THE HISTORY OF ART HISTORY: MODERN ART AND ITS HISTORY

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In European languages the word modern and its variants modernity and modernism stem from the Latin modernus, formed from modo, "just now, recently." Not found in classical Latin, the word first appeared (to the best of our knowledge) in 494-95 CE in a text of Pope Gelasius I, who used it to designate certain recently approved ecclesiastical regulations. These practices were not viewed as conflicting with the earlier ones (antiqui), but simply as having gained currency during the time of the writer.ⁱ This initial usage implied no sharp break between past and present: the latter flowed from the former. By the twelfth century, however, the word modernus had become more sharply etched. It took on a period connotation, as it referred, sometimes disparagingly, to the post-classical epoch that lasted until the time of the writer. In a famous simile attributed to Bernard of Chartres (twelfth century), the moderns are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, the ancients; they see more and farther only because of their vantage point, not because of their personal stature.ⁱⁱ

The idea of the inferiority of one's own time reflects a ubiquitous perception that things were better in the "good old days." This generic Golden Age prejudice gained reinforcement, however, from the special reverence for classical antiquity already evident in the twelfth century and ubiquitous during the Italian Renaissance. It was commonly held that moderns could only aspire to emulate the ancients, but might never surpass them.

In the seventeenth century the received idea of the incomparable superiority of antiquity encountered a major challenge. The France of Louis XIV gave birth to a portentous controversy, the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes--the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns.ⁱⁱⁱ During this time France, and northwestern Europe generally including England, had made enormous economic and cultural advances, gratifying the national pride of the peoples who had benefited from the changes. The era also witnessed the rise of the scientific spirit and the secular idea of progress (as distinct from its religious predecessor). Confidence in progress characterized not only science and technology but also the realm of culture. Such writers as Charles Perrault and Bernard de Fontenelle ranked the best vernacular poetry higher even than the hallowed ancient exemplars of Homer and Vergil. These views scandalized the defenders of the ancients who continued to claim that the writings and artifacts inherited from Greece and Rome provided unsurpassable models. The views of Perrault, Fontenelle, and their friends rank as the first indications of a tendency to prize the modern for its own sake, exalting it as the proper counterpart to other advances in human circumstances. As a linguistic sidelight, one notes that in the early eighteenth century a supporter of the superiority of modern literature over ancient could be called a modernist, foreshadowing the later partisans for modern art.

As the tumult of the Battle receded, ambiguities were detected. Determining the inception of the modern was no simple matter. A concise article on "Moderne" in the great French Encyclopédie dates the start of modern literature after the death of Boethius (ca. 524 CE), while modern architecture came into being only after the displacement of the Gothic style (ca. 1500).^iv Modern astronomy appeared with Copernicus (1473-1543), but the rise of modern physics was delayed until the time of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). In this account the modern starts at different times in different realms of human endeavor. Under the pervasive influence of the notion of a uniform "spirit of the times," the possibility of such chronological disjunctions has been neglected. Disallowing this assumption, scientific progress need not automatically be linked to cultural advance, as Perrault and Fontenelle had confidently assumed.

The inception of the romantic movement at the end of the eighteenth century opened the way to exploring contrasts between the classics and the romantics (that is, the moderns). Perhaps the most frequently encountered distinction is between the bounded wholeness of the classical temper as against the radical incompleteness of the romantic sensibility, which is ever striving for the infinite.
In his essay "Le peintre de la vie moderne" (1863) Charles Baudelaire equated modernity with "the transient, the fugitive, and the contingent." This is one half of art; its complement is the eternal and the immutable. All past art was once modern. If we traduce our own age, which has its own particular harmony, we engage in a masquerade.^v

Many nineteenth-century observers had the sense that romanticism initiated a major shift away from the reign of tradition--a shift whose final break was marked by realism. The new modern era was characterized by freedom from rules, and was not bound by classical-Christian canons of subject matter. In abandoning the constraints of tradition, the modern artist could give free reign to the personal and subjective.

Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) held that ancient art was beautiful, the art of her own day "interesting." From this quizzical endorsement it was but a step to accepting ugliness: Gustave Courbet seems to have ranked as the first artist to have been regarded, by some at least, as having created works both important and ugly.

Many have linked aesthetic modernism with the telephone, the telegraph, railways, and other technological innovations: modernization creates modernism. This technological determinism is already found among the defenders of cubism and futurism. Marshall Berman has characterized the impact of modernization in this way: "The maelstrom of modern life has been fed from many sources: great discoveries in the physical sciences, changing our images of the universe and our place in it, the industrialization of production, which transforms scientific knowledge into technology, creates new human environments and destroys old ones, speeds up the whole tempo of life, generates new forms of corporate power and class struggle. ..."^vi Yet, as the writer of the Encyclopédie article observed, the timing of the inception of the modern may vary greatly from one field to another; hence there is no reason automatically to assume that technological change, however far-reaching, must lead to immediate changes of similar magnitude in the arts.

Much of the promotion of modernism amounted simply to an assertion that one's own era must have its own art. In the nineteenth century, when the burden of the past was felt with particular intensity, this insistence seemed salutary. Futurism, however, went much further, condemning "passéism" outright and calling for the destruction of the museums. One might say, then, that there is a modernist advocacy of defense and one of offense.

The Museum of Modern Art was founded in New York City in 1929. At that point many supporters assumed that the definition of "modern" would shift with the times: as the work of new generations came into the collection the older objects would be shipped out to historically oriented institutions. In practice, it proved hard to part with the Cézannes, Van Goghs, and Gauguins--even when, according to this principle, the time had come to do so. The decision to keep them corresponds to a particular definition of the modern as a period, and not as a commitment to the present, whatever changes that might bring. If the start of modern art is fixed--tied in this instance to the earliest works in the Museum's permanent collection--then its inception must be marked by the appearance of particular hallmarks. Yet such a constellation of master traits cannot reign forever. Once these traits have yielded to different ones we confront a new era: the postmodern. In this way the idea of the modern as perpetual present yielded to the idea of modern as a specific period with a beginning and an end. That such a neat result is not conclusively established is perhaps just as well--for with the modern, appropriately enough, nothing is ever quite nailed down.

Ambivalence Towards the Historiography of Modern Art.

Let us assume for a moment that "modern art" is simply that produced during the two or three generations prior to the observer. What then is the attitude of the art historian to this material? Art historians have adopted two radically different policies regarding the applicability of their craft to the era in which they write. First is the company of art historians who trace past developments into the present, showing how the art of their own day flowed from earlier stages. Typical of these Past-and-Presentists are such figures as Xenocrates and Ghiberti. Against these advocates of continuity stand others who hold that the heyday of art belongs exclusively to the past, a Golden Age when great masters flourished who possessed a towering stature that their successors could only dream of achieving. Typical of these Golden Ageists were Pliny and Winckelmann, both of whom revered only Greek art. In their writings "modern art"--however defined--rarely merits notice, and then only in terms of disparagement. On the second view, then, writing the history of the art of one's own time is scarcely worth the trouble. Clearly there have always been naysayers who did not wish to encourage the creation of histories of modern art--which they deemed ugly, incompetent, and obscurantist--in short, simply not art.^vii

There is a more moderate version of the dismissive view. One must wait, so is said, until the dust settles to attempt the history of contemporary art. Sometimes this view is sincerely held, at other times it serves as a polite disguise for contempt, the contempt of those who honor only past Golden Ages. At any event the restriction is patent. Critical responses and factual chronicles may be appropriate, but contemporary production must not aspire to the synthesis that is the work of the true historian. That could come only after the participants are all dead. In practice it seems often to work that way. There is an inherent difficulty in creating a new language to describe the new effects; the first awkward terminology yields only gradually to a more satisfactory nomenclature. Writers may err as to the stature of individual masters, witness Charles Baudelaire's overestimate of Constantin Guys (1802-1892), the "painter of modern life." The importance of some artists may be obscured for a time by inappropriate criteria, such as the prejudice that women or members of ethnic minorities are unlikely to rank as significant artists. Even after such notions have expired, qualitative magnitudes take time to sort out.

How long a pause, then? Assuming that one accepts the "wait and see" argument in the first place, it seems clear that the origins of modern art now lie so many generations in the past that it is scarcely plausible that its history should not be written. For the modernist production accumulated in the past, the test of time has been allowed to do its work.^viii Moreover, it has become harder to cling to the disdainful view that modern art is worthless en bloc. Many distinguished critical minds from Julius Meier-Graefe and Roger Fry to Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg have addressed the subject. Defying the hopes of those reactionaries who held that modern art was but a passing fad, this interest has not remained a mere sport of intellectuals: in sometimes terrifying numbers the general public flocks to exhibitions of the modern masters, especially of the impressionists and postimpressionists, of Matisse and Picasso. The time for caviling and delaying tactics is now over. So many achievements clamor for attention that the case for addressing the historiography of modern art has been conclusively resolved in the affirmative. The same is true for the "sister art" of literary modernism.^ix

Yet this positive outcome has not always been obvious. As will become clear in the following pages, the argument for delay did hamper earlier attempts, often keeping the study of modern art out of the university.^x These roadblocks form a constituent part of the historiographic narrative.

An additional reason for studying modernism has come to the fore. We can see it steady and see it whole, some believe, because it has run its course. Expiring as a creative force, modernism has passed the torch to postmodernism. If this view be accepted, and it has been  influential in recent years, modernism now has a beginning, a middle and an end--the traditional requirements for a satisfying story. We can study modernism in the same way that we study, say, say the Gothic and the Baroque. The time frames for these eras are well established. But when in fact did modernism begin: 1789, 1860, 1890, 1905? The date chosen for the inception will affect how the nature of modern art is conceived. If postmodernism is the successor, when did it rise to dominance?^xi No mere scholastic disputes, these questions of periodization bear on the central defining features ascribed to modernism. Moreover, since its successor has come on the scene (or so it is widely maintained), the historian is summoned to clarify both modernism and postmodernism by their similarities and differences.

As noted above, Pliny and Winckelmann stand as witnesses to the fact that historians and critics who disliked the art of their own time have been ubiquitous. This aversion assumed a particular vehemence in the nineteenth century. In 1877 John Ruskin contemptuously claimed that James McNeill Whistler had flung "a pot of paint in the public's face," earning him a libel suit.^xii This is but one episode in the battle. Advanced modern artists, such as Manet, Cézanne, and Gauguin, suffered the accusations of having no more talent than children, of being demented, and of practicing deliberate fraud. These charges seem all the more strange in that the nineteenth century was a period in which belief in human progress was far more general than it is now. Art, one would think, was advancing along with other departments of human endeavor. But uncertainty and complexity reigned.  Buffeted by Darwinism, the Higher Criticism of the Bible, and other corrosive forms of new thought, the era was assailed by waves of doubt. In this atmosphere the epoch had difficulty affirming an art that spoke with a single voice. It was this very eclecticism that modernism sought to supplant by creating a new art that would no longer be a patchwork of inherited motifs, but a powerful and unified new idiom appropriate to a new age.

Avant-garde art may have accorded with the spirit of the age, but for the man and woman in the street the new painting posed a severe challenge. The difficulty lay in part in the very physicality of the work, which did not display the smooth surfaces, the "licked facture," to which viewers had been accustomed. These faultless, seemingly transparent surfaces accorded with the Renaissance conceit of the painting as a kind of window into another world. By incrusting the surface with heavy impasto or the dots and commas of impressionist technique, advanced work undermined this convention, showing that the surface was not a membrane to be looked through onto another reality, but a self-sufficient realm, interesting in and of itself.  Apart from their predilection for surface opacity, avant-garde artists seemed to play fast and loose with the rules of perspective and proportion. Instead of grappling with the challenge, the easy option was to dismiss the new works as products of incompetence.  
There was also a problem with subject matter.  The iconography no longer featured uplifting lessons from the worlds of classical antiquity and the Bible, but centered on everyday scenes, oftentimes hedonistic or even antisocial in character. Some paintings seemed to have no subject at all. Socially too, the great public felt alienated from the "bohemian" artists, whose defiance of middle-class norms of behavior seemed willful and self-indulgent.

The misgivings provoked by these departures festered all the more because there was an alternative.  Officially approved artists--individuals like Paul Delaroche, William Bouguereau,  Jean-Léon Gérôme, and other academic standard bearers--stood ready and able to meet traditional demands. If only the avant-gardists would paint like those gentlemen! Maybe they didn't, it was alleged, because they couldn't. But disquiet could not be stilled, for what was it that was new in the academic paragons? Were they not, when all is said and done, simply rehashing the triumphs of the grand tradition of yore? One need not even enter a gallery to see the problem. On his way to work the good bourgeois could pass by a Gothic Revival church, a classical bank, and a Renaissance town hall. The façades of these structures bristled with a like medley of sculptures. Why should a century that had so many inventions to its credit, from the telegraphy and the railroad to photography and x-rays, accept an art that was little more than the past warmed over? Thus respectable nineteenth-century opinion was faced with a frightening dilemma. Paintings, sculptures, and buildings were appearing which seemed beautiful, but they were derivative. Yet the works of the avant-garde, which were original, repelled refined tastes. A fateful chasm yawned between an alliance of two qualities that the ideal of cultural progress required: beauty and originality.

Castigation of the ugliness of the avant-garde dominated the harsh criticisms that populated art magazines and journals of opinion.^xiii Moreover, this attitude of stern dismissal lingered until the middle of the twentieth century, as seen in a widely read tract by Hans Sedlmayr.^xiv

These obstacles notwithstanding, gradually histories of modern art came to be produced in increasing quantities and with increasing sophistication. In principle these could have been written by universalists, historians with the past-and-present approach. However, these were virtually nonexistent in the nineteenth century, the preoccupation with the old masters and with ancient and medieval art being general and preemptive. It was left, therefore, to serious-minded critics like Julius Meier-Graefe, Richard Muther, Franz Roh, and Wilhelm Hausenstein in Germany; Félix Fénéon and Léon Rosenthal in France; and Roger Fry and Clive Bell in Britain to initiate the historiographical process.^xv Then came the turn of farsighted museum directors, such as Hugo von Tschudi, Katherine Dreier, and Alfred Barr, Jr., as well as dealers like D. H. Kahnweiler, Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons, and Leo Castelli. Only after World War II did professionally trained art historians take up the challenge to consolidate of modern art historiography.

Premises of the Positive Evaluation of Modernism.

From what has been said, it might be thought that writing the history of modern art was a lonely undertaking, vexatious because of the tremendous prestige attached to tradition and the obstinacy of those who claimed to be upholding it. As has been noted, the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns was a key turning point, freeing advocates of the modern from the conventional wisdom that the ancients were always better. Also significant was the link with modern science and technology, a connection widely thought to demand a new literature and a new art.  This claim often came to the fore in the advocacy of such movements as cubism and futurism.

After the French Revolution many artists convinced themselves that their own innovations paralleled radical developments in politics. And in fact the Saint-Simonians, in the middle of the nineteenth century, assigned artists a special role as heralds of the new society.^xvi This posited role is one of the reasons for the popularity in art circles of the concept of the vanguard, or avant-garde, the French expression that is commonly employed.

