Art in France 1900-1940 - Book Review

This brings us back to the demands of the survey form. Green's is a thoughtful and in many ways elegant solution to the competing demands of the genre, but it is not a value-free one. Moving consideration of the specificity of works of art into a separate section and delving into the detail of the work there and only there make it possible for him to give the claims of "history" their due elsewhere in the text, unimpeded by the need to spend extensive analytic time on close readings of individual works. This is handy for both author and user. But as the result of this solution perpetuates a division that modernist aesthetics imposed, convenience comes at too high a price. The most urgent task now for scholars of modernism must be to find a way of reconceptualizing the materiality of the work of art that gives critical purchase on modernism rather than capitulating to its myths and self-serving rhetoric. Green puts modernism at a distance, but he also finds himself ghettoizing the work itself as a consequence.

I need to conclude by making it clear that Green's book is an impressive and useful one. French art of this period has an enormous historiography, as a glance at the notes or at the very serviceable and extremely rigorously selected bibliography reveals, and Green's book summarizes and extends a great deal of recent scholarship. Moreover, the text offers a cogent and deeply researched account of French art over a substantial chronological period. Users, from students taking a survey course to their professors, will encounter valuable and usable material either by dipping into the narrative through the index or by reading through any of the sections. As a survey of current approaches and a judicious account of the current scholarship, which also, within that context, has much that is original to say in the shape and detail of the argument, it is most helpful. If it also marks a moment at which scholarship urgently needs to press forward with a reconceptualization of the work of art that is free of the continui ng glamour of modernism's version, then that, too, makes its appearance very welcome.

Notes

(1.) The Block Reader in Visual Culture, edited by the Block Editorial Board (London: Routledge, 1996), xiii.

(2.) See Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Finde-Siecle Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Michael C. Fitzgerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

(3.) Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting" (1961), reprinted in Art in Theory 1900-1939: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ad. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwells, 1992), 756.

(4.) Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).

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