Art & Visual Culture 1850-2010: Modernity to Globalisation E-Book

• Herausgeber: Tate Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 596

Beschreibung

An innovatory exploration of art and visual culture. Through carefully chosen themes and topics rather than through a general survey, the volumes approach the process of looking at works of art in terms of their audiences, functions and cross-cultural contexts. While focused on painting, sculpture and architecture, it also explores a wide range of visual culture in a variety of media and methods. "1850-2010: Modernity to Globalisation" includes essays which engage directly with topical issues around art and gender, globalisation, cultural difference and curating, as well as explorations of key canonical artists and movements and of some less well-documented work of contemporary artists. The third of three text books, published by Tate in association with the Open University, which insight for students of Art History, Art Theory and Humanities. Introduction: stories of modern art Part 1: Art and modernity 1:Avant-garde and modern world: some aspects of art in Paris and beyond c.1850-1914 2: Victorian Britain: from images of modernity to the modernity of images 3: Cubism and Abstract Art revisited 4: Modernism in architecture and design: function and aesthetic Part 2: From modernism to globalisation 5: Modernism and figuration 6: From Abstract Expressionism to Conceptual Art: a survey of New York art c.1940-1970 7: Border crossings: installations, locations and travelling artists 8: Global dissensus: art and contemporary capitalism

Leseprobe

Art & Visual Culture 1850–2010

This book is published by Tate Publishing in association with The Open University.

The books in this Art & Visual Culture series are:

Art & Visual Culture 1100–1600: Medieval to Renaissance, edited by Kim W. WoodsISBN 978 1 84976 093 5 (paperback)ISBN 978 1 84976 108 6 (ebook)

Art & Visual Culture 1600–1850: Academy to Avant-Garde, edited by Emma BarkerISBN 978 1 84976 096 6 (paperback)ISBN 978 1 84976 109 3 (ebook)

Art & Visual Culture 1850–2010: Modernity to Globalisation, edited by Steve Edwards and Paul WoodISBN 978 1 84976 097 3 (paperback)ISBN 978 1 84976 110 9 (ebook)

Art & Visual Culture: A Reader, edited by Angeliki Lymberopoulou, Pamela Bracewell-Homer and Joel Robinson ISBN 978 1 84976 048 5 (paperback)

Art & Visual Culture 1850–2010

MODERNITY to GLOBALISATION

Edited by Steve Edwards and Paul Wood

Tate Publishing

in association with

The Open University

First published by order of the Tate Trusteesby Tate Publishing, a division of Tate Enterprises LtdMillbank, London SW1P 4RGwww.tate.org.uk/publishing

in association with

The Open UniversityMilton KeynesMK7 6AAUnited Kingdomwww.open.ac.uk

Copyright © 2012, The Open University

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS (www.cla.co.uk).

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Distributed in the United States and Canada by ABRAMS, New York

Library of Congress Control Number applied for

Edited, designed and typeset by The Open University

This publication forms part of the Open University module Exploring art and visual culture (A226). Details of this and other Open University modules can be obtained from the Student Registration and Enquiry Service, The Open University, PO Box 197, Milton Keynes MK7 6BJ, United Kingdom (tel. [phone], email [email protected]).

ISBN 978 1 84976 110 9

1.1

Table of contents

PrefaceIntroduction: stories of modern artPart 1 Art and modernityChapter 1 Avant-garde and modern world: some aspects of art in Paris and beyond c.1850–1914Chapter 2 Victorian Britain: from images of modernity to the modernity of imagesChapter 3 Cubism and Abstract Art revisitedChapter 4 Modernism in architecture and design: function and aestheticPart 2 From modernism to globalisationChapter 5 Modernism and figurationChapter 6 From Abstract Expressionism to Conceptual Art: a survey of New York art c.1940–1970Chapter 7 Border crossings: installations, locations and travelling artistsChapter 8 Global dissensus: art and contemporary capitalismAfterword

Preface

This is the third of three books in the series Art & Visual Culture, which together form the main texts of an Open University Level 2 module, Exploring art and visual culture. Each book is also designed to be read independently by the general reader, to whom they offer an accessible introduction to some of the key issues raised by the study of art and visual culture across a broad historical period.

Central to each book is a concern with the ways in which the concept of art has developed over the course of time and how visual practices have both responded to and been shaped by these changing ideas. This final book in the series explores a period in which modern art diversified into a wide range of forms and media and spread from a few western centres to become a world-wide practice.

All of the books in the series include teaching elements. To encourage the reader to reflect on the material presented, each chapter contains short exercises in the form of questions printed in bold type. These are followed by discursive sections.

The three books in the series are:

Art & Visual Culture 1100–1600: Medieval to Renaissance, edited by Kim W. Woods

Art & Visual Culture 1600–1850: Academy to Avant-Garde, edited by Emma Barker

Art & Visual Culture 1850–2010: Modernity to Globalisation, edited by Steve Edwards and Paul Wood.

There is also a companion reader:

Art & Visual Culture: A Reader, edited by Angeliki Lymberopoulou, Pamela Bracewell-Homer and Joel Robinson.

Introduction: stories of modern art

Steve Edwards

This book addresses art and architecture across a broad period of two centuries, but it would be impossible to tackle the convoluted history of modern art in a volume of this size.1 Instead, we have opted to present some snapshots of art made during this period. The eight topics discussed have been selected to highlight both what happened in art history and visual culture and to draw attention to some influential ways of thinking about modern art. The book is organised in two parts. Part 1 examines the period from the middle of the nineteenth century until the end of the 1930s. It considers French and English art of the nineteenth century, the rise of Cubism and abstract art and the modern movement in architecture and design. Part 2 looks at developments from the middle of the twentieth century up to the present day. It opens with a study of figurative painting and sculpture; then, focusing on two exhibitions, it considers influential trends associated with New York in the period after the Second World War; and the final two chapters cast a spotlight on globalisation and recent developments in art.