Opposed to these progressivist ideas stood idealist currents that sought to rally artists to fundamentals of abiding, perhaps eternal significance. This is true of abstract art, which claimed to have rediscovered universally valid principles that had become lost during the centuries when realism was dominant. Philosophical ideas also played a role in this notion of timelessness. The elemental geometrical forms of Plato's "Philebus" were commonly invoked.^xvii Such pioneering abstract artists as Kandinsky, Marc, and Mondrian believed that they were paving the way for a new epoch in which spiritual values would triumph.

However, the elemental forms found in much modern work were grounded in a "nostalgia for the universal," to use Piet Mondrian's phrase. For many (if not for Mondrian himself), this meant a growing interest in primitive or tribal art, which had, it was claimed, retained a purity of form and value that the corruptions and complexities of everyday living under civilization had obscured.^xviii

Similarly admired was the art of children. Already in 1863 Baudelaire had asserted that "genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will."^xix The later nineteenth century saw wide acceptance of the so-called Law of Recapitulation, or "ontogeny repeats phylogeny," which asserts that the maturation process of the individual retraces that of the human race. Developmentally, then, the art of primitives is recapitulated in the art of children.^xx As the prestige of the one grew so did the other. Today this analogy is less favored as it is recognized that ethnic or tribal arts depend upon sophisticated stages of development that even the most gifted children cannot command. Nonetheless, qualities reminiscent of children's art have been noted in the work of such artists as Paul Klee, Joan Mirò, and Jean Dubuffet.^xxi

Perhaps the strangest affinity attributed to modern art was with the art of the insane. The romantics (expanding on a tradition going back to Plato) had compared artists to mad people. The intensity of their genius led them to frenzied, disordered lives. Hence the image of the "artiste maudit," exemplified by such figures as Van Gogh and Modigliani (as in poetry by Rimbaud and Verlaine). Not long ago, Louis A. Sass, a clinical psychologist, made a new attempt to delineate connections between literary and artistic modernism and mental abnormality.^xxii

While evidence of mental disturbance has been repeatedly--one might almost say routinely--detected in the work of major artists, until the early twentieth century the art of the certifiably insane was not preserved or collected. However, Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933), a psychiatrist who had art- historical training, amassed a considerable collection of such work under the auspices of the psychiatric clinic at the University of Heidelberg. These paintings and drawings provided the basis for his 1922 book on the imagery of the mentally ill.^xxiii Perused by such established artists as Paul Klee and Alfred Kubin, the book appeared just in time to have an impact on the emerging surrealist movement. Indeed, formal, though perhaps superficial similarities connect some of the work of insane mental patients with that of the masters of the avant-garde.^xxiv

Rise of a System of Periodization: The "Isms."

Without any conscious effort by art historians to create a grand historical narrative, a system of periodization emerged on its own.  This was the sequence of movements from romanticism to minimalism and beyond--the "isms" that today supply much of the structure of modern art textbooks. A first, rather schematic attempt at codification was undertaken by El Lissitsky and Hans (Jean) Arp in 1925.^xxv Surveying the previous ten years of art they detect fifteen isms, beginning with cubism and futurism, and continuing through expressionism, purism, neo-plasticism and others to "abstract film" (the latter not strictly a visual art).

In Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the suffix -ism had commonly served to designate religious sects, as Arminianism and Socinianism. In the nineteenth century this usage receded into the background as new "ism" terms proliferated to designate radical political movements, such as anarchism, socialism, and communism. The first term of this kind may have been the French jacobinisme, coined in 1793 to designate the tactics and outlook of the radical faction in the Revolution. So the primary world of reference shifted from religion to politics, but the notion of a sect, advocating its own special vision of life, persisted.

In the realm of art, it is a striking fact that terms referring to eras before the nineteenth century do not terminate in "-ism." At least not usually.  If we insist, we may speak of archaism or Gothicism, but those are not the normal words for the respective eras in the history of art. For the most part this is a dog "that did not bark." The one obvious exception, mannerism, tests the limits of the rule, for that -ism term did not displace maniera until the twentieth century, when the new label was adopted as a sign of the similarity with partisan modern movements. The first real herald of the development occurred when the term romanticism appeared at the end of the eighteenth century. Then there came a flood of literary and artistic isms: realism, impressionism, symbolism, and so forth. These terms for artistic innovations crested at the time that dissident political movements become known through their "ism" labels. Both types of movement propagated manifestos, short forceful declarations of basic principles, to gain attention. This synchronism is significant. It is one of several aspects of the kinship that sought, sometimes directly and sometimes unconsciously, to link political radicalism and artistic innovation. In art, then, the ism suffix connotes a conscious striving for a new mode of artistic statement, contrasting with some earlier "reactionary" modes, which the new movements aggressively sought to displace.

In the field of culture this process of articulation by movements began first in the field of literature. As a rule, the migration of terms from literature to art, or vice versa, displays a heightened consciousness of the parallel of the "sister arts" of literature, on the one hand, and painting and sculpture, on the other.^xxvi

As earlier chapters have shown, the eighteenth century saw many signs of the emergence of the romantic sensibility, from the vogue of the sublime and the Gothic to the new stress on inwardness and sincerity. But it was one thing to appreciate romanticism in the past, another to make it the credo of contemporary production. In fact, the first major link in the genealogy of the modern is the romantic movement, the foundations of which were arguably laid by Friedrich von Schlegel in an article in the Athenaeum of 1798.^xxvii It became a commonplace to contrast the "romantische Poesie" of Schlegel's discussion with classical poetry. The familiar stratagem of binary contrasts played its part in the early definition of this style: romantic is everything classic is not. The literary idea of romanticism spread to England, where Samuel Taylor Coleridge played a major part, and to France with the advocacy of Germaine de Staël. Only gradually were painters like Casper David Friedrich and William Turner assimilated to the concept. As the very different manners of these two great creators of landscape shows, romanticism in painting is not a compact style with easily defined characteristics, but more a bundle of associations and feelings.^xxviii

In the 1820a and 1830s, French critics began to apply the term realism to literature that was down to earth and direct.^xxix Its application to the visual arts is due above all to Gustave Courbet (1819-1877).^xxx Because of Courbet's political radicalism it tends to be assumed that realism is by nature "oppositional"; yet in many countries, including France itself, realism lent itself to cooptation by the authorities.^xxxi

Impressionism received its name from a quip provoked by an 1872 painting by Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise.^xxxii The appellation was taken up by the artists in a series of Impressionist Exhibitions (1874-86). At first applied only to painting, the term migrated to music and literature.^xxxiii

In a manifesto of 1886 the poet Jean Moréas launched Symbolism as a literary movement.^xxxiv At first the term found favor only among a small clique of poets, but it gradually  gained a wider acceptance--among painters as well.^xxxv During the "Belle Epoque" (1890-1914) this mode of self-naming through manifestos spread feverishly among those who would launch artistic movements.

The most prolific self-promoters were the futurists; after the first (literary) manifesto appeared in Le Figaro of February 20, 1909, over 150 others appeared for various fields of endeavor from music and dance to costume and cuisine.^xxxvi Under the energetic leadership of the writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, futurism demanded a complete break with past culture. The movement celebrated the modern technology of machinery, the automobile, and aviation, which were making an impact on the industrialized sector of northwestern Italy at the time of its birth. Futurism seemed to be exacting revenge on the celebrators of older art who hated contemporary work: it turned the tables. The movement can thus claim to be radically antihistorical.

The fire-breathing rhetoric notwithstanding, futurist painting had fairly mundane origins in divisionism or neo-impressionism, but then the trend found its own way by multiplying forms so as to suggest the passage of short periods of time.^xxxvii This technique reflected experiments with multiple-exposure photography.

As a movement, futurism purported to offer more than a set of artistic precepts, supplying a complete world view--a claim somewhat tarnished by its later association with Mussolini's fascism. Before this alliance was consummated, however, futurism spread to a number of foreign countries, especially Russia where it was probably more important as a literary movement than an artistic one.^xxxviii

Futurism represents something of an extreme in the realm of self-publicity. Yet most artists of the day remained untouched by this appetite for self-advertisement, and fauvism and cubism were left to be christened by a hostile outsider, the critic Louis Vauxcelles.^xxxix

A potent but ambiguous style label is that of expressionism.^xl In Britain lexicographers have recorded sporadic uses of the term from 1850 to 1908 with reference to several tendencies in painting. But none of these instances served to create a stable pattern of usage, and they must be regarded as sports. In January 1911 the English journalist Arthur Clutton-Brock wrote an article proposing to rename the post-impressionists, headed by Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, the "expressionists." This idea probably originated with Roger Fry who had assembled the great exhibition of post-impressionist artists then running at the Grafton Galleries in London. During the next few months the new term spread to Scandinavia and Germany, undoubtedly assisted by the prestige of Henri Matisse. In his "Notes d'un peintre" of 1908 he had declared: "What I seek above all is expression."^xli However, Matisse did not use the terms "expressionism" or "expressionist." The appeal of these words in England and Central Europe undoubtedly benefited from the notion that the recent tendencies so designated were opposed to impressionism.

In due course, the term expressionism migrated to other countries, including the United States, as a broad designation for antimimetic art. But the idea lingered that there was something particularly Germanic about expressionism, incarnated in painting by the Die Brücke group of Dresden with its "primitive" contrasts of angular forms and strident colors.^xlii The efforts of these artists were seconded by a group of expressionist writers, and eventually also German silent films came to be hailed as expressionist.^xliii Affinities were detected in earlier German art, especially in that of the Middle Ages.^xliv In this way expressionism fostered a kind of historical consciousness--even as futurism undermined it.

After World War II an American movement was named abstract expressionism (see below), and at the beginning of the 1980s several German and Italian artists made a splash with their "neo-expressionist" work.

The Modernist Historiographer Emerges.

Those who grew to maturity after 1870 and who felt the lure of the history of art as a professional calling were by and large still tightly held by the bonds of the classical tradition, especially in its Renaissance version, regarded as the touchstone of the most refined taste in painting and sculpture. It was left to the occasional eccentric university professor, in need of a recondite specialty, to look at the medieval past or the past of Asia.

For those indivuals, located mainly outside academia, who were interested in modern art a double challenge loomed. Like their past-minded confrères they felt the pull of the evolutionary approach of Charles Darwin and his followers then infiltrating many fields. The pattern of the history as evolution must be laid bare. However, another recognition cut across this commandment. If impressionism could be regarded as the product of realism and that in turn as the offshoot of romanticism, postimpressionism should be the next link in the chain. But was it legitimate to regard it in this way? For it looked very much as if postimpressionism represented a turn away from straight-line progress--perhaps it meant a lurch towards something fundamentally contrary, even drastically iconoclastic and subversive.^xlv The critics who sought to make sense of art at the turn of the century then had to try to reconcile these two tasks: a continuous narrative in the sense of a story with a happy outcome, and the puzzle of how to fit transgressive figures like Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin into the picture.

A heroic effort towards understanding what was new in art characterized the life work of the German Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935).^xlvi Trained as an engineer, he gravitated to the humanities. In 1892 he gravitated to the Berlin avant-garde circle of August Strindberg and Edvard Munch, producing two early writings celebrating the Norwegian painter. He held that the artist must not reflect the ideals of the age but must register a protest against them. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, he regarded the artist as a tragic hero summoned to combat the corrupt taste of a self-satisfied bourgeoisie.

In order to promote advanced art Meier-Graefe edited the journal Pan. Deeply impressed by the personality of Toulouse-Lautrec, he settled in Paris, where he was active as a journalist and dealer, joining forces with the Japanophile Samuel Bing, who also became identified with the art nouveau. Meier-Graefe began to seek more and more the sources of this art in a tradition that led him through Delacroix back to Rubens and Titian. A series of papers concentrating on nineteenth-century art coalesced into his major survey, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1904), the history of the development of modern art. Basically, he traces modern art to the tradition of color with its fountainhead in Venice, as against Florentine disegno. In this work he saw the flat color of Manet as the decisive turning point, initiating the still-prevalent idea of that artist as the pivotal modern figure.

To the dismay of his countrymen, Meier-Graefe believed that Paris was the center of the contemporary art world. Germans suffered from the error of thinking art instead of perceiving it. In a combative pamphlet, Der Fall Böcklin, of 1905, he dared to attack the idol of German art at the time, an artist whose later phase featured mawkish renderings of mythological themes. The contrast between theme and handling was ignored by the general public which responded to the subject matter only--generally mythological or historical--rather than to the inner substance, to what makes art.

Meier-Graefe was no fanatical Francophile, for in his Die grossen Engländer (Munich, 1908) he took up the cause of Constable and Turner. Then in his most concentrated work he dealt exhaustively with the neglected German artist Hans von Marées (1837-1887). A true cosmopolitan, Meier-Graefe was a patriot for his age rather than for his country. Although he lectured frequently, he never held any academic post.

In view of the domination of the field by independent scholars and writers, the figure of Léon Rosenthal (1870-1932) may seem anomalous, as he was professor of art history at the University of Lyon from 1924 to 1930.^xlvii However, as the history of art was not deeply rooted in France, and he wrote a more literary than technical prose, the exception is more apparent than real. A member of the French socialist party, he stood for parliament on that ticket in 1910.

Rosenthal's doctoral thesis, an account of painting in France from 1815 to 1830 that he published in 1900, served as prologue to his masterpiece, Du romantisme au réalisme: Essai sur l'évolution de la peinture en France de 1830 à 1848 (Paris, 1914). With great assurance he navigates between external conditioning factors--the social and intellectual influences--and internal essences--the intrinsic importance of each artist's work. Delacroix is the indisputable hero of this book, and Ingres is reduced to playing little more than a bit part.

The structure of Rosenthal's book entailed some difficulty. Attributing such a positive role to romanticism ran counter to a French cultural trend prominent at the time. The literary critics Pierre Lasserre and Ernest Seillère, allied with the royalist Action Française movement, had vehemently attacked romanticism stemming from Rousseau as the source of all the ills of the modern age, and a betrayal of the French spirit. Even those of the moderate left, where Rosenthal stood, were not immune to these currents of nationalism, with their accompanying longing for return to putative French classical roots. Accordingly, Rosenthal insisted that Delacroix had shunned the more cosmic, vapid aspects of the Germanic version of romanticism, tempering them with the French national inclination towards reason and equipoise. Adhering to a kind of cultural insularity that was in keeping with the spirit of the times in his country, the historian also tended to limit foreign influences--in his narrative the German Nazarenes played almost no part. Even English influences, despite the well-known success of Constable's Hay Wain in Paris, were largely absent. The ethnocentric tendency not to look beyond the borders of France has, with a few significant exceptions, hindered French historians of modern art from achieving a truly synoptic view.

