The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism. - book reviews

If the culture and politics of interwar and Vichy France evidence a marked desire for "history at a standstill," Jensen, Weiss, and Golan emphatically work against that nostalgic impulse for stasis, expanding and changing, rather than simply preserving and reinscribing, the history of art that is modernism. Yet in their respective analyses of the economic, popular, and political contexts that gave shape to modernism, a certain conception of history, if not of art, is reinscribed. None of the three authors acknowledges the embeddedness of his or her own interpretation, nor do they grant to history the mutability or relativity that is granted to the cultural object as text, despite the fact that each attends to language, to discourse, Golan and Jensen invoking Bourdieu, and Weiss, Bakhtin.

As forces of change continue to transform the discipline of art history, most recently in the wake of poststructuralism, we shall see more work that questions not only the object of, but also the subject in, art history. Without abandoning all claims to epistemological knowledge, we might ask, simply in relation to the three texts at issue, how investigations of commerce, popular culture, and nationalism speak as much of our locatedness in the present as they do of our investment in the past, how our analyses of history inform, and are informed by, the present.

LISA SALTZMAN Department of History of Art Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr, Pa. 19010

1. Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina, New York, 1985, 24.

2. Instead, Jensen cites and builds upon the work of such scholars as Albert Boime, T. J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Patricia Mainardi, Michael Marrinan, Maria Makela, and Peter Paret, each of whom has analyzed the role of institutions and politics in the formation of modernist culture, be it French or German. More explicitly invoked in Jensen's earlier "The Avant-Garde and the Trade in Art," Art Journal, XLVII, Winter 1988, 360-67, is Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanations of Pictures, New Haven, 1985, esp. the chapter "Intentional Visual Interest: Picasso's Portrait of Kahnweiler," in which Baxandall asserts the fundamental reciprocity of art and its commercial institutions.

3. See Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, 2d ed., New Haven, 1986, 16-17.

4. A version of this chapter first appeared as "Picasso, Collage, and the Music Hall," in Modern Art and Popular Culture, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, New York, 1990, 82-115, a companion volume to the exhibition "High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture," held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the fall of 1990.

5. See David Cottingham, "What the Papers Say: Politics and Ideology in Picasso's Collages of 1912," Art Journal, XLVII, Winter 1988, 350-59; idem, "Cubism, Aestheticism, and Modernism," in Lynn Zelevansky, ed. Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, New York, 1992, 58-72; and Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism and the Invention of Collage, New Haven, 1992, 141-44. If for Cottingham, Picasso's collage practice embodies a Mallarmesque aestheticism, for Poggi, his collages function as a programmatic critique of Mallarme.