Content provided in partnership with
The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism. - book reviews
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 1996 by Lisa Saltzman
If the structuralist art history of Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss has brought a theoretical sophistication to Greenbergian formalism, it has done so at a time when that critical tradition is desperately in need of fortification. For since the 1970s, critiques advanced largely by feminist and social art historians have left the formerly hegemonic status of the Greenbergian formalist paradigm greatly compromised. In the work of T. J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Linda Nochlin, and Griselda Pollock, for example, claims of formal autonomy have been countered with assertions of cultural and political embeddedness. In what could be seen as an Althusserian reframing of art-historical investigation and interpretation, ideology has been shown to pervade art and, moreover, its history. That is to say, insofar as both art and art history are systems of representation, differences of class, sex, gender, nationality, or race have been shown, in various socially and historically specific ways, to form a complex web of determination and meaning.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
In quite particular yet fundamentally united ways, the books by Robert Jensen, Jeffrey Weiss, and Romy Golan can be seen as participating in the project of redressing the deliberate blind spots and resulting lacunae of Greenbergian modernism and its legacy. Each account significantly challenges the autonomy of Greenberg's critical teleology, whether through an assertion of commerce, mass culture, or politics. In short, Jensen looks to social structures, analyzing the economic, institutional, and ideological factors that contributed to the historical legitimation of modernism at the turn of the century in Europe; Weiss to popular culture, revealing the fundamentally symbiotic relationship between "high" and "low" culture in early 20th-century French modernism; and Golan to politics, rereading interwar French culture as inextricably bound up in an emerging political discourse of nationalism.
Jensen's comprehensive and expansive account of early modernism, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, can be said to lay bare the foundational paradox of the formalist paradigm of modernism: the avant-garde's fundamentally dependent yet disavowed relationship to commerce. As Clement Greenberg wrote in his 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch":
No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde this was provided by an elite ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold.(1)
Although Jensen does not allude specifically to Greenberg's "umbilical cord of gold," it is this financially nourishing cord that can be seen to structure his account.(2) For it is the path of this cord that Jensen follows, tracing its movement through the institutional matrixes of a burgeoning 19th-century Parisian art market, and pursuing its trail across national boundaries to the cities and artistic institutions of Central Europe, particularly Berlin.
In Jensen's account, Impressionism, or historical modernism, is constituted, and constituted belatedly and internationally, by its financial agents, the network of critics and dealers who participated in the dissemination and ratification of 19th-century painting. In other words, it is through an examination of the exhibition practices of Paul Durand-Ruel or Paul Cassirer rather than the aesthetic practices of Maurice Denis or Mary Cassatt, through an analysis of the critical language of Theodore Duret or Emile Zola rather than the painterly language of Edgar Degas or Anders Zorn, that the history of modernism emerges.
This said, certain aesthetic differences between artists do persist within Jensen's cultural economy of critics and dealers, and are in fact quite necessary for the construction of his argument. What is blurred in his account are the distinctions between artists of the Left and the Right, arguably so essential to defining the historical avant-garde. As such, Jensen's account functions not just as a challenge to Greenberg's rigorously formalist account of modernism, but as a purposeful critique of Peter Burger's expressly political theorization of the avant-garde. For if Burger's avant-garde is a politically engaged, oppositional body of artists, epitomized in the artistic personae and practices of Dada and Surrealism, Jensen's avant-garde is ultimately neither heroic, political, nor oppositional. Instead, although the artists of the academy or the so-called juste milieu may have embraced the capitalist economy more forcefully and more forthrightly, aesthetic modernists, as epitomized in the refusals, were just as bound up in its machinations. Thus, the alienated artist so essential to Burger's formulation is for Jensen "largely a fiction that served rather than denied the commodification of art" (p. 10).
With its attention to such discursive constructions as the "alienated" artist, Jensen's account is not, then, simply a socioeconomic history of modernism, replete as his study may be with extensive, if not exhaustive, archival material on such institutions as the Salon, the Societe nationale des beaux-arts, the Secession, and the emergent commercial gallery. Rather, with explicit reference to Pierre Bourdieu, Jensen sets out to examine the central cliches, the endlessly adaptable dichotomies, through which modernism was constituted. In other words, within a historical framework of institutional structures and practices, Jensen sets out to analyze the mythic speech that "imagines rather than describes social reality" (pp. 9-10).