British advocacy of modernism was strongly Francophile, though it was at first tinged with German ideas. In the English-speaking world the counterpart of  Meier-Graefe and Rosenthal was Roger Fry (1866-1934).^xlviii At Cambridge University Fry was inducted into the elect group of the Apostles, leading naturally to his membership in the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals in London after the turn of the century. At Cambridge he also began the serious practice of painting, which he regarded as his true mistress--a relationship that posterity has refused to ratify, preferring his roles as a critic and art historian. In Italy in 1898, he came under the influence of Bernard Berenson, whose formalist concept of "ideated sensations" contributed to Fry's later distillation of formalism. The most trenchant version of this predilection was the slogan of "significant form," coined in 1914 by Fry's associate Clive Bell, also a "Bloomsberry." This concept identifies meaning with the successful transmission of an aesthetic message. Thus Giotto, Poussin, and Matisse are all on the same plane--they all achieve "significant form." Pushing the idea to an extreme, Bell insisted that "[t]he representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful: always it is irrelevant."^xlix Roger Fry rarely went that far, and in his mature studies of Rembrandt and Cézanne he acknowledged the importance, in some works at least, of subject matter.

Fry's Berensonian preoccupation with the Italian Renaissance led to his accepting a curatorship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1906. However, the heavy hand of his patron J. Pierpont Morgan ensured conflict. The job did not work out, and Fry returned permanently to England where, after meeting Clive and Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf's sister), he shifted to contemporary interests. In November 1910 Fry organized a blockbuster show of modernist French art, "Manet and the Post-Impressionists," at the Grafton Galleries in London. With Manet as the precursor, the triumvirate of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh formed the exhibition's center of gravity. Generously, coverage extended to living contemporaries, notably Henri Matisse. It seems that Fry first intended to call the work expressionist--a term that quickly spread to Scandinavia and Germany in a different sense. Others with whom he discussed the matter objected strongly to this label. His patience exhausted, Fry exclaimed "Oh let's just call them post-impressionists; at any rate they came after the impressionists."^l In this casual fashion was born one of the most enduring--even fateful--art-historical terms, a verbal formula which served as a model for other period designations, including "postmodern." The word caught on, but not quite in the sense that Fry intended, for in the course of time the art produced after Cézanne was excluded from the rubric, being termed fauve, cubist, and so forth. The continuation of the term postimpressionism with a changed meaning illustrates a common pattern: once words are successfully launched, they take on a life of their own. For this reason, application of the techniques of historical semantics, neglected in art history, offer useful guidance in tracing changing conceptions.

French domination of the 1910 exhibition needs to be seen in the framework of the entente cordiale, a political arrangement in which Britain and France jointed together to offset the rising strength of the German Empire. Despite the favorable atmospherics, "Manet and the Post-Impressionists" prompted an avalanche of hostile comment. Critics freely dispensed their stock comparisons with the art of the insane and with children's drawings. One of the commentators, Robert Ross, who had been a friend of Oscar Wilde, went so far as to exclaim that the exhibition (which had opened on Guy Fawkes day) revealed "the existence of a wide-spread plot to destroy the whole fabric of European painting." ^li Bizarrely, opponents linked the exhibition with the campaign for Irish Home Rule and the Suffragist movement.

With the exhibition partly in mind, Virginia Woolf detected a seismic change in human character "in or about December 1910." ^lii Such a claim may seem extravagant, but there can be no doubt that, by granting its cachet to the French avant-garde, Fry's great assembly of images left a mark on the perception of modern art in English-speaking countries that lasted for decades.

Apart from the notice it excited, "Manet and the Post-Impressionists" was a financial success, and on October 5, 1911 the "Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition" opened at the same venue. This selection encompassed the avant-garde of three countries, Britain, France, and Russia--significantly the component nations of the Triple Alliance. Unfortunately, the British work displayed served to confirm the derivative character of most of the "advanced" efforts of that country, a situation that was to persist until after World War II.

Together, the two exhibitions served as models for the landmark Armory Show, held in New York City in 1913, an event that was truly international. However, the mold of the French orientation, adopted by Fry and his colleagues was set. Only in recent years has proper recognition of the stature of modern German, Italian, and Russian art been secured. This was particularly problematic when these countries related themselves directly to one another--bypassing Paris--as in the Russian importation of Italian futurism.
In 1913 Roger Fry founded the Omega Workshops, hiring underemployed artists to produce furniture, textiles, and other domestic objects, all in a modern style derived from Paris, supplanting the arts and crafts approach stemming from William Morris and his circle. Although this English effort has been unfavorably compared with the later Bauhaus, it was a significant step in seeking to address the economic problems of artists.

One of Fry's most influential books is Cézanne: A Study of His Development (London: Hogarth Press, 1927). This monograph displays an intimate knowledge of the Provençal setting in which the artist worked, insight into his personality reflecting Freudian ideas, and an understanding of the special significance of his late phase. Fry's account of the early, romantic work of his "tribal god," adopts a contextualist approach, showing how Paul Cézanne's abandonment of his early style was not dictated by formal problems, but by his response to outside critical pressure.

In keeping with the modernist revolt against classical norms, Fry was also interested in "primitive" art, especially African, and in the art of children. In many essays he tirelessly promoted his understanding of modern art as essentially an interplay of formal values. He never wrote a detailed history of modern art, though he produced general surveys of French, Flemish and British art.

Cubism and Its Historiography. 
 

Modern art, with all its innovations, has seen no breakthrough more important than that of cubism. The historiography of this movement is unique, and uniquely challenging.^liii This difficulty stems in part from the early obscurity of the painters themselves and the challenge posed to their critic friends, mostly literary in background, in formulating the aims of the artists.^liv Picasso and Braque held aloof from the discussion groups so avidly attended by such epigones as Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger. Unlike these second-raters, Picasso and Braque declined to exhibit in the official Salons. Picasso rejected theory talk, remarking (in a 1908 interview) "it is forbidden to speak to the pilot." It has been contended that in the years 1910-12 Picasso and Braque acted deliberately to ensure that their work could not be evaluated by ordinary critical or art historical methods.^lv However, they were friends with several prominent writers, including Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and André Salmon. Although he later cooled towards cubism, Salmon was the first to emphasize the importance of the rebarbative Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso's depiction of five inmates of a house of prostitution.^lvi

Artists and writers attended social gatherings (boycotted by the two leaders) at the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse and at Jacques Villon's house in Puteaux. The earlier ideas quickly became blurred. As time advanced new trends arose, either indebted to cubism or in opposition to it, and the supporters of these trends developed a vested interest in endowing the earlier movement with a particular slant.

The term cubism seems to owe its ultimate origin to Henri Matisse's remark, in the fall of 1908, that a Braque landscape was made up of little cubes.^lvii In November of that year the critic Louis Vauxcelles took this observation up, by remarking of a one-person show by Braque that "[h]e disregards form and reduces everything, sites, figures and houses, to geometric schemes and cubes." The abstract noun "cubisme" seems first to have been used in print by Guillaume Apollinaire in the fall of 1910.^lviii Thus this style name (which many of the cubists themselves disliked) began with a casual, not exactly laudatory observation by a critic, and then caught on--apparently because nothing better was available. In any event, nothing conclusive can be deduced about the nature of the style from this designation, which has now become conventional.

Four major issues about cubism require further examination: 1) its developmental sequence; 2) its character as art; 3) the identity and ranking of its major exponents; and 4) the question of cubism in the other arts.

The first theme is the problem of sequence. This longitudinal or diachronic aspect was imperfectly understood by the first commentators, who inclined either to consider cubism en bloc, or to divide it into a series of separate, but coeval tendencies. The dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who had seen most of the works at the time of their creation in the studio and was of a theoretical cast of mind, is an exception.^lix In his 1920 study he pinpointed the start of cubism in the "African" figures on the right-hand side of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906-07).^lx In this text he cited a series of key innovations, such as the appearance of the illusionistic nail and the introduction of such new media as colored strips of paper, lacquer, and newspaper. Apart from these particulars, though, Kahnweiler did not offer a scheme showing the separate stages of cubism as a whole, though he attributed its rise to the imperious spirit of the age.

In 1936 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., recognized two major phases in the development of the style. The first, Analytic Cubism, lasted from 1908 to 1913. It had five stages, showing a progression from "three-dimensional, modelled, recognizable images to two-dimensional, flat, linear form, so abstract as to seem nearer geometry than representation."^lxi Colors were muted so as to allow the creators, Picasso and Braque, to concentrate on form. The succeeding phase of Synthetic Cubism, somewhat overlapping the previous one, was characterized by the use of pasted paper (collage) and the return of color. At first geometrical, the Synthetic phase then entered a softer more decorative mode. After World War I, continuity was lost and artists began to follow their own paths.

Although the terms analytic and synthetic, derived from German idealist philosophy, had enjoyed currency among French intellectuals during the heyday of cubism itself, Barr was the first to utilize them in a clear scheme tracing the logic of pictorial development. Ten years later he offered a refined model of his concepts in his monograph on Picasso.^lxii This book presented the development of 1906-08 as preparatory ("Towards Cubism"); then came a nuanced treatment of the Analytic and Synthetic phases. Before them, he perceived a transitional period, represented above all by that truly formidable canvas Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the sketches for it, and the works created in its wake. This period revealed "primitive" influences, first of Iberian sculpture and then of African sculpture, combining with an interest in Cézanne, whose presence had been significant earlier. The transitional period was characterized by the related problems of the volumetric presentation of objects, especially the human body, and the proper relationship of these to each other. During the first major phase, that of Analytic Cubism, Picasso teamed up with Braque. They began to take apart reality in terms of facets, earning them (or more precisely) Braque the appellation of painters concerned with "cubes." The analytic phase, at its height in the years 1910-12, concerned itself with a number of innovations, including collage. It was succeeded by the second major phase, or Synthetic Cubism, which is concerned with putting together, syntactically so to speak, the disjecta membra obtained by the first part.^lxiii Generally, this scheme has held, though modified in part by a semiotic interpretation, of which more later.

What then of the nature of cubism? Barr saw it as one pole of a major dichotomy in Western art: the Apollonian vs. the Dionysian. But this contrast does not take us very far. If Poussin, Cézanne, and Braque all count as Apollonian, why do their works look so different from one another? What in fact do they have in common? In any event, this polarity, which stems from the early writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, does not seem to have featured in the early discussions; many did speak of the conceptual emphasis of cubism, but without a carefully worked-out scheme of binary oppositions.

One cluster of early ideas emphasizes the quest for truth. For the banal truth of appearances, cubism substitutes a deeper truth. As Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger put it in their 1912 treatise "in order to display a true relation we must be ready to sacrifice a thousand apparent truths."^lxiv The superficial reality of a Courbet yields to the quest for a "profounder reality," a quest initiated by Cézanne. Several explanations appeared in an attempt to define the nature of this profounder reality. 1) It is something known to the primitives, but lost in the further elaboration of civilization. Careful study of African, Oceanic, and perhaps Egyptian works can bring back this truth. 2) The profounder reality corresponds to advances in science as seen in the Riemannian geometries that have been distinguished alongside the Euclidean one. Possibly some influence came from Henri Poincaré via the mathematician Maurice Princet, a shadowy member of the cubist circle. These concepts were invoked as a way of explaining the cubist rejection of Renaissance perspective, said to be tied to the limited Euclidian concept. Albert Einstein was unknown in France at the time of cubism's formation; his concepts of relativity were not discussed in this connection until the 1920s. 3) The world in which we live is conditioned not only by space but by time. Through its multiple views cubism incorporates the element of time. With a bow to the Italian futurists, the idea of "simultaneity" was often canvassed.^lxv There was also an attempt to link up with the speculations about time of the philosopher Henri Bergson.^lxvi 4) Cubism discloses a reality not readily characterizable, at least not in words, perhaps a reality of a "hermetic" kind.^lxvii

There was also an approach that appealed to the Zeitgeist in its material aspect. The way in which the cubist canvases were composed was regarded as reflecting the changed conditions of modern experience. There was considerable talk of the automobile and the airplane and their effect on consciousness. The Paris Futurist exhibition opening February 7, 1912 popularized the term dynamism, which was picked up by Gleizes and Metzinger.

The cubists refrained from discarding the object, from becoming completely abstract or "nonobjective." Despite this acknowledged allegiance, until recently probing accounts of the subject matter of cubist painting have remained rare. For a long time the formalist reluctance to admit that modern art might have any significant iconography or subject matter exercised a chilling effect.

To Leo Steinberg belongs the credit the decisive steps towards overcoming this blockage. Central to the work of this learned American scholar is his combination of Renaissance and modern studies: alternating between the two, he has been able to pose questions that have eluded other observers. Unlike Alfred Barr, Pierre Daix, and others, Steinberg has not chosen to convey his discoveries about Picasso's work in monographic form, but instead has produced a cycle of probing essays on particular themes. Several of these texts figured in his Other Criteria of 1972, a book which set new standards in the critical exegesis of modern art.^lxviii

The same year saw the appearance of the original version of his essay on that most challenging of all Picasso's works, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.^lxix After repeated and prolonged meditation before the canvas itself in New York's Museum of Modern Art, Steinberg became convinced that it demanded analysis for its own sake; it must no longer be regarded genetically, as a mere point of departure for cubism and modern art in general. Retracing the the painting's complicated gestation, the writer plumbed the preparatory drawings and studies. These disclosed that in addition to the five whores present in the final version, two males--one a sailor, the other a man carrying a skull--were originally meant to appear on the left. By excluding these intruders, Picasso effectively transferred their function to the observer. In emphasizing the spectator's role, Steinberg anticipated the reception criticism of the 1980s. Posing the question of a link between the work's treatment of sexuality and the creative innovation that it embodied, he not only broached the then-neglected theme of erotic art, but gave its application precise definition. Summoning an energy that partakes of that of Les Demoiselles itself, Steinberg's eloquent prose crackled with its author's acknowledgement of the primordial aggressiveness of the canvas and its Medusan denizens.

This Picasso paper has stood the test of time as a landmark in what might be termed the iconological study of cubism. Steinberg's intellectual tour de force--aptly fitted to the problems presented by a single major work--has remained without peer. All the same, it has served to open a path to later scholars grappling with cubist subject matter.^lxx

Until recently political approaches to cubism have been uncommon. Patricia Leighten has sought to link Picasso's work until 1914 to anarchism, a connection that rings true for the period and milieu, but is not always convincing for the interpretation of particular paintings.^lxxi Kenneth Silver shows that chauvinistic and classicizing currents surfacing in French criticism during and immediately after World War I shaped the zigzag course of the work of cubists during those years.^lxxii A study remains to be made of the imagery Picasso produced after World War II reflecting his allegiance to the French Communist Party.^lxxiii 
At one point, it seemed that an inviting avenue towards a new understanding of the question of meaning in cubism lay in the structuralist or semiotic approach. A tenacious effort to apply this method (to which Pierre Daix and Rosalind Krauss made earlier significant contributions) appears in a paper by Yve-Alain Bois. He holds that a "semiological attitude" had been at the core of what is usually called cubism right from the start.^lxxiv As in previous attempts to develop this methodology, Bois' exposition falters when it seeks to apply the Saussurean concept of the arbitrariness of the sign to cubism, as the signs found there are usually not arbitrary in the way that the signs "apple" and "pomme" are arbitrary in relation to the fruit they serve to denote. To be sure, cubism shows that there is a loosening of what might be called the iconic bond between the graphic denotation and that which it denotes, but no independent system that would be arbitrary in Saussure's sense is achieved. Still, it has seemed to many that comparisons with semiotic systems, and with linguistics, have a special pertinence to Picasso's work that helps to distinguish it from that of Braque (and from that of Matisse as well).

