Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. - book reviews

Later he offers the following succinct lines on postmodernism: "Postmodernism views both images and concepts as radically polyvalent. This permits a fluid reconfiguring of one's experience of the world, continually changing juxtapositions and sequences in a manner that fundamentally destabilizes their meaning" (p. 360).

Fineberg's definition of the "modern artist" as one whose "aesthetic runs counter to the normalizing force of tradition" implies that the only valid art today is that which functions as a critique. It may be that "running counter to" overstates the case and privileges subversion, when the role of the artist might also be seen as that of mediator between "the normalizing force of tradition" and wrenching perpetual change, especially at a point in time when the latter has the upper hand. As generations overtake each other there may be readers of this book who do not perceive a need for subversion or who will interpret their own role to be that of maintaining contact with rapidly receding tradition.

As I said earlier, Art since 1940 does almost everything one could ask for, especially in terms of engaging students' interest. Inevitably there are a few disappointments. Women get short shrift: in the first 311 pages the work of 120 males and 7 females is reproduced; in the following 160 pages the ratio rises to about one in four. It's too bad that an opportunity was missed to right the balance of Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning vis-a-vis their superstar husbands. The author misses a chance to show how Elaine de Kooning's all-over paintings of 1947 anticipated early 1950s canvases by some of her male colleagues or to make more than a passing mention of Krasner, who could paint and collage circles around many of the male contemporaries given a big play here. Joan Mitchell, a painter who started out strong in the 1950s and whose work built to a grand crescendo in the 1980s, makes no appearance. And is it possibly misguided to equate scale with importance to the extent of omitting a modern-day Goya like Sue Coe whose biting satire is most often delivered on a small scale in black and white?

Although there are frequent references to media-generated images there is virtually no photography per se; surprisingly, Cindy Sherman is the only photographer who makes the cut, with Robert Mapplethorpe conspicuously absent. Painting also gets short shrift, a bias that is to be expected on the part of a critic who made his art world entry in the anti-painting 1960s. The making of marks on a surface to register feeling or perception is an infinitely variable process, one that is capable of reflecting accurately a moment in history even though it has to make room for photography, video, and the computer. Watch a painter at work on a canvas, carrying on an unspoken dialogue with the emergent work, and try to deny that this is also a "strategy of being."

Then there are all those other questions about the production and consumption of art, usually addressed in Marxist art history and ignored here. Who shows this art and where? Who pays for the fabrication? To what consumer is it addressed? Is the critique compromised by being to a large extent tolerated and financed by the system it critiques? What similarities exist between the art production of post-World War II America and that of Athens after the Persian Wars when it established economic hegemony over its allies or that of Florence in the fifteenth century with its surplus of capital or that of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century with its thriving industry and colonial trade? Finally, are these heroic manifestations of individualism ultimately and unintentionally part of the political agenda of late capitalism? Well, assuming this book has been adopted for course use, these questions can be introduced at the option of the teacher, who can at least be confident that Fineberg has provided students with a thoroughly informed and enlivening insider's introduction to the material.