This book maps key moments in the history of postwar art from a global perspective.
The reader is introduced to a new globally oriented approach to art, artists, museums and movements of the postwar era (1945â70). Specifically, this book bridges the gap between historical artistic centers, such as Paris and New York, and peripheral loci. Through case studies, previously unknown networks, circulations, divides and controversies are brought to light. From the development of Ethiopian modernism, to the showcase of Brazilian modernity, this book provides readers with a new set of coordinates and a reassessment of well-trodden art historical narratives around modernism.
This book will be of interest to scholars in art historiography, art history, exhibition and curatorial studies, modern art and globalization.
Art Historyâs Work-in Pro(re)gress â Reflections on the Multiple Modernities Project
Terry Smith
A diagram entitled Art since 1900, devised by Jaakko Pallasvuo, a Finnish artist, was posted online on April 15, 2015. In its evident provisionality, and jokey irony, it is a provocative evocation of the questions that face us when we try to map the larger, longer historical flows that seem to shape modern and contemporary art (see Figure 1.1)
Art historical research into art made during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is no longer dominated by what we might call the âmainstream modernismâ narrative. It has been replaced by a âmultiple modernitiesâ picture of art evolving differentially at various art-producing sites around the world that have varying degrees and kinds of connections with the major locales. These may act as centers in their own region, or operate mostly according to their own necessities. This picture is driven by a desire for recognition on the part of the agents currently active in, or writing on behalf of, places that were, during modern times, provinces and peripheries. That is to say, a desire for acknowledgement as having been then what they insist on being now: genuine, coeval contemporaries. These are worthy impulses and goals. But they remain, I will suggest, a work in progress, one that sometimes entails regression to earlier modes. To me, the key question about the multiple modernities project, therefore, is whether it is sufficiently developed as yet to serve as the best account of the modern art that precedes the emergence of contemporary art, as this art is seen from the most viable art historical perspectives.1
Mainstream Modernism
The once-heroic narrative of dynamic progress from avant-garde modernism to mainstream modern art has become a quaint orthodoxy. Let us recall it briefly, as it will highlight how much understandings of modern art are changing these days. A locus classicus is the chart mapped on the cover of Alfred J. Barrâs 1936 catalogue for the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Thanks to Richard Myer and others (such as Masha Chlenova in this volume), we know that Barr and many of his fellow curators had a much more nuanced vision, and a more flexible curatorial style, than the narrow channels that are tracked on this famous flow chart, which shares a reductive rationality with the orthodox story.2
Chapter 2 in this story is that, during and after World War II, New York became the leading center of modern artâs mature development, the core of which was eventually named âmodernism,â most influentially by Clement Greenberg. Subsequently, during the 1960s and 1970s, artists active in the United States and Europe effected major transformations in art practice, purpose and the use of materials. Earlier modernisms were undermined, leading to what some historians name the âneo-avantgardeâ or âlate modernism,â others the beginnings of contemporary art. Surveys such as the Italian publication, The Birth of Contemporary Art, 1946â1968, which features on its cover a Jasper Johns painting of overlapping US flags, remind us that the story of modern art has been, often, an âAmerican Centuryâ narrative, and that this story has been deeply internalized within Europe.3
I continue to believe that radical revisionism â precisely because it so incessantly updates itself â remains the most appropriate approach to the history of avant-garde and mainstream modernist art created in Europe and the United States, up to and including the 1950s. Late modernist art continues to be made today, notably by artists whose major breakthroughs occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, so aspects of this approach remain relevant (for example, Peter Osborneâs identification of the âpost-conceptualâ character of a major neo-modernist stream within contemporary art).7 But radical revisionism has not been flexible enough to encompass the study of modern art when viewed on a worldwide basis, an optic required by globalization itself. Its place has been taken by the âmultiple modernitiesâ project.
The âmultiple modernitiesâ project in the visual arts seeks both local and international acknowledgment of the modern art created in the colonies and former colonies of the Western powers, and in the countries that, while not formal colonies, remained peripheral to them during the modern era. The struggles of many of these countries for independence, their efforts at nation building and their fight for a non-aligned place within the Cold War political and economic order have been definitive of their decolonization, especially since 1945. Artists, writers, educators and some politicians learnt from their own steadily accumulating experience that, in each country, the visual arts had specific roles to play in forwarding postcolonial critique, in perpetuating traditions and useable pasts, in creating new national cultures, in building bridges to other cultures with similar histories and in negotiating cultural relationships with the still dominant powers. For many, the questions became: How might histories of these changes be written? Can these developments be seen to have occurred during the decades prior to decolonization, that is, throughout the entire history of each societyâs relationships with Western modernity? Finally, how might such histories help accelerate these developments within each society, or at least help them find a viable place within the globalized world (dis)order that prevails at present?10
It is interesting that these histories have been written, mostly, from the presumption that the overriding and somehow natural priority for every social formation was to modernize itself â that is, to move toward the social, political and economic structures of the Western market democracies, and to integrate into a world that was dominated by those structures. The persistence of national narratives during periods of imperialism and more recently globalization remains an important topic for art history as an academic discipline as it does for art museums, many of which continue to be substantially nationalist in orientation, or, if they are âuniversalâ survey museums, still divide their collection displays according to national schools of art.11 Whichever form of nationality each society forged, and however frequently that form changed, the presumption underlying the multiple modernities project is that each society modernized, or negotiated a relationship to Wes...