The next question, not unconnected with the development and nature of cubism, is the grouping and ranking of the masters. If Les Demoiselles d'Avignon constitutes the first step towards cubism--even, in the view of some, the first cubist picture--then in 1906 Picasso stood alone, At that time Braque was still producing work in the Fauve manner. After the two men were introduced by Apollinaire in 1907, however, the development of cubism became a true partnership. During the most innovative years they worked very closely together; Braque compared them to two mountain climbers roped together in order to advance up a rock face. The question of their ranking has continued to be disputed. There is no doubt that Braque made some important contributions, but many, from the time of Salmon onwards, felt that Picasso was the decisive personality.^lxxv

What of the other artists called cubist? Derain was regarded as an early associate, but with his reversion to a more realistic style, he gradually disappeared from the honor role. By 1912 a number of artists were perceived as followers of Picasso and Braque: Metzinger, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Léger, and Delaunay. This group had begun to exhibit in the Salons of 1910, and Metzinger, who had coauthored the well-known 1912 book Du cubisme with Gleizes, counted as the spokesperson.^lxxvi

In his Les peintres cubistes, Apollinaire attempted a very catholic, inclusive survey of cubism.^lxxvii He presents four trends. Two of these issued from the initial founders, Picasso and Derain. Picasso was responsible for "scientific cubism," which utilized references to natural objects, but corrected them according to "the reality of knowledge." The second trend, "Orphic cubism," stemming from Derain, was nonrepresentational. Artists of this type invent the elements of painting with no reference to nature. The choice of Orpheus, the Greek musician-poet, seems to reflect Apollinaire's belief that abstract painting is analogous to music. A third, more down-to-earth trend was "physical cubism," associated with Le Fauconnier. With its recognizable images, this kind of art is more socially directed, perhaps even propagandistic. Finally, Apollinaire recognized "instinctive cubism" as a generic term for a medley of cubist-inspired modes practiced in major cities throughout Europe.

Later criticism, while acknowledging Apollinaire's energy and gifts as a publicist, has rejected his categories as too arbitrary and expansive. What is the attitude today? There seems general agreement that Derain, though probably a more interesting painter than generally allowed, was too transitory in his allegiance to cubism to count. Many scholars now regard Juan Gris as having almost the same status as the two cofounders. Léger continues to be highly regarded, but is treated as creating his own distinct variant.

               Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia Terk Delaunay rank as major artists but because their nonobjectivity and reliance on color are not considered cubist; Orphism figures as a separate style.^lxxviii  Gleizes and Metzinger enjoy only the status of minor masters.

It seems clear that many movements, especially in their first obscure stages, depend on circles or friendship networks both as support groups and as "grapevine systems" for spreading news of advances. Within such networks a pecking order is established. So reestablishing these patterns is part of the historical record. With the passage of time, the fundamental characteristics of the style increasingly stand out from lesser features. Similarly, there is a need to identify the key figures, separating them from the epigones. The innovations normally stem from the leading figures.

Finally, there is the matter of the relation of cubism to the other arts.^lxxix In his monograph on Juan Gris, Kahnweiler offered musical comparisons with the work of Erik Satie and the twelve-tone composers Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern.^lxxx Others add Bartók, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky to the mix. All these comparisons assume the similarity of abstract art to music.

The field of literature supplies several candidates for the title of cubist writer, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, the Pirandello of Six Characters in Search of an Author, André Gide, and Gertrude Stein.^lxxxi These links are based on a certain patterning and rhythmic repetition, as well as discontinuities in the presentation of time and space. Stein's prose in particular has been much analyzed as cubist, but this perception may reflect in part her friendship with Picasso.^lxxxii Max Jacob was much closer to Picasso than Stein; his poetry is obscure, but opinions differ as to whether the difficulty is best resolved in a cubist key.^lxxxiii Roger Fry thought that Stéphane Mallarmé had achieved something akin to cubism in that his poems were fragmented and restructured "not according to the relations of experience but of pure poetical necessity."^lxxxiv In view of the radical innovation of the poet's "Un coup de dés," this view has much to recommend it.

Architecture is a special problem.^lxxxv Le Corbusier's purist painting after World War I descends from cubism, and this movement clearly leaves an impress on his architecture. A similar crossover is found in the builders associated with the Dutch De Stijl group, with Theo van Doesburg as a connecting figure. However, whether there is any truly cubist architecture remains moot.

In summary, proposals of links with other media depend on several assumptions: (1) personal association with the possibility of direct exchange of ideas (Stein; Jacob; Stravinsky); (2) formal criteria including fragmentation and diminished contact with the "motif" as in Joyce's novels; (3) repetition, as in Stein; and finally (4) a concept of an overarching spirit of the age (or Zeitgeist). Most observers have found these comparisons more stimulating than convincing, and a tacit understanding generally restricts the term cubism to painting and sculpture.

The Role of Museum Personnel. 
 

Most European states had official systems of art patronage, but these had been carefully calibrated to assure purchase of academic works, usually ones produced by nationals of the acquiring country. Even so, these "safe" works did not usually gain admission into the big national museums, such as the Louvre and Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. A few museum directors defied these tacit boundaries, maneuvering to secure admission of a cosmopolitan selection of advanced works. The courage of Hugo von Tschudi, for a time director of the National Galerie in Berlin, stands out.^lxxxvi He defied the chauvinistic Kaiser Wilhelm II to acquire some works of the Barbizon school, and then moved to Munich, where his pioneering exhibitions, including one of El Greco, energized the Blaue Reiter painters.

The Folkwang Museum in Hagen, founded by the discerning collector Karl Ernst Osthaus, seems to rank as the first museum designed to house a comprehensive collection of advanced modern art. Established German public institutions (unlike those elsewhere) did not lag far behind. In the years after 1905 progressive German museum directors led the world in buildin avant-garde collections.^lxxxvii

In North America, the 1913 Armory Show, organized in New York by Arthur B. Davies and others, attracted intense journalistic attention, but was a one-shot effort, the effect of which was blurred by the outbreak of World War I in Europe.^lxxxviii A more concerted effort to establish modern art in North America was spurred by Katherine Sophie Dreier (1877-1952).^lxxxix In 1920, together with Marcel Duchamp, she founded the Société Anonyme, a New York organization devoted to exhibiting advanced art, mainly European, and to building up a permanent representative collection. In 1926-27 the efforts of the group culminated in a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, with over 300 pieces by one-hundred six artists from twenty-three countries. Although the show concentrated on recent avant-garde work, an effort was made to show roots before 1914. Perhaps the most important contribution of the exhibition was to alter the Francophile approach that usually marked--and still largely marks--Americans' approach to high modernism in Europe. Only about one-fourth of the works were French, and Germany and Russia enjoyed equal representation. Like many supporters of modern art, Dreier's personal philosophy, embodied in her book Modern Art (New York, 1927), reflected her commitment to theosophy. From this source she distilled ideas which she believed helpful particularly in understanding abstract works, including those of Kandinsky, to whom she was partial.

Gradually the permanent collections of the Société Anonyme expanded. It has rightly been termed the first museum of modern art in America. In 1941 the collection came to Yale University, where it functions as an important study collection.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

At the time of the Armory show and for some time after, America remained little more than an outpost; this was true both of production of modern art and its study. After World War II the United States became central. Much of the credit for this dramatic shift, especially in the area of study and education, belongs to the tenacious work of Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. (1902-1981).^xc This activity took place at his command post, so to speak--at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he ruled as spiritus animator from its formation in 1929 until his retirement in 1967. As Irving Sandler has noted, "Barr's vision and leadership built the Museum into the greatest museum of modern art in the world; its influence on public attitudes, art education, and museum practices is unequaled among institutions of its kind."^xci Barr's museum administration, acquisitions, and exhibition policies were buttressed by a stream of publications, embodying a particular approach to the examination and ordering of modern art.

Barr was born in Baltimore in 1902. the son of a Presbyterian minister. Consistently, his activity reflected the Protestant ethic of hard work, high moral seriousness, and striving to propagate the "new church" of modern art in North America. As an advocate of modern art, Barr was singularly honest and self-reflective. Yet there remained a zone of interference where proselytism and objective scholarship came into conflict.

Alfred Barr attended Princeton University, where he studied medieval art under Charles Rufus Morey, one the founders of professional art history in America. At the time an affinity was felt between medieval and modern art; although Morey showed no particular sympathy for the art of his own epoch a number of his students went on to careers as pioneering modernist scholars. Barr derived two main lessons from Morey's course: (1) an awareness that art comprised not just the "triple crown" of painting, sculpture, and architecture, but encompassed a whole range of so-called minor arts and crafts, including ceramics, glass, and furniture; and (2) a sensitivity to the guiding role of broad, parallel traditions--Morey recognized three great streams of medieval art--which persisted over many generations. This latter concept he was able to crystalize in the famous charts of the genealogy of modern art that summarized his teachings in a nutshell.

In 1927 Barr began teaching the first true course in modern art at Wellesley College. Later in that year he began the first of a series of intensive study trips to see modern art and meet its creators; these ventures took him as far as the Soviet Union.

Although he was only twenty-seven, Barr seemed the logical choice of a group of wealthy women and men to head their new Museum of Modern Art in New York.^xcii It opened its doors on November 8, 1929, a few days after the stock-market crash. The first exhibition, a great success despite the unfavorable times, was devoted to Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh. This was followed immediately by a show of Nineteen Living Americans. Although Barr sought to balance European and American art, the trustees mainly responded to prestigious objects imported from overseas. For a long time a sense of grievance festered among American artists, particularly those of the regionalist tradition who sensed that they were undergoing superannuation--as indeed they were.

Like the Société Anonyme, the Museum was both an acquiring and an exhibiting institution. As the permanent collection grew, Barr arranged the holdings in a sequence of styles or isms, thus consecrating that approach. There always remained a tension between the pantheon function (permanently displaying an array of representative masterpieces) and the nurturing function (seeking out and exhibiting the latest trends).

The Museum's commitment to go beyond painting and sculpture was evident in the 1932 exhibition of avant-garde architecture, which the organizers--Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock--termed the International Style. A substantial book, which strove to set forth the main stylistic characteristics of advanced modern architecture, accompanied the show. After its New York premiere, the exhibition traveled to other American cities for several years. This event, more than any other, set in motion key changes in the architectural profession that presaged the death knell of the beaux-arts tradition.

Barr's approach to art in parallel streams was exemplified by his catalogue to the 1936 exhibition on Cubism and Abstract Art. The dust jacket of the catalogue contained his famous chart (Ill. 6). Granting that he was oversimplifying, Barr delineated two streams of modern art, Apollonian and Dionysian, the one with a more rational, formal emphasis; the other a more emotional and expressive one. Barr conveyed the gist of the contrast in this lapidary sentence: "The shape of the square confronts the silhouette of the amoeba."^xciii To characterize the early work of Kandinsky he introduced the term Abstract Expressionism. (After World War II this double-barreled term morphed into a label for a major trend in contemporary American art). The successful exhibition was followed by its complement, a show of Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism. At that time Barr shared the common view that the latter trend was more topical and vital than the cubist-abstract one, which was becoming historical.

The effectiveness of Barr's breviary What is Modern Painting, issued by the Museum in 1943, is evidenced by the fact that it went through nine editions and was translated into several foreign languages. This accessible introduction was part of the outreach program to spread knowledge of modern art among broad sectors of society, including the main parts of the United States that New Yorkers patronizingly referred to as "the provinces."

With a fitting sense of proportion, Barr created major monographs on the two artists he regarded as the giants of the twentieth century. Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (1949), an expanded version of a 1939 exhibition catalogue, earned him a doctorate at Harvard University. In addition to its characteristically limpid prose, the layout of this book, which so carefully coordinates illustrations with commentary, made it an ideal instrument for self teaching. The volume won over many who had been Picasso skeptics. Now that almost a half century has past, one can see that the account of Picasso's career is schema of the received view of modern art itself as a series of discrete "periods," so that the blue period, the pink period, analytic cubism, synthetic cubism appear in stately procession. Matisse: His Art and His Public (1951) offers a more conventional narration, which is ultimately more satisfying as it offers a "thick description" of the interplay between the artist's life and his work.

In the 1950s Barr struggled with the trustees to gain recognition for American Abstract Expressionism. Apart from their reluctance to back an unfamiliar type of artistic vanguardism, the cause of modern art faced another difficulty. During this period of the ascendancy of Senator Joseph McCarthy, modern art was decried as communistic. Ironically, in the later radical atmosphere that developed in the wake of the Vietnam War protests, the opposite claim came to be made: the museum was held to be an instrument of United States imperialism. In collusion with goverment agencies, the Museum of Modern Art was ostensibly seeking to foist the art of "late capitalism"--Abstract Expressionism--on the cowed client states of a purported American Empire.

Barr's books appeared in tandem with the museum's exhibitions. Following his models, the museum persuaded other scholars to write many short monographs on individual artists, usually supplied with valuable chronologies and careful bibliographies by the museum's dedicated librarian, Bernard Karpel. These monographs gained wide credibility as sober, factual accounts, which on one level they were. However, they also avoided tackling controversial or unsatisfactory aspects of an artist's work. In this way they inadvertently augmented the celebratory, "triumphalist" vein of modern art writing in the sixties--so welcome to dealers and collectors with their substantial investments in the oeuvres that were being canonized. When one could not say something good about some aspect of an artist, as in the later Giorgio de Chirico, it might simply be omitted as in James Thrall Soby's monograph Giorgio de Chirico (New York, 1955).

During the sixties and seventies the museum consolidated its leading position as a repository of established masterpieces, enjoying unparalleled esteem. It fell behind, however, in discovering and exhibiting innovative new work. Criticisms on this score did not go unheeded. As the end of the millennium approached, the Museum of Modern Art began seeking to resume its earlier role, with results that cannot yet be assessed.

Contemporary Trends.

