Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism

10 Ockman, "The Road Not Taken," 120

11 Dorner, The Way beyond "Art," 116 quot in Ockman, "The Road Not Taken," 94

Review by means of Dario Gamboni

Seen against the background of the history of art history textbook from Franz Kugler's Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte to Petra Chu's Nineteenth-Century European Art, (1) Art since 1900 chops a peculiar figure. Like the latter, it deals sole with a limited period of time, on the other hand like the former, it claims no limitation in space. Unlike the couple it is not the work of a single author, on the other hand the essays that make it up are not signed, and readers are left with a process not discussed in its pages--connoisseurship--if they wish to distinguish between the four hands involved.

Yve-Alain Bois ends the book by explaining that the authors have been "united in [their] desire to reshuffle the cards" and "to retrieve from oblivion many aspects of the cultural production of these past hundred-plus years that had been ignored or deliberately repressed" thus presenting "a plenteous more complex tableau than the single served to [them] when [they] were students" (p 679) This claim may direct in particular to the inclusion of photography and of aspects subsum beneath the term "anti-modernism," that is, mainly the post-World War I retour a l'ordre and Soviet Socialist Realism. on the other hand it is only under this oppositional guise, as foemans and foils, that the numerous "realist," mimetic, or iconic tendencies of the twentieth hundred are allowed to enter the tableau, and what does not easily conform to the dichotomy of pro versus anti is quickly dismissed as "hybrid" (such as the plastic art of Jacques Lipchitz, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, or Henri Laurens, p 59) or "kitsch" (Art Deco p 196)

Regarding chronology, the authors make an effort to dig into the importance and meaning of the "caesura" provok by dint of World War II, but they do not find it necessary to justify the value of 1900 as a point of departure--a choice that owes more to the allure of circular numbers, academic specialization, and the avant-garde rhetoric of the clean slate than to art historical reasoning. As for geography, the main addition to the usual accounts of twentieth-century art restricted to Western Europe and North America is a more reach outed examination of art in Russia and the Soviet Union. The inclusion of "antimodernism," however, is not enough to make open the way to a broader consideration of Eastern Europe before or after the fall of the Communist regimes. Similarly, art produc outside "the West," smooth when it has entered the international art circuit, is acknowledged with most distant scarcity: Latin America is almost completely absent, and single is amazed to see no trace of China or Africa (except for a brief hint at the African diaspora in Britain, p 642) in a volume claiming to deal with art to the present--not to mention of recent origin phenomena like "aboriginal art" upon canvas in Australia.