During the period covered by this book, art changed out of all recognition. At the beginning of our period, the various academies still held sway in Europe. Artists continued to learn their craft by drawing from plaster casts before progressing to the figure, and the trip to Rome remained a cultural rite of passage. It is true that the hierarchy of the genres was breaking down and the classical ideal was becoming less convincing. In 1859, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) poured scorn on the new medium of photography. According to him, photographs that imitated paintings of ancient history were ludicrous:

By bringing together a group of male and female clowns, got up like butchers and laundry-maids in a carnival, and by begging these heroes to be so kind as to hold their chance grimaces for the time necessary for the performance, the operator flattered himself that he was reproducing tragic or elegant scenes from ancient history.2

Baudelaire was suggesting that photographs that mirrored history painting – ‘male and female clowns, got up like butchers and laundry-maids in a carnival’ – were utterly unpersuasive, because tawdry details from everyday life undermined references to ancient history. Many of his contemporaries went a step further, believing that paintings and sculptures of contemporary women posed as classical nymphs were equally preposterous. Increasingly, academic art failed to generate conviction, and ordinary landscapes and scenes from everyday life began to replace ‘resurrected Romans’. Nevertheless, what counted as art in much of the nineteenth century remained pretty stable. Whether in sculpture, painting, drawing or printmaking, artworks represented recognisable subjects in a credible human-centred space. To be sure, subjects became less high-flown, compositional effects often deliberately jarring and surface handling more explicit. There were plenty of academicians and commentators who believed these changes amounted to the end of civilisation, but from today’s perspective they seem like small shifts of emphasis.

In contrast, art in the first part of the twentieth century underwent a rapid gear change. Art historians agree that during this time artists began to radically revise picture making and sculpture. As you will see in chapters 1 and 3, painters flattened out pictorial space, broke with conventional viewpoints and discarded local colour.3 Sculptors began to leave the surface of their works in a rough, seemingly unfinished state; they increasingly created partial figures and abandoned plinths or, alternatively, inflated the scale of their bases. Architects abandoned revivalist styles and rich ornamentation. To take one often cited example from painting, while the art of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) is based on a recognisable motif, say a landscape, when looking at these paintings we get the distinct impression that the overall organisation of the colours and structural elements matters as much or more than the scene depicted. To retain fidelity to his sense impressions, Cézanne is compelled to find a new order and coherence internal to the canvas. Frequently this turns into incoherence as he tries to manage the tension between putting marks on a flat surface and his external observation of space.

As Paul Wood shows in chapter 3, in fifteen years some artists would take this problem – the recognition that making art involved attention to its own formal conditions that are not reducible to representing external things – through Cubism to a fully abstract art. Conventionally, this story is told as a heroic progression of ‘movements’ and ‘styles’, each giving way to the next in the sequence: Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism …. Each changing of the guard is perceived as an advance and almost a necessary next step on the road to some preset goal. This rapid turnover of small groups and personal idioms can seem bewildering and, in fact, this is a minimal version of this story. Whether they sought new expressive resources, novel ways of conveying experience or innovative techniques for representing the modern world, modern artists turned their backs on the tried and tested forms of mimetic resemblance. But what counted as art changed too. Bits of the everyday world began to be incorporated into artworks – as collage or montage in two-dimensional art forms; in construction and assemblage in three-dimensional ones. The inclusion of found materials played a fundamental role in modern art. The use of modern materials and technologies – steel, concrete, photography – did something similar. Some artists abandoned easel painting or sculpture to make direct interventions in the world through the production of usable things, whether chairs or illustrated news magazines. Not all artists elected to work with these new techniques and materials, and many carried on in the traditional ways or attempted to adapt them to new circumstances.

Autonomy and modernity

Broadly speaking, there are two different ways of thinking about modern art, or two different versions of the story. One way is to view art as something that can be practised (and thought of) as an activity radically separate from everyday life or worldly concerns. From this point of view, art is said to be ‘autonomous’ from society – that is, it is believed to be self-sustaining and self-referring. One particularly influential version of this story suggests that modern art should be viewed as a process by which features extraneous to a particular branch of art would be progressively eliminated, and painters or sculptors would come to concentrate on problems specific to their domain. This version of modern art and the theories associated with it will be examined in more detail in Part 1 of this book. Another way of thinking about modern art is to view it as responding to the modern world, and to see modern artists immersing themselves in the conflicts and challenges of society. That is to say, some modern artists sought ways of conveying the changing experiences generated in Europe by the twin processes of commercialisation (the commodification of everyday life) and urbanisation. From this point of view, modern art is a way of reflecting on the transformations that created what we call, in a sort of shorthand, ‘modernity’.

While it has its roots in the nineteenth century, the approach to modern art as an autonomous practice is particularly associated with the ideas of the English critics Roger Fry (1866–1934) and Clive Bell (1881–1964), the critic Clement Greenberg (1909–94) and the New York Museum of Modern Art’s director Alfred H. Barr (1902–81). For a period this view largely became the common sense of modern art.4 This version of modernism is itself complex, and you will come up against it at various points in this book. The argument presumes that art is self-contained and artists are seen to grapple with technical problems of painting and sculpture, and the point of reference is to artworks that have gone before. This approach can be described as ‘formalist’ (paying exclusive attention to formal matters), or, perhaps more productively drawing on a term employed by the critic Meyer Schapiro (1904–96), as ‘internalist’ (a somewhat less pejorative way of saying the same thing).5 According to Greenberg:

Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miró, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, colours, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors.6

Rather than cloaking artifice, modern art, such as that made by Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) (see Plate 0.1), drew attention to the conventions, procedures and techniques supposedly ‘inherent’ in a given form of art. Modern art set about ‘creating something valid solely on its own terms’.7 For painting, this meant turning away from illusion and story-telling to concentrate on the features that were fundamental to the practice – producing aesthetic effects by placing marks on a flat, bounded surface. For sculpture, it entailed arranging or assembling forms in space. In a series of occasional pieces, Greenberg produced an account of the coming to consciousness of artists (or art) in which this fundamental recognition of the nature of painting was brought to fruition. For him modern art began with Edouard Manet (1832–83), who was the first to recognise or emphasise the contradiction between illusion and the flat support of the canvas. Cézanne pushed this recognition much further and his legacy was picked up by Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and the Cubists and further developed by Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) and the interwar abstract painters and some Surrealists (particularly Joan Miró, 1893–1983), culminating in the Abstract Expressionist generation of American painters (see chapter 6), who were his contemporaries. Greenberg represented this trajectory as the modernist ‘mainstream’.8

Plate 0.1 Wassily Kandinsky, Painting with Green Center, 1913, oil on canvas, 109 × 118 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection, 1931.510. Photography: © The Art Institute of Chicago. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012.