A different slant on the perception of modern art stemmed from the intervention of the Bavarian Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen (1890-1967).^xciv An amateur painter, Rebay's growing interest in abstract art drew nourishment, as was so often the case with her contemporaries, from her devotion to the mystical tenets of Theosophy. About 1926 she gained an ascendancy over the very wealthy Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York. The baroness encouraged him to acquire abstract paintings, even-handedly favoring the great Vassily Kandinsky and the mediocre Rudolf Bauer. Many of these works eventually went on exhibition in the Museum of Non-Objective Art (later called the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). Then Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to design a new building. Gradually the trustees eased Rebay out, while Wright moved to New York to complete the job of construction. Much admired for its dramatic structure commanding upper Fifth Avenue, Wright's striking but inflexible building has been decried as an enemy to the works of art it is meant to display. (A new annex was opened in 1992 to display the bulk of the works chosen from the permanent collection.) In fact Wright's spiraling central-plan scheme actually expresses in a schematic way a particular concept of sequence, which might be taken as a paradigm of historical development. The course of the spiral, from the ground floor to just under the domed ceiling is a linear, continuous one, yet it doubles over and over itself, suggesting the "handshake" of affinities across time.

The universal scope of New York's Museum of Modern Art was the model for an even more ambitious project, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which housed virtually every type of modern art in a striking building by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano (1974-76). Elsewhere, especially in Germany, modern and post-modern designs produced striking new museum structures.

Museums, whether displaying changing or permanent collections were important--but so were galleries. Before World War I dealers like Herwarth Walden (expressionism) and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (cubism) had specialized in promoting particular styles.^xcv In New York City Alfred Stieglitz favored all sorts of European and American modernism, while in the 1930s Julien Levy introduced surrealism. In the view of some observers after World War II a few top galleries in New York City had an almost dictatorial role as tastemakers.^xcvi

The art historian Meyer Schapiro (b. 1904) occupied a special position. A frequent visitor to museums and galleries, he marshaled his prodigious research capacities at his professorial post at Columbia University. His studies of abstract art reflected both a comparative perspective (he had originally studied, and continued to study, medieval art) and a sense of social milieu--the latter stemming from his involvement in the tumultuous world of New York radicalism of the 1930s. In 1941 he published a breakthrough essay on "Courbet and Popular Imagery."^xcvii In addition to showing how works generally accorded the status of the fine arts could nonetheless draw nourishment from "low" productions of popular origin, Schapiro explored Gustave Courbet's embeddedness in the broad intellectual and social context of his age. In other papers on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art he was to deploy a dazzling range of methods, from semiotics and mathematics to psychoanalysis and the history of ideas, always adapting them to the particular character of the works at hand. In his monographs on Van Gogh (1950) and Cézanne (1952) Schapiro reached a wide public through his sensitive visual analyses. Alert as he has been to the values of many disciplines, the New York art historian has always kept the individual art work at the center of his attention. This work-centered approach has not always been accorded the attention it deserves by some of his latter-day admirers, who have sought to appropriate him for their own ideological agendas.

Clement Greenberg.

The independent critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1993) dominated the interpretation of contemporary art in America during the 1950s and 60s.^xcviii Reporting the findings of his subtle eye for distinctions in contemporary painting in a series of pellucid articles, he championed the emerging style of Abstract Expressionism. He linked it to the major developments that had shaped European art during the first half of the century, while at the same time sharply distinguishing it from these forerunners. Establishing the paramount importance of Abstract Expressionism, especially as embodied in the figure of Jackson Pollock, he and his fellow critics simultaneously celebrated the shift of art's center of gravity from Europe to the United States.^xcix

Viewed in the larger context, Greenberg's achievement may be construed as a successful fusion of two social roles that had been distinct in America. The first was typified by such public intellectuals as Randolph Bourne, Walter Lippmann, and Mary McCarthy, who were passionately concerned with broad issues of culture and national destiny.^c With the significant exception of Lewis Mumford, these pundits rarely addressed the visual arts. The second role was that of the working art critic. Some of these journalists had backgrounds as artists, while others had previously sought to make their mark as creative writers. Generally they wrote for daily newspapers and art magazines. During the earlier decades of the century they habitually rejected advanced modern art, often in caustic terms, witness Kenyon Cox, Royal Cortissoz, and Thomas Craven.^ci In the 1940s, though, such successors as Henry McBride and Robert Coates (who introduced the label "abstract expressionist") adopted a more cautious neutrality.^cii During the first half of the century, university professors of art history were almost invariably indifferent, if not downright hostile to contemporary art of any kind.

Clement Greenberg was born in the Bronx in 1909. While he profited from some art training in his teens, after graduating from Syracuse University in 1930 he dedicated himself to writing, first for private consumption, and then at the end of the decade for publication. For some years he worked as a clerk for the United States Customs Service. This calling has symbolic resonance, for New York's position as a gateway to Europe helped it to supplant Chicago in the 1920s as the main seat of American intellectual life. Customs officers exclude as well as admit, however, and during the forties Greenberg's disdain for contemporary European art, which he regarded as inferior to the American product, might be viewed as an extension of the official gatekeeper function to the sphere of culture. In any event, after 1942 he labored exclusively as a critic and editor. Although his poetry remains unpublished, during the early forties his interests were as much literary and political as artistic.

Greenberg was fortunate to find his first home with the Partisan Review, a journal that had at first taken a leftist, in fact Communist line, but then became critical of Stalinism, under the influence of Leon Trotsky. As the prime organ of the skeptical but ever inquiring "New York School" of intellectuals, the magazine excelled through its unique blend of political analysis with the cultural concerns of the typical Little Magazine of the 1920s.^ciii On its pages Leon Trotsky and Sydney Hook mingled with  T. S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling. One of the major concerns of the Partisan Review group was the defense of high culture against the depredations of mass culture as diffused by the media. Greenberg's first major essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), posited a struggle between a heroic, but often lonely and neglected band of modernists upholding the banner of high culture against the purveyors of kitsch, the debased surrogate for high art generated by mass production. He lamented the fact that the kitsch principle befouled much of the middlebrow culture industry in America.^civ At this time he saw redemption in working for socialism, not only as the way to a more just society, but also as the guarantor of cultural continuity.

Greenberg's first critical notice on Jackson Pollock appeared in The Nation for November 27, 1943. In this short piece he shrewdly discerned that Pollock, "[b]eing young and full of energy, takes orders he can't fill." But if he could keep shy of the influences of other painters he would have a brilliant future. Foreseeing Pollock's capacity for large monumental works, the critic continued to encourage him over the years.

Greenberg demonstrated his independence of political judgment by joining with Dwight Macdonald to oppose United States participation in World War II. This opposition was based in part on the Trotskyist ideas which had played such an important part in the intellectual formation of the New York intellectuals in the late 1930s. Like many others after the war he became disillusioned with radical politics, so that by 1948 he styled himself an "ex- or disabused Marxist." A quarter of a century later this "defection" was to be held against him by art critics allied with the New Left. Not having had the disillusioning experience of the "God that failed," they could not understand the solid reasons for the change of view of the intellectuals of Greenberg's generation.

One of Greenberg's greatest strengths was his genuine enjoyment of painting so that he seemed to look more closely, and to choose more tellingly than any of his contemporaries. His writings are informed by a powerful intuitive element, which he sometimes termed "taste." In addition, however, he sought to buttress his perceptions with a theory of the development of art over the previous one hundred years, in short a theory of modernism. An adumbration of his later views appeared in the "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" essay: "Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Mirò, Kandinsky, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in."

In "Modernist Painting," an article of 1965, he set forth the basic principles of his mature theory.^cv Historically, the critical endeavor of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment challenged each human activity to justify its existence. To escape being "leveled down" to the status of mere entertainment or therapy, the arts had to show that they could provide an experience that was "valuable in its own right and not to be obtained by any other kind of activity." In keeping with this commandment it emerged that the proper realm of each art "coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium." Realization of this aim meant the elimination of any features that rightly belonged to some other art. In this way each art would become "pure," a characteristic assuring both quality and autonomy. In former times, realistic art had dissembled its nature; by contrast modernism "used art to call attention to art." Modernist art was required to treat its limitations as positive factors: the flat surface, the (usually rectangular) shape of the support, and the properties of the pigment.

When, in Greenberg's view, did modernist painting begin? He maintained that Manet's canvases became the first modernist ones by reason of the "frankness with which they declared the surfaces on which they were painted." The impressionists and Cézanne made further progress in acknowledging the "ineluctable flatness" and surface opacity that is painting's true vocation. Then the cubists created a kind of painting that was flatter than ever before. Greenberg emphasized that this development was not a straight linear one; there were many variations as the qualities of the basic premise were tested and retested. It is evident, though, that in this theory Greenberg not only provided a set of basic touchstones--flatness, the nature of pigment, and so forth--but showed how they could be deployed to create a history of painting as a meaningful sequence from Manet's time to the present. By following the threads of this development one could distinguish the "mainstream" from subsidiary achievements, which however enjoyable they might be in their own right did not contribute to the developmental patterns. He emphasized that modernism did not mark a break with the art of the past: "It may mean a devolution, an unraveling of anterior tradition, but it also means its continuation." Even in Renaissance and Baroque painting Greenberg found an interest in surface, it was simply that it was combined with illusionism. As the latter was gradually sloughed off, the true essence of painting, which had been there all the time, was more and more revealed.

Greenberg's ideas are not completely new; their affinity with Julius Meier-Graefe's stress on the "painterly" origins of modern art and the formalism of Roger Fry is undeniable. Yet he lent greater precision to these concepts by his specification of the way that each art derives its reason for being from its material embodiment. For this reason the aims of sculpture, as a three-dimensional medium, differ fundamentally from those of painting. And both must be released from the grip of literature with its anecdotal interests. The exclusion of the connection with literature, though a logical conclusion, is curious, perhaps even an evidence of self-denial, in view of Greenberg's own strong literary bent. In a general way Greenberg claimed to have taken his central principle from Kant's idea of the autonomy of art, but this sourcing is probably secondary.^cvi Many observers found Greenberg's surface emphasis illuminating, and it also influenced a new generation of artists, including the color-field painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, who believed that they were carrying the principle into new territory; in turn, their claims secured the endorsement of the master critic himself.

Greenberg's influence peaked in 1961 with the publication of his essay collection Art and Culture, and he was hailed by a broad segment of informed opinion as the oracle of modern art, on an equal footing, it appeared, with the increasingly august Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the 1960s, however, his seemingly unerring eye blinked at the incursion of pop art, which in its blatant appeal to mass culture transgressed his injunction against kitsch. In a different way he seems to have found minimalism too cerebral; it violated the pleasure principle that was always central to his appreciation of art.

Greenberg's approach came to seem out-of-date for other reasons, for his "formalism"--a term that began to be hurled as an abusive epithet--was found wanting by a generation whose political consciousness had been raised by the Vietnam War. With the rise of neo-Marxist currents of "cultural materialism," Greenberg was chided for his departure from the social consciousness that had appeared, if only fitfully, in his early writings. If only he and Meyer Schapiro had persisted in their early vein, so the lament went, the social history of modern art could have risen on firm foundations. Unwilling to stay the course, Greenberg withdrew into a privileged arcadia of art for art's sake.^cvii Neglected in this critique is the possibility that had the general climate of thought become frozen in the left-wing currents of the late 1930s, art would probably have continued to conform to the dreary prescriptions of social realism--post-office art in short. The abandonment of leftist shibboleths helped to prepare a space in which the truly radical artistic innovations of Abstract Expressionism could flourish.

This "what might have been" scenario fused with another complaint. Some began to ask whether Greenberg had simply described things that happened or whether he had, to a significant degree, made them happen, and not always in a benign way. The critic's role in the expansion of the prestige of contemporary American art was attacked for its alleged complicity with the Cold War political objectives of the United States government. The subtext of Greenberg's exaltation of Abstract Expressionism ("American-type painting") was seemingly this: just as America was the free world's preeminent economic and military power so it was its cultural colossus. The logic of this nexus would seem to be prima facie suspect, as (to take one example) French art and culture flourished after the defeat of 1870-71, while that of the victor Germany languished. And in fact, as American aims and achievements came more into question, the allegation surfaced that the "Cold War" faction promoting American avant-garde art had not so much chronicled the shift as hijacked the artistic center.^cviii

These charges invite several responses. First, there is no evidence of conspiracy between critics and the State Department or other organs of the government to promote avant-garde work as the bearer of American values abroad. If anything during the early years of the Cold War a cloud of suspicion lingered about abstract painting, which might even be--as Congressman George Dondero and others alleged--itself tainted with Bolshevism. Moreover, the hold of the School of Paris on American taste in the immediate postwar years was such that dynamiting was necessary to dislodge it. In proclaiming the Westward migration of the art spirit, the assertive American critics ironically replicated an argument that French writers had used in the late seventeenth century, when they claimed that the vital center of the art world had shifted from Rome to Paris. (At the beginning of the 1980s, it was claimed that West Germany and Italy, with their neo-expressionism, were displacing the United States, but this assertion did not stick.)

It is doubtful that the international prestige of the abstract expressionist painters contributed significantly to the prosecution of the Cold War. But if it did, is this not cause more for rejoicing than lament? Our side won the Cold War and--in view of all we have learned about the crushing tyranny and cultural blight of Communist regimes--it was a good thing too.

As the fashion for Marxist art history declined, this line of critique of Greenberg faded. But this does not mean that the New York magus has regained his former pinnacle. Writing as both artist and museum curator, Robert Storrs has arraigned the early, the middle, and the late Greenberg: the first for his faith in socialism, the second for his didactic simplifications in the name of "purity," and the last for his praise of the "Color Field Academy" and the pallid realism of Andrew Wyeth.^cix Storrs views Greenberg as a dapper mandarin who refused to acknowledge the complexity, even vulgarity of much modern art. Although marred by a certain ring of generational envy, these charges, directed at a figure entering the tenth decade of his life, have some merit.

Regrettably, Greenberg's paradigm of the development of modern painting as a progressive discarding of inessentials has remained vague and generic: it has not been feasible for Greenberg (or anyone else) to flesh it out in detail. The historical trajectory he postulates is a teleological one, yet he resists the idea that abstract art is its final goal. He concedes that there have been deviations from the straight course along the way, but has not specified what has shaped these zigzags, apart from unpredictable factors of individual personality. In the language of the philosophy of science his "research program" has not proved fertile, because it has offers no succor to those who might seek to extend and complete it.

For a time, however, Clement Greenberg provided a road map where none was available before. And he showed how the vigorous intervention of contemporary criticism can balance support of living major artists with historical awareness.

Russian Modernism Repressed and Revived.

The upsurge of modern Russian culture, sometimes known as the Silver Age, began with symbolism--first conceived as a literary movement--in the 1890s. The visual arts were still dominated by realism (The Wanderers) and, in the crafts, a revival of Slavic folk themes. The year 1898 saw the inception of Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art)--both a periodical publication and a group holding art exhibitions. When the lavish magazine ceased six years later, other publications took up the torch. Especially after the inception of the constitutional period with an elected parliament in 1905, artists made a determined effort to catch up with Western Europe. In short succession post-impressionism, cubism, and futurism were absorbed. Though deriving from these styles, such painters as Goncharova and Larionov produced distinctive work of their own, influenced by Russian popular prints. In due course this process of absorption and reformulation produced an indisputably world class artist, Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) with his Suprematism, a rigorously abstract mode of painting excluding any reference to the outside world.

