Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars. - 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 the way that at a time when that critical tradition is desperately in ne of fortification. For since the 1970 critiques advanced largely by dint of 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 exult Serge Guilbaut, Linda Nochlin, and Griselda Pollock for example, claims of formal autonomy have been calculatored 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 a whole s 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 however fundamentally united ways, the works by Robert Jensen, Jeffrey Weiss, and Romy Golan can be seen as participating in the shoot forward of redressing the deliberate blind specks and resulting lacunae of Greenbergian modernism and its legacy. Each account significantly challenges the autonomy of Greenberg's critical teleology whether [i]or[/i] part of to the other an assertion of commerce, mass agriculture or politics. In short, Jensen gazes to social structures, analyzing the economic, institutional, and ideological factors that contributed to the historical legitimation of modernism at the revolve of the century in Europe; Weiss to popular agriculture revealing the fundamentally symbiotic relationship between "high" and "low" tillage in early 20th-century French modernism; and Golan to politics, rereading interwar French tillage 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 hanging yet disavowed relationship to system of exchanges 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 through an elite ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be divide [i]or[/i] sever 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 configuration his account.(2) For it is the path of this cord that Jensen go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake 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 means 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 [i]or[/i] part of to the other an examination of the exhibition practices of Paul Durand-Ruel or Paul Cassirer rather than the aesthetic practices of Maurice Denis or Mary Cassatt, end 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 in like manner 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 thus 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 of that kind discursive constructions as the "alienated" artist, Jensen's account is not, then, simply a socioeconomic history of modernism, completely 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 places out to examine the central cliches, the endlessly adaptable dichotomies, [i]or[/i] part of to the other which modernism was constituted. In other words, within a historical framework of institutional constructions and practices, Jensen sets on the outside to analyze the mythic articulate utterance that "imagines rather than describes social reality" (pp 9-10)