It important to understand that the account of autonomous art, however internalist it may seem, developed as a response to the social and political conditions of modern societies. In his 1939 essay ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’, Greenberg suggested that art was in danger from two linked challenges: the rise of the dictators (Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Franco) and the commercialised visual culture of modern times (the kitsch, or junk, of his title). Dictatorial regimes turned their backs on ambitious art and curried favour with the masses by promoting a bowdlerised or debased form of realism that was easy to comprehend. Seemingly distinct from art made by dictatorial fiat, the visual culture of liberal capitalism pursued instant, canned entertainment that would appeal to the broadest number of paying customers. This pre-packaged emotional distraction was geared to easy, unchallenging consumption. Kitsch traded on sentimentality, common-sense values and flashy surface effects. The two sides of this pincer attack ghettoised the values associated with art. Advanced art, in this argument, like all human values, faced an imminent danger. Greenberg argued that, in response to the impoverished culture of both modern capitalist democracy and dictatorship, artists withdrew to create novel and challenging artworks that maintained the possibility for critical experience and attention. He claimed that this was the only way that art could be kept alive in modern society. In this essay, Greenberg put forward a left-wing sociological account of the origins of modernist autonomy; others came to similar conclusions from positions of cultural despair or haughty disdain for the masses.

The period covered by this book has been tumultuous: it has been regularly punctuated by revolutions, wars and civil wars, and has witnessed the rise of nation states, the growth and spread of capitalism, imperialism and colonialism, and decolonisation. Sometimes artists tried to keep their distance from the historical whirlwind, at other moments they flung themselves into the eye of the storm. Even the most abstract developments and autonomous trends can be thought of as embedded in this historical process. Modern artists could be cast in opposition to repressive societies, or mass visual culture in the west, by focusing on themes of personal liberty and individual defiance. The New York School championed by Greenberg, which Michael Corris discusses in chapter 6, coincided with this political situation and with the high point of US mass cultural dominance – advertising, Hollywood cinema, popular music and the rest. In many ways, the work of this group of abstract painters presents the test case for assessing the claim that modern art offers a critical alternative to commercial visual culture. It could seem a plausible argument, but the increasing absorption of modern art into middle-class museum culture casts an increasing doubt over these claims. At the same time, as discussed in chapter 5, the figurative art that was supposed to have been left in the hands of the dictators continued to be made in a wide variety of forms. Brendan Prendeville, the author of this chapter, argues that artists’ encounters with the human body offered the same possibilities for a critical and engaging art in opposition to mainstream culture. If figurative art had been overlooked by critics during the high point of abstract art, it made a spectacular comeback with Pop Art.

Greenberg’s story was particularly influential in the period from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. He produced a powerful synthetic account of developments or changes in art, but it was always a selective narrative. Even in the case of the paradigmatic example of Cubism (discussed in much more detail in chapter 3), it is possible to see other concerns. Whereas the internal focus concentrated on the flattening of picture space through the use of small ‘facet planes’, art historians have recently paid a lot of attention to the way Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963) engaged with the signs and materials of mass culture: their inclusion of newspaper cuttings, handbills, cinema tickets and the like. Cubism can be viewed as an experiment with the internal or formal concerns of art for a small audience of cognoscenti, and there is no denying that it is this, but embedded in this work is an engagement with the new forms of visual culture.

Let’s take a step back to the middle of the nineteenth century and consider the emergence of modern art in Paris. The new art that developed with Gustave Courbet (1819–77), Manet and the Impressionists entailed a self-conscious break with the art of the past. These modern artists took seriously the representation of their own time. In place of allegorical figures in togas or scenes from the Bible, modern artists concerned themselves with the things around them. When asked to include angels in a painting for a church, Courbet is said to have replied ‘I have never seen angels. Show me an angel and I will paint one.’ But these artists were not just empirical recording devices. The formal or technical means employed in modern art are jarring and unsettling, and this has to be a fundamental part of the story. A tension between the means and the topics depicted, between surface and subject, is central to what this art was. Nevertheless, we miss something crucial if we do not attend to the artists’ choices of subjects. Principally, these artists sought the signs of change and novelty – multiple details and scenarios that made up contemporary life. This meant they paid a great deal of attention to the new visual culture associated with commercialised leisure.

Greenberg contrasted the mainstream of modern art, concerned with autonomous aesthetic experience and formal innovation, with what he called ‘dead ends’ – directions in art that he felt led nowhere. Even when restricted to the European tradition, this marginalised much of the most significant art made in interwar Europe – Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism.9 The groups of artists producing this art – usually referred to collectively as the ‘avant-garde’ or the ‘historical avant-garde’ – wanted to fuse art and life, and often based their practice on a socialist rejection of bourgeois culture.10 From their position in western Europe, the Dadaists mounted an assault on the irrationalism and violence of militarism and the repressive character of capitalist culture; in collages, montages, assemblages and performances, they created visual juxtapositions aimed at shocking the middle-class audience and intended to reveal connections hidden behind everyday appearances (see Plate 0.2). The material for this was drawn from mass-circulation magazines, newspapers and other printed ephemera. The Constructivists participated in the process of building a new society in the USSR, turning to the creation of utilitarian objects (or, at least, prototypes for them). The Surrealists combined ideas from psychoanalysis and Marxism in an attempt to unleash those forces repressed by mainstream society; the dream imagery is most familiar, but experiments with found objects and collage were also prominent. These avant-garde groups tried to produce more than refined aesthetic experiences for a restricted audience; they proffered their skills to help to change the world. In this work the cross-over to visual culture is evident; communication media and design played an important role. Avant-garde artists began to design book covers, posters, fabrics, clothing, interiors, monuments and other useful things. They also began to merge with journalism by producing photographs and undertaking layout work. In avant-garde circles, architects, photographers and artists mixed and exchanged ideas. For those committed to autonomy of art, this kind of activity constitutes a denial of the shaping conditions of art and betrayal of art for propaganda, but the avant-garde were attempting something else – they sought a new social role for art. One way to explore this debate is by switching from painting and sculpture to architecture and design, and Tim Benton follows this line of enquiry in chapter 4.