During the war Kandinsky and others who had settled in the West returned to Russia, jump-starting new art institutions under Soviet auspices. The first years of Communism saw the appearance of Constructivism, which was not so much new as an extension of formal ideas that had reached maturity in the last years of tsarist rule. An ideal of collective work was, however, often affirmed. Important links with the Bauhaus and other Western pioneers were forged. However, the Soviet authorities under Stalin first rejected and then repressed avant-garde art, finally proclaiming Socialist Realism as the only accepted style in 1932. Most of the works of the advanced artists disappeared into museum storerooms--those not lost due to neglect.

As a result of the suppression, advanced Russian art was little known in the West. On one of his study trips Alfred Barr had journeyed to the Soviet Union in 1927-28. A few abstract works could be seen in Western museums. Some artists took the path of exile: Naum Gabo worked in England and America, while his brother Antoine Pevsner settled in Paris. An important group of Malevich paintings went on display in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum in 1958. A major step forward was taken by Camilla Gray, a courageous independent scholar who had lived in Russia, through the publication of her book The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922 in 1952. It was still hard to conduct research--or even to enter the country, as Yale scholar George Heard Hamilton found in preparing his Penguin volume on Russia in the early 1950s. John E. Bowlt and others made primary documents available.^cx A few courageous private galleries contributed to knowledge by showing what was available. The thaw in relations with the Soviet Union finally permitted works to emerge and be shown in a series of notable exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in a huge roundup "The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932," at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the fall of 1992.^cxi Since so much has disappeared, the displays at these shows have been augmented by reconstructions, especially of sculptural works and architectural models, where relatively little is lost in the process of creating the replicas. The exhibitions also permitted the reconstitution, in part at least, of some notable original shows, including the 0.10 one of 1915, in which Malevich's nonobjective works reached full maturity, and 5 x 5 = 25, a major event of the early Soviet period. At least one group of works has left the country. In 1977 the George Costakis collection, formed by a Greek resident of Moscow, was divided between the Russian state and its owner, who moved to Greece.^cxii The showing of the exported portion in a number of Western cities was a notable event.

In the meantime, under the influence of the New Left some influential Western critics and artists were turning away from formalism in search of a socially responsible art which would at the same time be avant-garde rather than social realist. Some believed that they had found such a fusion in the Constructivist work, which they hailed particularly as it entered its "Productivist" phase in the early twenties. With its dramatic openwork spiral and revolving geometric forms, Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (1919-20)--only the model was executed--became a kind of emblem of this neo-Marxist interpretation.^cxiii It seemed that the Holy Grail was now in sight: the hypostatic union of the ideal art with the ideal politics.^cxiv

Those living in the early years of the Soviet regime had felt less confidence. One problem was that apart from using new materials and processes, few of the artists knew how to contribute directly to the cause of the revolution. To be sure, El Lissitzky and Rodchenko made non-objective posters, but these were probably less effective as political persuasion (agit-prop) than posters showing photographs or realistic images. The driving principle of propaganda is expediency, and the artists, for the most part, were unwilling to concede this. Even had they modified their style, it is unlikely that they would have found a public to respond, for the masses still loved icons and popular prints. Moreover, realistic art, including that of the "politically correct" Wanderers, continued under the early years of the Revolution. With this welter of tendencies, the Soviet art story was more complex than a simple "before" (abstraction under Lenin) and "after" (socialist realism under Stalin).^cxv In fact, Lenin showed no interest in the experimental forms of modern art and music. The Soviet leader regarded these cultural innovations as a distraction, as seen in the traditional views reported by the Marxist feminist Klara Zetkin, who was also disappointed by his lack of concern for women's issues.^cxvi Most of the innovative designs for buildings were never erected. A few Soviet structures that were built were strikingly modern, but not essentially different from the International Style work of Gropius or Le Corbusier.^cxvii

Another stumbling block for the New Left "materialist" admirers of Constructivism was the mystical bent of many artists, especially Malevich, with his cult of the fourth dimension. Thus the exaltation of the "progressive character" of Constructivism clashed with the rediscovery, to some most unwelcome, of the occult interests of the pioneering abstractionists. There was also the matter of the involvement of some of the artists with Italian futurism, a movement that rallied to Mussolini after the March on Rome of 1922. Finally, and very tellingly, most of the major innovations in Russian avant-garde art occurred before the October Revolution; they did not emanate from the Bolshevik state, but were commandeered by it.^cxviii On balance then, this effort to create a "revolutionary" lineage for abstract art failed. It is a "Golden Age" myth. The 1992 Guggenheim Museum exhibition, with its invocation of "utopia," sought to keep the faith but this effort to achieve a kind of "salvage Marxism" is faltering. Viewing a 1920s movement in terms of 1970s leftist politics no longer makes sense. There remains the continuing task of reconstructing lost objects and regrouping them together to form complete artistic personalities and collectives, after which the historical development must be rethought. In all likelihood the product of this research will show a more nuanced version of what is already accepted: Russian art showed movement away from dependence on Western art, through precocious partial emancipation, and then to a precarious equality--briefly in the twenties--with the West.

Modern Art and the Spiritual. 

Modern art has often been driven by a sense of extending boundaries, of transgression and the resulting "shock of the new." Encountering resistance at first, these extensions eventually achieve acceptance, and may even become old hat--the conventional wisdom against which the next generation will react. Yet this familiarization process has not yet fully embraced one aspect of modern art that intellectuals find scandalous and unacceptable, the occult inspiration of many modern artists, especially those who lean to abstraction. Recognition of such inspiration seems to violate two cherished articles of faith at once: that modern art is politically progressive and that it is allied with the secular world view of modern science. Research has indisputably established, however, that hermetic religious ideas, even occult ones, enjoyed the adhesion of many major modern artists.^cxix

Theosophy is a religious and philosophical system founded by the Russian Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who was both adventuress and seer, in New York in 1875.^cxx Apart from her delvings into ancient Egyptian monuments, Blavatsky had little interest in art, but Theosophy attained an aesthetic dimension through the work of the movement's second generation. The illustrations of Thought-Forms, a small book published by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater in 1901, present diagrams that purport to show auras and mental states. In their abstract color arrangements, the plates of this book forecast the formal explorations of abstract art for its own sake that were to begin a decade later.

Many influences, including a formative experience with the art of Siberian tribespeople, contributed to the formation of the art of Vassily Kandinsky. However, during the formative years (ca. 1905-13) when the breakthrough to abstraction occurred, Kandinsky was involved with Theosophy, as well as with its offshoot, the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner.^cxxi Kandinsky believed that the spiritual art he was creating had a prophetic dimension, it pointed to a New Age of harmony that would sweep away the crass materialism that he detested. His contemporary Piet Mondrian, who experienced a "nostalgia for the universal," also believed in the emergence of a new art. An important part of the shaping of Mondrian's consciousness was his membership in the Dutch branch of Theosophy.

In Russia Kazimir Malevich adopted the doctrine of the fourth dimension, as championed by P. D. Ouspensky.^cxxii Originally the concept of the fourth dimension did not have to do with time--this is a later interpretation--but with advance to a higher reality. Thus Malevich also broke through to nonobjectivity with the help of an occult, parascientific theory.

Even at the Bauhaus, ostensibly a citadel of rational application of aesthetic principles to the needs of industrial society, the occult played a major formative role through the ideas of Johannes Itten, who devised the Vorkurs, or foundation course that was the prerequisite for all further study at the institution.^cxxiii

After World War I occult ideas played an important role in Hilla Rebay's championing of nonobjective art in New York. The impress of occult influences, and those of oriental religions (important especially after World War II),^cxxiv can found in many modern artists.

When in 1947 T. H. Robsjohn-Gittings exposed the importance of the occult, admittedly with a hostile slant, in Mona Lisa's Moustache: A Dissection of Modern Art, he was first denounced and then ignored. Finally, in 1975, a comprehensive exhibition highlighting these currents was mounted by the Los Angeles County Museum.^cxxv Despite the uncontrovertible evidence concentrated at this overdue manifestation, most historians of abstract art prefer to minimize this major theme. This reticence reflects the continuing faith that modern art, indisputably progressive, must always be secular and scientific.

The question remains open of just how the occult functioned as a midwife to the creation of abstraction. Was it central and organic, or external and temporary? The answer probably lies somewhere between the two extremes. One thing is clear, however, and that is that understanding of the origins of abstract art will not be advanced by covering up this component because it is deemed "politically incorrect."^cxxvi

The Duchamp Effect.

For a long time, Pablo Picasso reigned as the artist of the twentieth century.  Even before his death of the Spanish artist in 1973, however, the preference of younger artists and critics had begun to swing to Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968).  Best known for his connection with the Dada and Surrealist groups, Duchamp is not readily reducible to such labels. In his early years he created paintings in a cubist-futurist vein.  Increasingly, however, he became dissatisfied with what he termed “retinality,” the optical emphasis that had dominated Western art for centuries.  During the second decade of the twentieth century, he began to produce his ready-mades, of which the 1917 “Fountain” (a urinal) is the most famous.  Apart from their function in posing the question of the very nature of art, these objects make contact with the modern culture of mass-production and commercialism in a way that traditional art did not.
In 1924 Marcel Duchamp said that he was abandoning art, in favor of chess.  This claim turned out to be not totally true, but he is rightly credited with saying what he had to say, and moving on. In terms of personal image, Duchamp replaced the swaggering machismo of a Pablo Picasso and his kind with a new gender ambiguity, as seen in the photographs he had taken of himself as Rose Sélavy.   


The Historiography of Modern Architecture.  
 
 Otto Wagner's Moderne Architektur seems to be the first book in any language to bear this title. This treatise, which went through four editions from 1896 to 1914, is more a set of exhortations than a systematic work.^cxxvii Although Wagner (1841-1918) condemned dependence on the Gothic and Renaissance styles and called for the use of modern materials and structural methods, his commendation of flowered borders and other decorative flourishes reveals him to be a man of the art nouveau, contrasting with his younger Viennese contemporary Adolf Loos (1870-1933), who was truly a pioneer of architectural functionalism. Wagner could not accept Loos' link of ornament with crime.

At the turn of the century and for several decades thereafter, the teaching of architecture was still in the hands of beaux-arts schools, with their heavy emphasis on classical and Renaissance precedence.^cxxviii Departure from established norms was discouraged. Those few who sought to offer a different sort of training, such as Henry van de Velde (1863-1957), generally appealed to a design ideology rooted in the Arts and Crafts movement rather than to the traditions of architecture proper.^cxxix The beaux-arts professors exalted the past; the gurus of design focused only on the present. In their separate ways both blocked the discernment of linkages between past and present, a vision that was essential for a history of modern architecture.

After World War I new voices were heard. In 1922 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret; 1887-1966) issued his Vers une architecture, an eloquent manifesto extolling the qualities of the new architecture that was emerging. Condemning beaux-art architecture, Le Corbusier appealed to the works of the engineer as the basis; however, engineering was not enough because aesthetic sensibility is also required. Architecture, he maintained, is "the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of volumes, brought together in light." As inspiration for the new architecture he cited not only American grain elevators, ocean liners, airplanes, and automobiles, but the great architecture of the past, of Egypt, Rome, and the Renaissance. Good architecture, so goes the subtext, is perennial: we need not invent its principles out of nothing for they are present to us all along. Le Corbusier differs from the futurists, for he does not reject past achievements en bloc. In this way Le Corbusier opened the way for a new kind of teaching of architectural history.

The avant-garde publicist efforts of Walter Gropius (1883-1969) had begun earlier. Only after he started the Bauhaus in 1919 was he in a position to propagandize through teaching and publications, especially with the handy primers known as the Bauhaus Bücher. In 1927 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) organized a landmark demonstration of the achievements of avant-garde architecture in the housing quarter, the Weissenhofsiedlung, in Stuttgart. The structures emanated from an international galaxy of architects.^cxxx That this work was not without historical connections is shown by the hostile criticisms leveled against it, which compared the flat-roofed structures to the Muslim vernacular architecture of the Mediterranean. The following year, advanced European architects joined together to promote their ideas in the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). One of the main concerns of the group was city planning, which--whether intentionally or not--was to wreak havoc on the historic heritage of the townscape of industrialized countries. A sense of the value of history was further hampered by the widespread impression that advanced modern architecture must be severely functional. As such it should always be the same--except for the introduction of new materials and techniques--and should have no history in the sense of evolving styles.

Trained in the historiography of medieval architecture at Harvard University, Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1903-1987), turned his encyclopedic curiosity to advanced European architecture.^cxxxi Only five years after his graduation, he produced Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration, which ranks as the first history of modern architecture. The opening third of the volume discusses precedents from 1750 on under the umbrella heading of "The Age of Romanticism." Hitchcock then divides modern architecture proper into two contrasting aspects: the New Tradition and the New Pioneers. The account of the first, more conservative trend salutes the earlier figures Richardson and Sullivan, and then presents, among others, Wright, Berlage, Wagner, Hoffmann, Behrens and Perret. Coverage of the more advanced trend, the New Pioneers, sweeps up Le Corbusier, Oud, Rietveld, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Neutra as the chief figures.

Almost immediately Hitchcock saw the need to revise the book, tilting more strongly in favor of the avant-garde. With the aid of an enthusiastic recruit, Philip Johnson (later to become a famous architect), he formulated his plans. These were, however, temporarily overridden by a request from Alfred Barr to hold a didactic exhibition promoting the new architecture. The impact of this event has already figured in the discussion of Barr's career. Somewhat hastily put together, the landmark exhibition "Modern Architecture--International Exhibition" was held at the Museum of Modern Art between February 10 and March 23, 1932.^cxxxii This display was accompanied by a catalogue, and followed by a book, The International Style, coauthored by Hitchcock and Johnson. The emphasis on a style was new, and the book set up stylistic criteria for the identification of the new "hard core" modernism that began, according to the writers, in 1922.

In the early 1930s Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983), a German art historian with a particular interest in modern architecture and design, emigrated to England.^cxxxiii In his Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936) he presented a new genealogy of advanced architecture, locating its origins in the reaction, led by William Morris and others, against the design decadence evident in the Great Exhibition held in London in 1851. This desire to elevate standards fostered the Arts and Crafts movement. Then, as the English began to falter after the turn of the century, the torch was passed to central Europe. Pevsner supplied functionalism with a linear pedigree. After the war the revival of art nouveau and especially the work of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet disturbed this clear pattern, and Pevsner was forced to shoehorn in a discussion of these nonconformist phenomena.^cxxxiv Later, in a harsh indictment David Watkin objected to Pevsner's moralism, which he believed continued the approach of Pugin and Ruskin.^cxxxv

A student of Heinrich Wölfflin's, the Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion had issued many publications and closely associated himself with CIAM.^cxxxvi However, full academic success eluded him until Walter Gropius arranged for him to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1938-39. These twelve lectures then appeared as a book, Space, Time and Architecture.^cxxxvii Using the concept of space as his critical center, Giedion took things back even further than Pevsner had, to sixteenth-century papal Rome. His presentation of architectural history is avowedly selective so as to create a body of material leading to the Modern Movement, which was only getting established in America at the time. Giedion's work is thus histoire engagée, a quality that accounted for the book's popularity until the 1960s, and its falling off thereafter.

