey," Art Journal 49, no. 3 (Autumn 1990): 322.