Plate 0.2 Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Epoch of the Weimar Beer-Belly Culture (Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche, Deutschlands), 1919–20, photomontage and collage with watercolour, 114 × 90 cm. State Museums, Berlin, inv. NG57/61. Photo: © bpk/Nationalgalerie, SMB/Jörg P. Anders. © DACS 2012.

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), who is now seen as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, occupies an important place in this alternative story. Duchamp started out as a Cubist, but broke with the idea of art as a matter of special visual experience and turned his attention to puns and perceptual or conceptual conundrums.11 These activities brought him into the orbit of Dada in Paris and New York, but this was probably nothing more than a convenient alliance. Duchamp played games with words and investigated the associations of ordinary objects. He also messed around with gender conventions, inventing a female alter ego called Rrose Sélavy – a pun on ‘Eros, c’est la vie’ or ‘Eros is life’. Critics and other artists have particularly focused on the strain of his work known as the ‘readymades’. From 1914, Duchamp began singling out ordinary objects, such as a bottle rack, for his own attention and amusement and that of a few friends. Sometimes he altered these things in some small way, adding words and a title or joining them with something else in a way that shifted their meaning; with Bicycle Wheel, he attached an inverted bike wheel to a wooden stool – he seems to have been particularly interested in the shadow play this object created. We can see this odd object among the clutter of Duchamp’s studio on West 67th Street in the photograph by Henri-Pierre Roche (Plate 0.3). He called these altered everyday things ‘assisted readymades’.

Plate 0.3 Henri-Pierre Roche, Bicycle Wheel, 33 West 67th Street, New York, 1917–18, gelatin silver print, 4 × 6 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art; Gift of Jacqueline, Paul and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother Alexina Duchamp, 1998-4-61. Photo: © 2012 The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012.

Duchamp was interested in interrogating the mass-produced objects created by his society and the common-sense definitions and values that such things accrued. Mischievously, he probed the definitions and values of his culture for a small group of like-minded friends. It isn’t at all clear that any of this was meant to be art; in fact, he explicitly posed the idea of making ‘works’ that could not be thought of as ‘art’.12 Nevertheless, artists in the late 1950s and the 1960s became fascinated with this legacy and began to think of art as something the artist selected or posited, rather than something he or she composed or made. According to this idea, the artist could designate anything as art; what was important was the way that this decision allowed things to be perceived in a new light. This was to lead to a fundamentally different conception of art practice.

With the break-up of the hegemony of the New York School, artists began to look at those features of modern art that had been left out of the formalist story. During this period, Duchamp came to replace Picasso or Matisse as the touchstone for young artists, but he was just one tributary of what became a torrent. Perhaps most significantly, painting and anything we might straightforwardly recognise as sculpture began to take a back seat. As chapters 7 and 8 show, a host of experimental forms and new media came to prominence: performance art, video, works made directly in or out of the landscape, installations, photography and a host of other forms and practices. These works often engaged with the representation of modernity and the shifting pattern of world power relations we call ‘globalisation’.

National, international, cosmopolitan

Whether holding itself apart from the visual culture of modernity or immersed in it, modern art developed not in the world’s most powerful economy (Britain), but in the places that were most marked by ‘uneven and combined development’: places where explosive tensions between traditional rural societies and the changes wrought by capitalism were most acute.13 In these locations, people only recently out of the fields encountered the shocks and pleasures of grand-metropolitan cities. As the sociologist of modernity Georg Simmel (1858–1918) suggested: ‘the city sets up a deep contrast with small-town and rural life with reference to the social foundations of psychic life’. In contrast to the over-stimulation of the senses in the city, Simmel thought that in the rural situation ‘the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly’.14 This situation applies first of all to Paris.15 In Paris, the grand boulevards and new palaces of commercial entertainment went hand in hand with the ‘zone’, a vast shanty town ringing the city that was occupied by workers and those who eked out a precarious life. Whereas the Impressionists concentrated on the bourgeois city of bars, boulevards and boudoirs, the photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) represented the Paris that was disappearing – the medieval city with its winding alleys and old iron work – or those working-class quarters composed of cheap lodgings and traders recycling worn-out commodities (see Plate 0.4).16 This clash of ways of life generated different ways of inhabiting and viewing the city with class and gender at their core. Access to the modern city and its representations was more readily available to middle-class men than to those with less social authority, whether they were working people, women or minority ethnic or religious groups.17

Plate 0.4 Eugène Atget, Untitled (Ragpicker), c.1899–1900, gelatin silver print on paper, 22 × 17 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden 1.1969.889. Photo: © 2012 The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence.

Before the Second World War, the alternative centres of modernism were also key sites of uneven and combined development: Berlin, Budapest, Milan, Moscow and Prague. In these places, large-scale industry was created by traditional elites in order to develop the production capacities required to compete militarily with Britain. Factory production was plopped down into largely agrarian societies, generating massive shocks to social equilibrium. In many ways, Moscow is the archetypal version of this pattern of acute contradictions. Before the 1917 Revolution, Moscow was the site of enormous and up-to-date factories, including the world’s largest engineering plant, but was set in a sea of peasant backwardness. This is one reason that Vladimir Lenin described Russia as the weakest link in the international-capitalist chain.

This set of contradictions put a particular perception of time at the centre of modern art. As Wood demonstrates in chapter 1, opposition to the transformations of society that were underway could be articulated in one of two ways, and in an important sense both were fantasy projections: on the one hand, artists looked to societies that were seen as more ‘primitive’ as an antidote to the upheavals and shallow glamour of capitalism. On the other hand, they attempted a leap into the future. Both perspectives – Primitivism and Futurism – entailed a profound hostility to the world as it had actually developed, and both orientations were rooted in the conditions of an uneven and combined world system.

