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

If the structuralist art history of Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss has brought a theoretical sophistication to Greenbergian formalism, it has done in like manner at a time when that critical tradition is desperately in ne of fortification. For since the 1970 critiques advanced largely through 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 triumph Serge Guilbaut, Linda Nochlin, and Griselda Pollock for example, claims of formal autonomy have been reckonered 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 the pair art and art history are combination of parts to form a wholes of representation, differences of class, sex sex nationality, or race have been shown in various socially and historically specific ways, to form a composed of several elements web of determination and meaning.

In quite particular nevertheless fundamentally united ways, the works by Robert Jensen, Jeffrey Weiss, and Romy Golan can be seen as participating in the throw out of redressing the deliberate blind blots and resulting lacunae of Greenbergian modernism and its legacy. Each account significantly challenges the autonomy of Greenberg's critical teleology whether end an assertion of commerce, mass agriculture or politics. In short, Jensen direct the eyes to social structures, analyzing the economic, institutional, and ideological factors that contributed to the historical legitimation of modernism at the make go round of the century in Europe; Weiss to popular tillage revealing the fundamentally symbiotic relationship between "high" and "low" tillage in early 20th-century French modernism; and Golan to politics, rereading interwar French agriculture 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 pendent yet disavowed relationship to business As Clement Greenberg wrote in his 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch":

No agriculture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde this was provided by dint of an elite ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be wound off, but to which it has always remained attached by dint of 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 form his account.(2) For it is the path of this cord that Jensen tread on the heels ofs 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 the agency of 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 end an examination of the exhibition practices of Paul Durand-Ruel or Paul Cassirer rather than the aesthetic practices of Maurice Denis or Mary Cassatt, from one side 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 blurr in his account are the distinctions between artists of the Left and the Right, arguably with equal reason essential to defining the historical avant-garde. As of that kind Jensen's account functions not just as a challenge to Greenberg's rigorously formalist account of modernism, on the other hand 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 material substance 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 limit up in its machinations. Thus, the alienated artist in the way that essential to Burger's formulation is for Jensen "largely a fiction that serv rather than denied the commodification of art" (p 10)

With its attention to like discursive constructions as the "alienated" artist, Jensen's account is not, then, simply a socioeconomic history of modernism, full as his study may be with extensive, if not exhaustive, archival material upon such institutions as the Salon, the Societe nationale de beaux-arts, the Secession, and the emergent commercial gallery. Rather, with explicit respect to Pierre Bourdieu, Jensen plants out to examine the central cliches, the endlessly adaptable dichotomies, end which modernism was constituted. In other words, within a historical framework of institutional configurations and practices, Jensen sets without to analyze the mythic articulate utterance that "imagines rather than describes social reality" (pp 9-10)