Only after World War II did the Modern Movement triumph as the vehicle of technological efficiency and world capitalism. (Commanded by Stalin, the Soviet bloc preferred a more traditionalist, "wedding cake" manner.) Handbooks of modern architecture began to be dominated by a "triumphalist" narrative of progress culminating in Mies, Gropius, Le Corbusier and their followers, leaving Edwin Lutyens and Ralph Adams Cram out of the picture altogether. Gaudí was admitted, but grudgingly.

The linear history of modern architecture went hand-in-hand with the triumph of severe functionalist architecture. When this style lost its hegemony, a new historiography became necessary.

The signal for a change in atmosphere was given by Robert Venturi's 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.^cxxxviii To characterize the austerities of high modernism Mies had said "Less is More." "Less is a bore" countered Venturi. An earlier blow against modernism had been delivered by an eloquent 1961 book by Jane Jacobs attacking the ruthless bulldozing of whole sections of cities in the guise of "urban renewal."^cxxxix The historic preservation movement also fostered respect for historic styles.

The 1970 biennale in Venice, with its display of historical allusions by the insurgents of architecture showed that "prohibition" was lifted. The modern academy had given birth to its nemesis. Postmodern architects, the new rebels, reveled in their freedom to use all sorts of historically derived motifs.

It is not clear how all this is to be sorted out. Venturi proposed the categories of the architecture of exclusion as against the architecture of inclusion, which succeed one another temporally. The former has the severe restrictiveness of Mies and Le Corbusier as its touchstone; the latter derives from many sources, from Lutyens to Wright. Could it be that the history of modern architecture should in fact be written as a dialectical interplay of the two forces of exclusion and inclusion? Historians would then return, by a different route, to Hitchcock's 1929 contrast of the New Tradition and the New Pioneers.

Modernism Delimited?

With all of its exciting and unexpected developments, the art scene of the late twentieth century is suffused by a sense of belatedness. Above all the mantle of the two giants who dominated the first half of the century--Picasso and Matisse--has not been handed on. Picasso and Matisse define our age, it seems, just as two earlier giants, Michelangelo and Raphael, dominated the sixteenth century. The great Matisse exhibition held at the New York Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1992 has raised anew the question of the respective weighting of the two masters. For a long time Picasso was held to be the superior of the two, but this ranking now seems less certain. The rivalry was felt even in the early days, as when Picasso remarked that he and his French peer were the "North and South Poles of art." In any event, the comparison of the two giants is yet another instance of the tendency to think in terms of polarities: intellect and drawing (Picasso) vs. sensual experience and color (Matisse).^cxl

Another binary contrast of giants is that between Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. As we have seen Hitchcock's early scheme allocated Wright to the New Tradition and Le Corbusier to the New Pioneers. Later observers tended to emphasize the role of nature in Wright's Organic Architecture as against a kind of Cartesian aloofness from nature in Le Corbusier, with his preference for basic geometrical forms. Wright pilloried the cubic forms of Le Corbusier and his colleagues as coffins. As the century draws to a close, no architect has appeared to fit the shoes of either figure.

Some writers have written of modernism (or Modernism) as if it were an essence with readily identifiable characteristics--though without attempting to identify them themselves. Perhaps the definition of modernism is not even necessary; we are living it. However, things could not be so simple, as there were always nonmodern phenomena, such as the academic painting of Bouguereau and Co. within the time frame of modernism, that was not "modern." These anomalies are sometimes explained by labeling them retardataire holdovers from a previous age. Caught up in a web of nostalgia, the creators of this old-hat stuff did not understand Emile Deschamps' commandment "Il faut être de son temps."^cxli

The problem has been cast under a new light by the assertion that modernism has in fact ended: it has yielded to postmodernism.^cxlii Disagreements about the definition of this term recall the fable of the blind man and the elephant. So varied are the perspectives that one may even question whether there is an elephant. In the wake of such models as postimpressionism and postindustrialism the expression has taken on a life of its own.

Social critics seem to have been the first to utilize the term as a period designation. In 1946 the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee applied it to the period after 1875, when the accelerated pace of modern life eroded the secure foundations of the preceding "modern" era. Persuasively, Toynbee saw the decline of the world hegemony of northwestern Europe as one of the symptoms of the shift. Not long after his ideas were echoed by the Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills, who proposed the term "Fourth Age," coming after the ancient, medieval, and modern periods (the latter starting with the Renaissance).

Commentators on art have generally placed the start of the postmodern considerably later than Toynbee did. The aesthetic discussion of postmodernism was first aired at some length by Charles Jencks and other architectural critics who regarded modernism as the International Style of Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier which became dominant about 1922 but had begun to weaken as early as 1970.^cxliii

In painting, the inception of modernism is reflexively located in the time of Manet, half a century earlier. Literary historians also tend to see modernism arriving at about that time.^cxliv But further complication stems from the views of general historians, for whom Descartes and Hobbes in the seventeenth century are already modern.^cxlv

Modernism can start in the Renaissance or the seventeenth century (or if the French Encyclopédie is followed, as early as the sixth century in literature). It can end in 1875 or 1970, or somewhere in between. Clearly the time frame chosen will affect the definition of modernism that emerges. If the start is pushed back further, as historians tend to do, then critical rationality is central to modernity, while postmodernism becomes the age of uncertainty about all previously accepted intellectual truths. Yet Manet, Cézanne and Van Gogh--not to mention Picasso and Matisse--challenged many previously accepted habits and truisms. By this criterion they must therefore be "postmodern"--but for art scholars they are modern!

What then is postmodernism? Alas there is more enthusiasm for the label than for wrestling with a problem of creating a convincing definition. Perhaps it is just a further avatar of the modern. The debate continues.

For those who believe that art is a reflection of changing technology, the computer age would seem to represent a major break. Perhaps correspondingly, major changes have affected the roster of media: performance art and video have been added. On the other hand, the proclamation of the death of painting (by Douglas Crimp and others) was premature, to say the least.

Conclusion.

For some time uncertainty about the definition of the word "modern," together with the indifference and even hostility of traditionally minded scholars, hindered the emergence of the historiography of modern art. The detection and proclamation of "isms" served an organizing function, though one that implied that art movements were more self-contained than many of them actually were. Important roles in promotion and study have been played by independent critics and journalists, by museum directors and dealers. The exclusion of modern art, once common policy in major fine arts museums, led to the compensatory creation of special museums to display it; in their turn, these institutions sponsored scholarship and publications.

Geographically, there has been a tendency to concentrate on Paris during the first half of the century, and on New York during the second half, neglecting other zones of art production. An increasing volume of research has targeted these complementary achievements, but the mass of publications has become such that overall patterns are hard to discern. Polycentrism or growth from multiple centers, which appears to be the logical result, has not yet triumphed. Currently, debates about postmodernism are forcing reexamination of the idea of modernism itself.

i Hans Ulrich Gumbricht, "Modern, Modernität, Moderne," Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, vol. 4, 1978, pp. 93-131 (at p. 97).

ii Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, New York: Free Press, 1965 (revised ed., Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993).

iii See the invaluable collection of original sources edited by Marc Funaroli, La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, Paris: Gallimard, 2001.  See also, A. Owen Aldridge, "Ancients and Moderns in the Eighteenth Century," in Philip P. Wiener, ed., Encyclopedia of the History of Ideas, vol. 1, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973, pp. 76-87; and Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991.

iv Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 10, Neufchatel: Samuel Faulches, 1765, p. 601.

v Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. by Claude Pichois, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, p. 695.

vi Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982, p. 16.

vii Cf. Hans Belting, The End of Art History, trans. by Christopher S. Wood, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; Thomas H. Gaehtgens, "Les rapports de l'histoire de l'art contemporain en Allemagne à l'époque de Wölfflin et de Meier-Graefe," Revue de l'art, 88 (1990), 31-38.

viii On this concept of sifting over time, see Anthony Savile, The Test of Time: An Essay in Philosophical Aesthetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

ix Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism (Pelican Guides to European Literature), New York: Penguin, 1976.

x The author recalls that one of his teachers in graduate school, Martin Weinberger, used to say that no art should be studied after the reign of Queen Anne, who died in 1714! For the problem of hostility in the nineteenth century, see Francis Haskell, "Enemies of Modern Art," New York Review of Books, June 30, 1983, pp. 19-25.

xi An invaluable guide to the various theories is Margaret A. Rose, The Post-modern and the Post-industrial: A Critical Analysis, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. The final chapter of this book offers some further reflections on the controversy about postmodernism in art and architecture.

xii Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v Ruskin, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.

xiii No representative collection of this onslaught of disparagement exists. For one pivotal artist, however, a panorama is offered by George Heard Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, New York: W. W. Norton, 1969.

xiv Art in Crisis: The Lost Centre, trans. by Brian Battershaw, London: Hollis & Carter, 1957. Sedlmayr, once regarded as the great hope of Viennese art history, fell in with the Nazis in the late 1930s, and then recycled himself as a Catholic after the war. On his work, see Eva Frodl-Kraft, "Hans Sedlmayr (1896-1984), Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 44 (1991), 7-46.

xv For German-speaking writers, see Gottfried Boehm, "Die Krise der Representation: Die Kunstgeschichte und die moderne Kunst," in Lorenz Dittmann, ed., Kategorien und Methoden der deutschen Kunstgeschichte 1900-1930, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1985, pp. 113-28.

xvi Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts: Western Europe: A Cultural History from the French Revolution to 1968, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970, pp. 125-32.

xvii Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, argues that Plato's influence was fundamental.

xviii Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, second ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986; William Rubin, ed., "Primitivism" in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984.

xix Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, p. 690.

xx Commonly regarded as a quaint relic of the past, this parallel is defended by Alan Gowans, "Child Art As an Instrument for Studying History: The Case for an 'Ontogeny Repeats Phylogeny" Paradigm in Universal History," Art History, 2 (1979), 247-74. For the context of this idea, see George Boas, The Cult of Childhood, London: The Warburg Institute, 1966 (repr. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1990).

xxiGoldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, pp. 192-215; Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991, pp. 90-96.

xxii Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernity: Insanity and Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, New York: Basic Books, 1992.

xxiii Hans Prinzhorn, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, Berlin: Springer, 1923.

xxiv John M. MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989; Maurice Tuchman and Carol S. Eliel, Modern Artists and Outsider Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992 (catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

xxv El Lissitsky and Hans Arp, Die Kunstismen; Les ismes de l'art; The Isms of Art, Erlenbach-Zurich: Eugen Rentsch, 1925.

xxvi Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

xxvii Arthur O. Lovejoy, "The Meaning of 'Romantic' in Early German Romanticism," Essays in the History of Ideas, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948, pp. 183-206. In another essay, "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms" (op. cit., pp. 228-253), Lovejoy argued that in actual usage the meaning of the term is too diffuse for any single definition to prevail. This "nominalistic" view was countered by René Wellek in "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History" and "Romanticism Re-examined," in his Concepts of Criticism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963, pp. 128-221.

xxviii Two valuable recent efforts to grasp romanticism in art are Hugh Honour, Romanticism, New York: Harper & Row, 1979; and Jean Clay, Romanticism, Secaucus, N.J.: Chartwell Books, 1981.

xxix René Wellek, "The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship,' Concepts, pp. 222-255.

xxx Linda Nochlin, Realism, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971. For political connections, see Timothy J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851, Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973; and idem, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic 1848-1851, Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973.

xxxi See the papers in the symposium edited by Gabriel P. Weisberg, The European Realist Tradition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. This symposium was held on the occasion of an exhibition: see the catalogue: Weisberg, ed., The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing, Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980. The exhibition elicited shrewd comments from Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art, New York: Viking, 1984, pp. 133-79.

xxxii Linda Nochlin, ed., Impressionism and Post-Impressionism 1874-1904 (Sources and Documents in the History of Art), Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966; John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, 4th ed., Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973; Paul Tucker. "The First Impressionist Exhibition and Monet's Impression: Sunrise: A Tale of Timing, Commerce, and Patriotism," Art History, 7 (1984), 465-76. For some reflections on the meaning of the word "impression," see Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 14-20; this monograph is noteworthy for its use of original sources.

xxxiii For links with music generally, see Edward Lockspeiser, Music and Painting: A Study in Comparative Ideas from Turner to Schoenberg, New York: Harper & Row, 1973; and Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. by Roger Lustig, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Karin von Maur, Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Prestel, 1985, offers a wonderful conspectus of examples.

xxxivRené Wellek, "The Term and Concept of Symbolism in Literary History," Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, pp. 55-89.

xxxv Robert Goldwater, Symbolism, New York: Harper & Row, 1979. See also the references in Sharon Hirsh, ed., "Symbolist Art and Literature," Art Journal, 45 (1985), 171-80.

xxxvi A sampling appears in Umbro Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, New York: Viking Press, 1973. Because it involved so many spheres, the bibliography of futurism is very extensive. The following are the most useful compilations: Maria Drudi-Gambillo and Teresa Fiori, Archivi del futurismo, 2 vols., Rome: De Luca, 1958-62; Enrico Falqui, Bibliografia e iconografia del futurismo, Florence: Sansoni Antiquariato, 1959; Jean-Pierre Andreoli-deVillers, Futurism and the Arts: A Bibliography 1959-73, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975; Claudia Salaris, Bibliografia del futurismo 1909-1944, Rome: Biblioteca del Vascello, 1988.

xxxvii Marianne Martin, Futurist Art and Theory 1909-1915, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968; Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzola, Futurism, Oxford University Press, 1978.

xxxviii The Venice Biennale exhibition of 1986 afforded a conspectus of many countries; see the catalogue: Pontus Hulten, ed., Futurismo e futurismi, Milan: Bompiani, 1986 (also English-language version).