The vast urban centres – Paris, Berlin, Moscow – attracted artists, chancers, intellectuals, poets and revolutionaries. The interchange between people from different nations bred a form of cultural internationalism. In interwar Paris, artists from Spain, Russia, Mexico, Japan and a host of other places rubbed shoulders. Modernist artists attempted to transcend parochial and local conditions and create a formal ‘language’ valid beyond time and place, and ‘the school of Paris’ or the ‘international modern movement’ signified a commitment to a culture more capacious and vibrant than anything the word ‘national’ could contain. The critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–78) stated this theme explicitly. Rejecting the idea that ‘national life’ could be a source of inspiration, he suggested that the modernist culture of Paris, was a ‘no-place’ and a ‘no-time’ and only Nazi tanks returned the city to France by wiping out modernist internationalism.18 Wood examines this theme in the introduction to chapter 1.

‘No-place’ then shifted continent. Perhaps for the only time in its history, after the Second World War modernism was positioned at the heart of world power – when a host of exiles from European fascism and war relocated in New York. American abstract art was centred on New York and a powerful series of institutions: the Museum of Modern Art, Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century and a host of small independent galleries run by private dealers (including Betty Parsons, Samuel Koontz and Sidney Janis). In the main, these artists, such as Jackson Pollock (1912–56), Mark Rothko (1903–70), Arshile Gorky (1904–48), Robert Motherwell (1915–91) and Barnett Newman (1905–70), and associated critics (Greenberg and Rosenberg) were formed during the 1930s in the circles of the New York Left: they were modernist internationalists opposed to US parochialism in art and politics. After the war, they retained this commitment to an international modern art, while the politics drained away or was purged in the Cold War. The period of US hegemony in modern art coincided with the optimum interest in autonomous form and pure ‘optical’ experience. As you will see in chapter 6, this was the time when artists working in the modernist idiom were least interested in articulating epochal changes and most focused on art as an act of individual realisation and a singular encounter between the viewer and the artwork. At the same time, these artists continued to keep their distance from mainstream American values and mass culture. Some champions of autonomous art are inclined to think art came to a shuddering halt with the end of the New York School. Alternatively, we can see the Conceptual Art discussed by Michael Corris as initiating or reinvigorating a new phase of modern art that continues in the global art of today.

It should be apparent from this brief sketch that the predominant ways of thinking about modern art have focused on a handful of international centres and national schools – even when artists and critics proclaim their allegiance to internationalism. The title of Irving Sandler’s book The Triumph of American Painting is one telling symptom.19 There is a story about geopolitics – about the relationship between the west and the rest – embedded in the history of modern art. These powerful forms of modernism cannot be swept aside, but increasingly critics and art historians are paying attention to other stories; to the artworks made in other places and in other ways, and which were sidelined in the dominant accounts of art’s development. What we have tried to do in this book is to have our cake and eat it – to tell the mainstream story and simultaneously problematise it by raising some other possibilities. As you will see in the final two chapters of this book, a focus on art in a globalised art world leads to revising the national stories told about modernism. This history is currently being recast as a process of global interconnections rather than an exclusively western-centred chronicle, and commentators are becoming more attentive to encounters and interchanges between westerners and people from what has helpfully been called the ‘majority world’, in art as in other matters. In this book, we use this term – majority world – to characterise those people and places located outside centres of western affluence and power; they constitute the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants and this reminds us that western experience is a minority condition and not the norm.20

The standard perception of globalisation is that the entire world will gradually develop into the equivalent of New York or Strasbourg. Depending on your point of view, this is either utopia or hell. But irrespective of the value judgements, this idea of upward standardisation is a misconception. The reality is not that the majority world will be transformed into a high-tech consumer paradise. In fact, inequality is increasing across the world. What is referred to as globalisation is the most recent phase of uneven and combined development. The new clash of hypermodern and traditional forms of economic activity and social life are taking place side by side; megacities spring up alongside the ‘planet of slums’, and communication technologies play an important role in this clash of space and time (see Plate 0.5). Under these conditions, the making of modern art has entered a new and geographically extended phase. If an earlier phase of modernism is identified with internationalism, it is increasingly apparent that this dream of a place that was nowhere (Paris, New York) was just that – a dream. Recent debates on globalisation and art involve a rejection of modernist internationalism; instead, artists and art historians are engaged with local conditions of artistic production and the way these mesh in an international system of global art making. Chapters 7 and 8 show that modern art is currently being remade and rethought as a series of much more varied responses to contemporaneity around the world. Artists now draw on particular local experiences, and also on forms of representation from popular traditions. You will see in chapter 1 that the engagement with Japanese popular prints played an important role in Impressionism, but in recent years this sort of cultural crossing has undergone an explosion.

Plate 0.5 Baha Boukhari, My Father’s Palestinian Nationality, 2007, medium variable, dimensions variable. 12th Istanbul Biennial, 2011. Photographed by Natalie Barki.

Drawing local image cultures into the international spaces of modern art has once more shifted the character of art. The paradox is that the cultural means that are being employed – video art, installation, large colour photographs and so forth – seem genuinely international. Walk into many of the large exhibitions around the globe and you will see artworks referring to particular geopolitical conditions, but employing remarkably similar conventions and techniques. This cosmopolitanism risks underestimating the real forces shaping the world; connection and mobility for some international artists goes hand in hand with uprootedness and the destruction of habitat and ways of life for others. International travel and exhibition sit alongside increasing restrictions on migration and strong borders. Nevertheless, we are here dealing with art engaged with the most recent phase of modernity; this art brings other experiences and claims to the attention of a museum-going public. These are issues addressed in the final chapters of this book.

Notes

1 One recent introductory book of about 900 pages (Foster et al., 2004) focused on just the second half this era.

2 Baudelaire, 1981 [1859], p. 112.

3 ‘Local colour’ is the term used for the colour things appear in the world. From the early twentieth century, painters began to experiment with non-local colour.

4 O’Brian, 1986–95, 4 vols; Barr, 1974 [1936].

5 Schapiro, 1978 [1937]. The opposition between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ approaches to art runs through much of Schapiro’s subsequent writing.

