New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era

Multiple Modernisms

Flavia Frigeri, Kristian Handberg, Flavia Frigeri, Kristian Handberg

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429640582
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Art
• Categoria: History of Contemporary Art

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 (1945–70). 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.

1Prologue

Art History’s Work-in Pro(re)gress – 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)

Figure 1.1Jaakko Pallasvuo: Art Since 1900, diagram posted in 2015 on the artist’s now-defunct Tumblr blog dawsonscreek.info. By permission of the artist.

Art historical research into art made during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is no longer dominated by what we might call the “mainstream modernism” narrative. It has been replaced by a “multiple modernities” picture of art evolving differentially at various art-producing sites around the world that have varying degrees and kinds of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. Barr’s 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 art’s mature development, the core of which was eventually named “modernism,” 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 “neo-avantgarde” or “late modernism,” others the beginnings of contemporary art. Surveys such as the Italian publication, The Birth of Contemporary Art, 1946–1968, 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 “American Century” narrative, and that this story has been deeply internalized within Europe.³

Radical Revisionism

The “new art history” that has been an ongoing enterprise of disciplinary self-criticism since the 1970s has complicated this orthodoxy in significant ways, critiquing it from social, political, feminist, psychological and semiotic perspectives, while, arguably, sustaining the overall narrative structure.⁴ To me, this approach has always seemed to be less a matter of a “new art history” than one of “radical art historical revisionism.” It is devoted to exploring the roots of the art that it studies – the psychic, sexed, social, economic, cultural and political embedment of art, including art’s critique, or othering, of its own situatedness. It does so in the name of the need to radically transform the disabling inequities of these situations as they have evolved within capitalist modernity, statist socialism, patriarchy, racism and feudal fundamentalism. Further, it seeks always to test the critical theoretical approaches, and the political strategies, that have emerged to pursue such transformations. It is, therefore, committed to constantly revising the frameworks within which critical art writing is undertaken, including art historical practice. It is at its best in the work of Linda Nochlin, T.J. Clark and Griselda Pollock, for example, all of whom have offered substantial revisions of canonical modernist art, such as that of Cézanne. The so-called October group – led by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster – developed a parallel, but less passionately political version of this approach during the same period, notably in their volume Art since 1900.⁵ This is the book that Pallasvuo had in mind when making his amusing diagram. It is now the prevailing orthodoxy for modernist art studies in the United States, but it is operating as a default, passively resisting other, more contemporary paradigms. As a result, it is becoming increasingly attenuated. In contrast, some scholars from the peripheries made important revisionary contributions during these decades: for example, Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, and Bernard Smith’s Modernism’s Histories, especially in the latter’s compelling arguments for the impact on the centers of artistic initiatives from the peripheries.⁶

I continue to believe that radical revisionism – precisely because it so incessantly updates itself – 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 Osborne’s identification of the “post-conceptual” 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 “multiple modernities” project.

Modern, Modernism, Modernist

Since the 1980s, and especially since the 1990s, researchers in museums and universities all over the world have been exploring the local and regional arts made during the modern period, in greater depth, and in less prejudicial ways than before. Practices described as vernacular, alternative, counter or other to the Euro-American mainstream have become valued on their own terms, and more highly in comparative terms, however much modernization in the West constituted, as sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt puts it, “the crucial (and usually ambivalent) reference point.”⁸ These questions have also been posed within literary theory and historiography, with somewhat more variety than within art history. Susan Stanford Friedman’s concept of “polycentric modernisms” in world literature is matched by few art historians, an exception being Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, who applies data-collection methods to explore the contents of exhibitions throughout Europe to show that these were widely distributed, not centered in Paris, and were calibrated to local audiences and markets, not imposed upon them. She argues that a similar network operated during the interwar period, above all through circulated magazines.⁹ This work is currently confined to Europe, but in principle is applicable to networks anywhere.

The “multiple modernities” 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 society’s 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 – 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 “universal” 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...