For Russia, see Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

xxxix Vauxcelles' quip "Donatello chez les fauves [wild beasts]" referred to a pair of Italianate sculptures by the now-forgotten Albert Marque in a roomful of paintings by Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and others at the Salon d'Automne of 1905 (Gil Blas, October 17, 1905). In his review of a Braque show at Kahnweiler's in 1908, the critic referred to "cubes" (Gil Blas, November 14, 1908). This observation seems to have first been made orally by Henri Matisse. In any event, the noun forms ending in -ism(e) only came in a little later.

xl Marit Warenskiold, The Concept of Expressionism: Origin and Metamorphoses, trans. Ronald Walford, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984.

xli Roger Benjamin, Matisse's "Notes of a Painter": Criticism< Theory, and Context, 1891-1908, Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1987.

xlii Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

xliii For expressionism in a broad range of cultural endeavor, see Donald Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. For the crisis that emerged in the aftermath of World War I, see Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918-1919, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

xliv Magdalena Bushart, Der Geist der Gotik und die Expressionistische Kunst: Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie 1911-1925, Munich: Verlag Silke Schreiber, 1990.

xlv See Shiff, Cézanne, for discussion of the problem of linking impressionism with what came after.

xlvi Kenworth Moffett, Meier-Graefe as Art Critic, Munich: Prestel, 1973; Ron Manheim, "Julius Meier-Graefe 1867-1935," in Heinrich Dilly, ed., Altmeister moderner Kunstgeschichte, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1990, pp. 95-115.

xlvii On his career, see the introductory essay of Michael Marrinan in the reprint of Rosenthal's Du romantisme au réalisme (Paris: Macula, 1987), pp. i-xxiii.

xlviii Frances Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. For Fry's texts, see Donald Laing, An Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings of Roger Fry, New York: Garland, 1979.

xlix Clive Bell, Art, London: Chatto and Windus, 1914, p. 25.

l Thus the recollection, in 1945, of Desmond MacCarthy. Spalding, Roger Fry, 133.

li J. B. Bullen, Post-Impressionists in England, New York: Routledge, 1988, p. 100.

lii "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown," in Collected Essays by Virginia Woolf, I, London: Hogarth Press, 1975, p. 320.

liii There are, however, several useful guides to the literature and concepts: Lynn Gamwell, Cubist Criticism, UMI Research Press, 1980; Mark Roskill, The Interpretation of Cubism, Philadelphia: New Alliance Press, 1985; and Eunice Lipton, Picasso Criticism 1901-1939: The Making of an Artist-Hero, New York: Garland, 1976.

liv For sources in translation see Edward F. Fry, ed., Cubism, London: Thames and Hudson, 1966; and Herschel B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968, pp.103-280.

lv For the period 1910-12 "the cubism of Picasso and Braque was a refusal to signify 'art historically,' a denial of the hegemony of art historical discourse over the field of artistic practice." Roger Cranshaw, "Cubism 1910-12: The Limits of Discourse," Art History, 8 (1985), 467.

lvi Beth S. Gersh-Neśic, The Early Criticism of André Salmon, New York: Garland, 1991.

lvii Gamwell, Cubist Criticism, p. 15.

lviii Guillaume Apollinaire, Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902-1918, ed. by LeRoy C. Breunig, New York: Viking Press, 1972, p. 114.

lix Pierre Assouline, An Artful Life: A Biography of D. H. Kahnweiler, 1884-1979, transl. Charles Ruas, New York: Fromm International, 1991. For the dealer-critic's later views, see Kahnweiler, with Francis Crémieux, My Galleries and Painters, transl. Helen Weaver, New York: Viking Press, 1971. A critical view is offered by Yve-Alain Bois, "Kahnweiler's Lesson," in his Painting as Model, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990, pp. 65-97.

lx Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus, Munich: Delphin-Verlag, 1920; translated by Henry Aronson as The Rise of Cubism, New York: Wittenborn, 1949.

lxi Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1936, p. 31.

lxii Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946, pp. 53-141.

lxiii The terms analytic and synthetic derive from Kant; however, any substantial influence from the ideas of the German philosopher, as some scholars of cubism have proposed, is unlikely.

lxiv Chipp, Theories, 207.

lxv Pär Bergman, "Modernolatria" et "Simultaneità": Recherches sur deux tendances dans l'avant-garde littéraire en Italie et en France à la veille de la première guerre mondiale, Uppsala: Svenska Bokforlaget, 1962.

lxvi At this time the prestige of Bergson was at its height. See Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, eds., The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992; and Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

lxvii For some hermetic and occult themes in the orbit of cubism, see Julia Fagan-King, "United on the Threshold of the 20th-Century Mystical Ideal: Marie Laurencin's Integral Involvement with Guillaume Apollinaire and the Inmates of the Bateau Lavoir," Art History, 11 (1986), 88-114.

lxviii Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

lxix Steinberg, "The Philosophical Brothel," Art News, 71:5-6 (September-October 1972); reprinted with revisions and retrospect in October, 44 (Spring 1988), 7-74. On this protean canvas, see the comprehensive monograph edited by Hélène Seckel, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 2 vols., Paris: Musée Picasso, 1988; a French version of Steinberg's revised paper, "Le Bordel philosophique," appears on pp. 319-64 of vol. 2.

lxx See, e.g., Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Picasso & Things, Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1992.

lxxi Patricia Leighten, Re-ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897-1914, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

lxxii Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the Fist World War, 1914-1925, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

lxxiii Pierre Daix, a fellow member of the French Communist Party after the war, has written some interesting, though inadequate pages on this matter (Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, trans. Olivia Emmet, New York: Harper Collins, 1993, pp. 277-309).

lxxivYve-Alain Bois, "The Semiology of Cubism," in William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and Lynn Zelevansky, Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992, pp. 169-221.

lxxv This question was reexamined in the grouping of a large number of paintings by the two masters at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1989. See the catalogue by William Rubin: Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989; and the proceedings of the symposium held on the occasion: William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and Lynn Zelevansky, eds., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium.

lxxvi Gamwell, Cubist Criticism, pp. 26-27, 40-41.

lxxvii This work should be consulted in the critical edition prepared by LeRoy C. Breunig and J.-C. Chevalier: Guillaume Apollinaire, Méditations esthétiques: Les peintres cubistes, Paris: Hermann, 1968. See also Harry E. Buckley, Guillaume Apollinaire as an Art Critic, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981.

lxxviii Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Evolution of Non-figurative Painting in Paris 1910-1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

lxxix This paragraph follows the useful discussion in Roskill, Interpretation of Cubism, pp. 162-83.

lxxx Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Juan Gris: His Life and Work, trans. Douglas Cooper, New York: Curt Valentin, 1947, pp. 121-22.

lxxxi For advocacy of a category of "cubist writing," see Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems of the Relation Between Modern Literature and Painting, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 178-83.

lxxxii Randa K. Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

lxxxiii Gerald Kamber, Max Jacob and the Poetics of Cubism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.

lxxxiv Roger Fry, Poems by Mallarmé, London: Chatto & Windus, 1936, p. 1

lxxxv Ivan Margolius, Cubism in Architecture and the Applied Arts: Bohemia and France 1910-1914, North Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1979; Hellmuth Sting, Der Kubismus und seine Einwirkung auf die Wegbereiter der modernen Architektur, Balingen: H. Sting, 1965.

lxxxvi See Peter Paret, "The Tschudi Affair," Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981), 589-618; and Barbara Paul, Hugo von Tschudi und die französische Kunst im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Berliner Schriften zur Kunst, 4), Munich: Philipp von Zabern, 1994.

lxxxvii Henrike Junge, ed., Avantgarde und Publikum: Zur Rezeption avantgardischer Kunst in Deutschland 1905 bis 1933, Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1992. Unfortunately, the National Socialists sold off many of these works after pillorying them in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937.

lxxxviii Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, 2nd ed., New York: Abbeville, 1988; Martin Green, New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant, New York: Macmillan, 1988.

lxxxix Ruth L. Bohan, The Société Anonyme's Brooklyn Exhibition: Katherine Dreier and Modernism in America, UMI Research Press, 1982. Useful for the general context is Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada, 1915-23, New York: Abrams, 1995.

xc See the incisive comments in the Introduction to Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., ed. Irving Sandler and Amy Newman, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986. A predominantly anecdotal emphasis informs Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Alfred Barr Jr.: Missionary for the Modern, Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989.  More incisive is Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

xci Defining, p. 8.

xcii See the official history: Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Atheneum, 1973.

xciii Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936, p. 26.

xciv Joan M. Lukach, Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spirit in Art, New York: George Braziller, 1983.

xcv For Kahnweiler's activity in the French context, see Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics as Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market Between 1910 and 1930, New York: Garland, 1981.

xcvi Diana Crane, The Transformations of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940-1985, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

xcvii Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 4 (1941), 164-91; reprinted in Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers, New York: Braziller, 1978, pp. 47-85. The second part of the paper, dealing with Courbet and death, has never been published. In general, Schapiro's published work, encompassing only a portion of his interests, is not a valid barometer of the immense influence his intellectual distinction has exercised.

xcviii The earlier writings have been presented in an exemplary edition (Collected Essays and Criticism) prepared by John O'Brian: Clement Greenberg, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986; idem, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1986; idem, Affirmations and Refusal, 1950-56, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993; and idem, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969. The original versions reprinted in these volumes differ in some respects from the edited texts appearing in Greenberg's widely read selection, Art and Culture, Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. A somewhat personal estimate of his career is offered by Donald Kuspit, Clement Greenberg: Art Critic, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979.  For a searching study of the origins of Greenberg's ideas, see Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

xcix Also important as early defenders of Abstract Expressionism were Harold Rosenberg and Thomas B. Hess; see the excellent critical anthology edited by David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. For a narrative account, see Stephen Foster, The Critics of Abstract Expressionism, Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1980.

From the extensive historical literature on the development of the Abstract Expressionist artists the following may be noted: Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, New York: Praeger, 1970; Michael Auping et al., Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments, Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1987; Ann Gibson and Stephen Polcari, eds., "New Myths for Old: Redefining Abstract Expressionism," special issue of Art Journal, 47:3 (Fall 1988); and Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

c Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, & Lewis Mumford, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990; Steven Biel, Independent Intellectuals in the United States, 1910-1945, New York: New York University Press, 1992.

ci Milton W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955, pp. 52-58, 83-91; H. Wayne Morgan, Keepers of Culture: The Art-Thought of Kenyon Cox, Royal Cortissoz, and Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989.

cii Piri Halasz, "Art Criticism (and Art History) in New York: The 1940s vs. the 1980s; Part One: The Newspapers," Arts Magazine, 57 (February 1983), 91-97; idem, "Art Criticism (and Art History) in New York: The 1940s vs. the 1980s; Part Two: The Magazines," Arts Magazine, 57 (March 1983), 64-73.

ciii Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986; Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987; Neil Jomonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. A longer view is offered by Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

civ On kitsch, see Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977, pp. 225-62.

cv Art and Literature, 4 (Spring 1965), 193-201.

cvi Some of Greenberg's friends regarded his claim to have been influenced by Kant pretentious and unfounded. See, however, Paul Crowther, "Greenberg's Kant and the Problem of Modernist Painting," British Journal of Aesthetics, 25 (1985), 317-25.

cvii Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, New York: Harper and Row, 1985.

cviii Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Art World from Paris, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

cix Robert Storrs, "No Joy in Mudville: Greenberg's Modernism Then and Now," in Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings in High and Low, New York: Abrams, 1990, pp. 160-81.

cx John E. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant Garde: Theory and Criticism, revised ed., New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988.

cxi See the 732-page catalogue of the same name released by Rizzoli in New York in 1992. Also of continuing value are the catalogues of the Paris exhibition (Paris-Moscou 1900-1930, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1979) and the University of Washington exhibition (Art into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914-1932, New York: Rizzoli, 1990).

cxii Angelica Rudenstine, Russian Avant-Garde Art--the George Costakis Collection, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981.

cxiii John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

cxiv For a subtle example of this linkage, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "From Factura to Factography," in Annette Michelson et al., eds., October: The First Decade, 1976-1986, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987, pp. 77-114.

cxv See the variety of styles illustrated in Vladimir Leniashin, ed., Soviet Art 1920s-1930s, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988.

cxvi Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin, New York: International Publishers, 1934.

cxvii A perusal of the plates in S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture, New York, Rizzoli, 1987, and Alexander Ryabushin and Nadia Smolina, Landmarks of Soviet Architecture 1917-1991, New York: Rizzoli, 1992, shows that most of the built work (as distinct from visionary projects) was historicist and traditional.

cxviii On this point, see John E. Bowlt, "Utopia Revisited," Art in America, 81:5 (May 1993), p. 101. As Hilton Kramer has pointed out, the choice of the year 1915 as the starting point for the Guggenheim exhibition enabled its organizers to ignore the essential achievememt of the last two decades of tsarist rule ("Aesthetics and Ideology in 'The Great Utopia,'" The New Criterion, 11:4 [December 1992], 5-9).

cxix For an ambitious, but somewhat diffuse synthesis of these themes, see Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston: Shambhala, 1988.

cxx Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revealed: A History of the Theosophical Movement, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Especially valuable for its objectivity is Maria Carlson, "No Religion Higher Than Truth": A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

cxxi Sixten Ringbom, "Art in 'The Epoch of the Great Spiritual': Occult Elements in the Early Theory of Abstract Painting," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 24 (1966), 386-418; idem, The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting, Abo: Abo Akademi, 1970.

cxxii Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

cxxiii Marcel Franciscono, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971; Johannes Itten: Künstler und Lehrer, Bern: Kunstmuseum, 1984.

cxxiv David J. Clarke, The Influence of Oriental Thought on Postwar American Painting and Sculpture, New York: Garland, 1988.

cxxv The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, New York: Abbeville, 1985.

cxxvi The criterion of political correctness will figure in a later chapter of this book. Suffice it to say here that the expression is not a bogey of the cultural right, as has been recently alleged, but stems from the usage of left-sectarians, Trotskyists and others, who really did seek to detect and eliminate symptoms of political incorrectness in their groups.

cxxvii The translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave: Otto Wagner, Modern Architecture: A Guidebook for His Students in the Field of Art, Santa Monica, Calif.: The Getty Center for the Arts and the Humanities, 1988, contains an introduction surveying the Central European theoretical background (pp. 1-51). The fullest record of Wagner's own architectural work appears in Otto Antonia Graf, Otto Wagner, 2 vols., Vienna: Hermann Böhlau, 1985.

cxxviii Arthur Drexler, ed., The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977.

cxxix Klaus-Jurgen Sembach, Henry van de Velde, New York: Rizzoli, 1989.

cxxx Richard Pommer and Christian Otto, Weissenhof 1927 and the Modern Movement in Architecture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

cxxxi Helen Searing, "Henry-Russell Hitchcock: The Architectural Historian as Critic and Connoisseur," in Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, ed., The Architectural Historian in America, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, pp. 251-63.

cxxxii Terence Riley, The International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Rizzoli, 1992.

cxxxiii Susie Harries, Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life, London: Chatto and Windus, 2011. 

cxxxiv See the third edition, entitled Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius, London: Pelican Books, 1960.

cxxxv David Watkin, Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

cxxxvi Eduard F. Sekler, "Sigfried Giedion at Harvard University," in The Architectural Historian in America, pp. 265-73.

cxxxvii Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941. The enlarged third edition dates from 1954.

cxxxviii New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966. See the author-architect's reflections after a quarter century: Stuart Wrede, "Complexity and Contradiction Twenty-Five Years Later: An Interview with Robert Venturi," Studies in Modern Art 1: American Art of the 1960s, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991, pp. 142-63.

cxxxix Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of the Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 1961.

cxl John Elderfield, Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992, pp. 20-21.

cxli George Boas, Wingless Pegasus: A Handbook for Critics, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950, pp. 194-210.

cxlii An excellent synopsis of the various theories is Margaret A. Rose, The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial: A Critical Analysis,New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

cxliii Jencks, in particular, has excelled in working out elaborate tables showing the differences between modern and postmodern; see, e.g., his What Is Post-Modernism, 2nd ed., London: Academy Editions, 1987.

cxliv Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

cxlv See, most recently, Anthony J. Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.