6 Greenberg, 1986 [1939], p. 9.

7 Ibid., p. 8.

8 For a succinct statement, see Greenberg, 1993 [1960].

9 This perspective became particularly entrenched in 1961 with the publication of his book Art and Culture: Critical Essays. In this volume, he rewrote some earlier work, excluding reference to these ‘dead ends’ and consolidating what he viewed as the mainstream of modern art. See Greenberg, 1961.

10 See, in particular, Bürger, 1984.

11 Examples can be found in Duchamp, 1975.

12 This account of Duchamp draws on Nesbit, 2000.

13 The classic definition of uneven and combined development is to be found in Trotsky, 1962 [1928/1906].

14 Simmel, 1997 [1903], p. 175.

15 For Paris and modernity, see Clark, 1984; Harvey, 2003; Prendergast, 1992.

16 Nesbit, 1992. See also Benjamin, 1983.

17 Wolff, 1985, pp. 37–46; Pollock, 1988, pp. 50–90. Nesbit shows the argument must also be extended to class – see Nesbit, 1992.

18 Rosenberg, 1970 [1940].

19 Sandler, 1970.

20 During the early 1990s, the Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam began using the term ‘majority world’ as an alternative to the more common descriptions: ‘third world’, ‘developing nations’ or ‘global south’. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc there is no longer a ‘second world’, so reference to the ‘third world’ does not make sense; ‘developing nations’ presumes a pattern of economic growth with wealthy western nations as a norm on which all others are converging. This is unlikely. The ‘global south’, intended to convey the generalised conditions of poverty in distinction to the wealthy northern hemisphere countries, is the best of these descriptions, but the oxymoron is awkward.

Bibliography

Barr, A.H. (1974 [1936]) Cubism and Abstract Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art (exhibition catalogue).

Baudelaire, C. (1981 [1859]) ‘On photography’ in Newhall, B. (ed.) Photography: Essays and Images, New York, Secker & Warburg, pp. 112–13.

Benjamin, W. (1983) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, London, Verso.

Bürger, P. (1984) Theory of the Avant-Garde, Manchester, Manchester University Press.

Clark, T.J. (1984) The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, London, Thames & Hudson.

Duchamp, M. (1975) The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp (ed. M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson), London, Thames & Hudson.

Foster, H., Krauss, R., Bois, Y.-A. and Buchloh, B.H.D. (2004) Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, London, Thames & Hudson.

Greenberg, C. (1961) Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, MA, Beacon Press.

Greenberg, C. (1986 [1939]) ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’ in O’Brian, J. (ed.) Clement Greenberg:The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgements, 1939–1944, Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press, pp. 5–22.

Greenberg, C. (1993 [1960]) ‘Modernist painting’ in O’Brian, J. (ed.) Clement Greenberg:The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press, pp. 85–100.

Harvey, D. (2003) Paris: Capital of Modernity, London and New York, Routledge.

Nesbit, M. (1992) Atget’s Seven Albums, New Haven, CT and London, Yale University Press.

Nesbit, M. (2000) Their Common Sense, London, Black Dog.

O’Brian, J. (ed.) (1986–95) Clement Greenberg:The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols, Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press.

Pollock, G. (1988) Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London and New York, Routledge.

Prendergast, C. (1992) Paris and the Nineteenth Century, Oxford, Blackwell.

Rosenberg, H. (1970 [1940]) ‘The fall of Paris’ in The Tradition of the New, London, Paladin, pp. 185–94.

Sandler, I. (1970) The Triumph of American Painting, Westport, CT, Praeger.

Schapiro, M. (1978 [1937]) ‘Nature of abstract art’ in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries. Selected Papers, New York, George Braziller, pp. 185–211.

Simmel, G. (1997 [1903]) ‘The metropolis and mental life’ in Frisby, D.P. and Featherstone, M. (eds) Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, New York, Sage, pp. 174–85. Extract reprinted in Lymberopoulou, A., Bracewell-Homer, P. and Robinson, J. (eds) Art and Visual Culture: A Reader, London, Tate Publishing in association with The Open University, pp. 267–9 (Reader Text 5.18.3).

Trotsky, L. (1962 [1928/1906]) The Permanent Revolution; Results and Prospects, London, New Park.

Wolff, J. (1985) ‘The invisible flaneuse: women and the literature of modernity’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 37–46.

Part 1 Art and modernity

Introduction

The first part of this book examines the subculture of modern art that developed in Paris during the 1850s and spread through a number of key western centres in the period up to the Second World War. The artists associated with modern art sometimes drew upon the new commercial visual culture of capitalism, but the images and objects they made were no longer addressed to the mainstream of society. Artists formed small circles of like-minded practitioners, often with a few associated and vocal champions who tended to be poets-cum-critics. This cultural faction set itself against the prevailing bourgeois cultural and moral values, if not always the political or economic ones. However, academic art did not suddenly wither and die, and the institutions that supported official art retained much of their power and authority into the twentieth century, but an alternative current developed in opposition to the tenets associated with the academic tradition. Changes in the structure of feeling that animated modern art had been evident at least since the generation associated with ‘Romanticism’, but these gathered pace from the 1850s. Artists who rejected academic values, or at least wanted to do something different, came to value those types of art that had previously seemed minor, such as landscape and genre pictures; spontaneous impressions replaced studied composition; handling became looser in painting and finish rougher in sculpture; and originality was attributed a higher importance than adherence to fixed rules. Architects explored the use of new materials and structural possibilities and rejected the obsession with historical-revivalist styles. Modern artists tried to face modern society, rather than looking back to classical Rome.

A breach with the past is seen by some as central to modern art or ‘modernism’, while others have argued for a continuity of values. Certainly, from the mid nineteenth century onwards, modern art underwent a series of rapid transformations. There was an intensification of formal experimentation and an urgent search for new ways of working. Right through this period, some artists continued to find ways of responding to modern life, both by introducing new formal equivalents for experience and by searching out novel subjects. Others attempted to remain aloof and develop a calmer space for art. This latter tendency is sometimes referred to as autonomous art. Abstract art is one clear example of this trend towards a focus on unique aesthetic experience that was unrelated to other kinds of knowledge or the wider visual culture. But this impulse had a wide appeal, beyond the circles of abstract artists. It is important to understand that the art of this time does not follow a single track. Nevertheless, artists who were identified as modernist shared a belief that the old techniques and skills were increasingly inadequate, even redundant, in the face of new conditions, whether those concepts were thought to be social, spatial or aesthetic.

