Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism

Review by Amelia Jones

This is a structurally innovative, brilliant, and in some ways surprising book (who would have thought Rosalind Krauss would go on record proclaiming her support for the "continuance of modernism," p. 674, or Benjamin Buchloh would emerge as sympathetic to the goals of feminism?). This is also a book that is in the main all too unsurprising: frustratingly flawed by its own ideological myopia and hubris, it is also lacking to the extent that it may be virtually useless as a teaching tool for the increasing numbers of people not invested in a canonical, modernist narrative of the development of "art" over the last century. Implicit in the term, as illustrated in this volume, is a narrowly European-United States-centric, or even a Paris-New York-centric worldview. It will be equally inadequate for the vast majority of undergraduates not studying at the kinds of elite institutions in which these authors are ensconced (Krauss at Columbia; Yve-Alain Bois, formerly of Harvard, now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; Hal Foster at Princeton; Buchloh previously at Barnard and now at Harvard), and for whom the complexities of the book's language will be largely impenetrable.

There is much to be said in praise of the elegant, well-articulated, sometimes blazingly compelling analyses of canonical works and movements in this book. Particularly notable in this regard are Krauss's discussions of Cubism, Bois's of the works of Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian, Foster's and Krauss's of Surrealism and its legacies, and Buchloh's analyses of works by Gerhard Richter and other Continental artists. And, with four initial sections on methodological frameworks (strangely, coyly, without direct authorial attribution, these are nonetheless written in an aggressive first-person voice) and, following, a chronological narrative pivoting around major works, punctuated by two round-table discussions among the authors on modern and contemporary art, the innovative structure confirms the book as a major, certain to be canonical as well as canonizing, work in the history of art.

At the same time, the book falls short on several fundamental points. If, as the authors repeatedly claim, it provides the newest, deepest, and most important account of Euro-American art and its relation to theoretical shifts over the past one hundred years, then it must be taken to task for what can only be seen as a blatant contradiction of the most profound insights of the very twentieth-century philosophy and poststructuralist theory that these authors want to claim as their bedrock and justification. The book also fails to provide an adequate history of modern and contemporary art in relation to social and political forces, unless by history is meant (as it was for Heinrich Wolfflin in 1915 (1)) a progression of influences from one formally determined instance of innovation, usually instantiated by the work of a white Euro-American male artist, to another. It is startling, for example, to find a book addressing modern and contemporary art with no explicit reference to Indian and Algerian wars of independence or the Vietnam War, nor a deep understanding of the relation between such events and the articulation of a critique of subjectivity in poststructuralism and the various rights movements--a critique itself with obvious links to developments in body and installation art, not to mention in work that is overtly feminist, antiracist, and/or queer.