Even in the few western metropolitan cities where modern art developed, it was invisible to most people and the spread was definitely uneven. Modern art made little headway in Britain during this period, and whole swathes of the globe have remained immune to its influence for much longer, but in Paris, Berlin and Moscow small groups of artists and critics developed different ways for imagining and representing the forces that were transforming western European societies and which would eventually draw in most other parts of the world. As many artists and critics are discovering today, the alternative visions of modernity set out in the period covered by Part 1 of this book may have much to teach us about globalisation in our own time.

We are not going to survey this complex and involved history in this part of the book. Instead, we will fasten on four points, or moments, which we hope illuminate some of the larger contrasts and patterns. Part 1 opens with Paul Wood’s chapter ‘Avant-garde and modern world: some aspects of art in Paris and beyond c.1850–1914’. This chapter establishes many of the concepts that will appear throughout the book and it bears close attention. Wood considers the avant-garde art that developed in Paris, a city that was virtually synonymous with modern art in the period he covers. In the process, he looks at the influential account of this art offered later by the critic Clement Greenberg. Wood also provides some pointers to what we might mean by ‘modernism’ and how this important category might relate to ‘modernity’. He also shows that, while Paris was the key site for modern art, it was always connected to the visual culture of other societies. Principally, he reflects on the response to Japanese prints by Impressionist artists; the technical radicalism they saw in these images fired their imagination and provided important resources for rethinking pictures. The final section of this chapter considers the decline of a concern with contemporary society as artists turned to visions of the future or fantasy conceptions of ‘primitive’ life.

The second chapter, ‘Victorian Britain: from images of modernity to the modernity of images’, takes Britain as a counter-example to the Parisian avant-garde. In this chapter, Steve Edwards suggests that there is no automatic link between modernity and modern art. Britain, the most powerful industrial and commercial economy, produced no equivalent to the Parisian avant-garde. Looking at three different responses to modernity in Britain, Edwards suggests that we need to distinguish between images of modern life and the role images played in shaping modern experience. Here, visual culture occupies a prominent position in the argument. He concludes by suggesting that the most powerful response to modernity in the British Isles was developed by William Morris in an idiom that at first sight has little to do with the concerns that underpinned the Parisian artists’ fascination with the appearance of contemporary urban life.

In chapter 3, ‘Cubism and Abstract Art revisited’, Paul Wood picks up the story of modern art and considers some of the central developments and transformations that took place in the first half of the twentieth century. The art of this period – from Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse to Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian and then Vladimir Tatlin and Władysław Strzemiński – includes some of the most challenging work of the century. In many ways, this was a pivotal moment: the point at which artists turned their backs on resemblance to the external world (mimesis). For many, this is difficult to comprehend. Wood offers a clear account of the concerns that informed these choices and shows that, despite the overt hostility towards established forms of depiction, Cubism and abstract art were very much wrapped up with the tumultuous events of European history.

Part 1 concludes with Tim Benton’s chapter 4, ‘Modernism in architecture and design: function and aesthetic’. Developed around a study of buildings by Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, 1887–1965), Benton looks at what ‘modernism’ means in architecture and design. He introduces key concepts and reflects on the concerns of architects with new forms and materials, and at their commitment to a pared down, anti-ornamental building style. Benton considers the way modernist architecture and design took inspiration from industry and reflects on how the latest materials, such as glass, concrete and tubular steel, allowed new developments in building and furniture. He looks at different trends within the modern movement, principally contrasting the ‘functionalists’, who rejected aesthetics and suggested buildings should be constructed in a way that foregrounds their structural principles and their use or purpose, with the ‘formalists’, who felt that the new building forms should convey a unique experience through the composition of volumes, planes and the use of light.

Chapter 1 Avant-garde and modern world: some aspects of art in Paris and beyond c.1850–1914

Paul Wood

Plate 1.1 Paul Gauguin, The Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) (detail from Plate 1.22).

Introduction

The trajectory of ‘modern art’ has been remarkable. From a ridiculed subculture in one city in the middle of the nineteenth century, it had become by the middle of the twentieth the official art of the western world. In the early twenty-first century, major museums of art dot the globe, no longer just in Europe and ‘the west’, and the exhibitions that are guaranteed to bring in the crowds are those of the late nineteenth-century pioneers of the ‘modern movement’. People in enormous numbers want to experience the art of Edouard Manet, Claude Monet (1840–1926), Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Vincent van Gogh (1853–90), Paul Cézanne and others, as well as their immediate successors in the early twentieth century, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, all of whom worked in the city of Paris.

Not that they all lived in Paris all of the time. Picasso was Spanish, van Gogh Dutch. Monet came from Le Havre, Cézanne from the Mediterranean south. Gauguin produced his most lasting art on the other side of the world, in Polynesia. But none of it could have existed without Paris, without the network of dealers and galleries that grew up there, without the periodical literature, and without something more difficult to pin down: the evolving social relations, the ferment of ideas, the distinctive politics and culture that was Paris. In the 1930s, the exiled German philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), who was among the first to open up a complex and nuanced understanding of that place and time, dubbed Paris ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’. The phrase has almost become a cliché now, but that does not mean it is not, in important respects, true. At the end of the nineteenth century, Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) called London ‘the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth’.1 But for Paris it seems to have been a matter less of quantity than of quality, as if the city precipitated the essence of the modern consciousness. Only a few years after Benjamin’s pioneering attempt to think through the origins of modernity, the American critic and poet Harold Rosenberg wrote a kind of obituary for Paris after it had fallen to the Nazis in June 1940. For him, Paris was not in France; it was an enchanted island, floating above the world – an international non-place, or supra-place, which more than any other had produced the modern mind. And modern art.

The story of modern art fills libraries. It has been told time and again. The present chapter can introduce only some of its outstanding features, features which seem interesting now. That is itself an important point. For no telling of the story now can remain innocent of the ways it has already been told. Even though this is only an introduction, the reader has to hold in place two distinctive registers: the history and the historiography. By which I mean something like ‘the facts’ on the one hand, and on the other the way those historical facts have been represented, framed and arranged, according to the priorities and interests of the time when the tale was being told. Most people who possess some sense of the narrative of modern art would probably say the story has been told in two broad ways, with one type of account replacing the other some time in the 1970s and 1980s. The former was called then, and is frequently still called, ‘modernist’. Its successor was a product of the ‘new art history’ which emerged at that time, and set the terms of reference for what followed, up to the present day. This picture is, of course, simplified, but it offers a way of gaining traction on some key terms without which it is hard to tell the story at all.

1 Modernism

In the discussion that follows, I want to remain as close to actual examples of art as I can, while yet paying due attention to the ideas that animated them.

Exercise

Look at Manet’s Olympia (Plate 1.2).

Plate 1.2 Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 130 × 190 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photographed by Jean-Gilles Berizzi. Photo: © RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/Jean-Gilles Berizzi.

Try to write down what you, as a contemporary viewer, or reader (of a book like this), see.

Show discussion

End of exercise.

What I have just described is my response to a coloured illustration in a book, a few inches square, with the characteristic sheen of such things, which in conjunction with the relatively small size can make it difficult to pick out details. If I were standing in front of the real thing, I would see differently. The surface would be relatively matt. If I moved closer I might be able to see the detail of the brushstrokes out of which the image is made. And depending on where the painting was hung on the wall, I would be more powerfully aware of those eyes of Olympia, looking out at me, level with my own.

Now read what the American modernist art critic Clement Greenberg had to say about Manet’s art in the canonical essay ‘Modernist painting’ that he wrote in 1960, and then revised in 1965, a hundred years after Olympia was exhibited at the Salon in Paris:

Manet’s paintings became the first Modernist ones by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the surfaces on which they were painted.

In the next two sentences, Greenberg went on:

The Impressionists, in Manet’s wake, abjured underpainting and glazing, to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colours used were made of real paint that came from pots or tubes. Cézanne sacrificed verisimilitude, or correctness, in order to fit drawing and design more explicitly to the rectangular shape of the canvas.

Then he proceeded to draw the general lesson from these observations about particular artists and their work:

It was the stressing, however, of the ineluctable flatness of the support that remained the most fundamental in the processes by which pictorial art criticised and defined itself under Modernism. Flatness alone was unique and exclusive to that art.2

The difference is remarkable. My first inclination, looking at the illustration of Olympia, was to pick out the depicted subject matter of the painting – naked girl, black maid, flowers, cat, bed – and only secondarily to notice the masses of light and dark and the relatively indistinct space in which those pictorial illusions are constructed. Although he is talking about Manet’s painting in general, and not Olympia in particular, Greenberg’s priorities are the opposite. The things that matter for him are the flat surface on which the picture is painted, the actual paint it is painted with, and the rectangle of the framed canvas, the ‘support’.

Clearly, we have to ask ourselves what is happening here. Our main subject is the nineteenth-century French avant-garde, but, as I have already said, the significance of that subject is inseparable from the ways it has already been represented. Greenberg’s view of Manet’s importance is a powerfully stated example of what has come to be known as modernism. It would take us too far from our nineteenth-century subject to engage with that concept fully, for modernism is a discourse, a set of ideas and practices, that reached its fullest fruition in the mid twentieth century. However, certain of its key principles remain relevant, both to the study of modern art in general and to the French avant-garde of the nineteenth century. I will mention only two here, but both have had profound ramifications for our relationship with art in the west throughout the modern period. These are ‘formalism’ and the ‘autonomy’ of art.

Greenberg’s apparent disregard for Manet’s depicted subject matter is a product of his concentration on the formal properties of the work of art. All pictorial art can be considered in terms of subject matter on the one hand and form on the other, where these two terms mean something like what is depicted, and how it is depicted. Thus a Nativity scene may be depicted by a medieval artist or a Renaissance artist (see Plates 1.3 and 1.4). The subject matter is the same, but the formal properties of the works are very different. In one the shapes are relatively flat, features such as the folds in clothing are quite stylised, and the space in which the figures are situated is only suggested and not even coherent across the picture. Whereas the other demonstrates an almost magical degree of illusionism in the treatment of the figures and a fiction of coherent spatial depth. These kinds of things, the lines, colours and shapes that artists use to depict their chosen subject, and the kind of illusionistic space those subjects are placed in, together constitute the formal aspect of the work of art. Until the twentieth century, all works of art in the western tradition had that dual aspect. With the advent of abstract art, of course, depicted subject matter seems to diminish in significance, or even to disappear entirely. This is not to say that meaning disappears from abstract art, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, but twentieth-century abstraction did tilt the balance between depicted subjects and the formal features of art to an unprecedented degree.

Plate 1.3 French School, The Nativity, from Psautier à l’Usage de Paris, thirteenth century, vellum. Bibliothèque Municipale, Rouen. Photo: Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Plate 1.4 Lorenzo Lotto, The Nativity, 1527–28, oil on wood, 56 × 42 cm. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena. Photo: © 2011, Scala, Florence. Reproduced with the permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.

That is the point. Greenberg is writing as a defender of the modern tradition, where that tradition is seen as culminating in a fully abstract art. A painting by Mark Rothko (1903–70) would be a good example (see Plate 1.5). So what Greenberg is constructing is an example of ‘historicism’, retrospectively locating Manet’s art at the head of an evolution that, by the time he was writing, had come to occupy the centre-stage of the western tradition. That was the modernist tradition exemplified by ‘modern masters’ such as Matisse and Rothko, the key to which for Greenberg and similar modernist critics was its ‘autonomy’.

Plate 1.5 Mark Rothko, Black and Dark Red on Red, 1958, oil on canvas, 233 × 176 cm. Private collection. Photo: © Christie’s Images/The Bridgeman Art Library. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko ARS, NY and DACS, London.