Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (review)

Abstract

Anarchist Modernism transforms understanding of early twentieth-century American art. Far from being a "quietist and apolitical" exercise in formalist abstraction, avant-garde art and art theory in the New York art world were directed towards radical social and political ends (2). Indeed, Antliff persuasively argues that anarchism lent "coherence and direction to modernism in the United States between 1908 and 1920" (ibid.). His book represents an alternative, therefore, not only to the depoliticized formalism that emerged with Clive Bell and culminated with Clement Greenberg, but also to Marxist-Leninist social history in the tradition of Meyer Schapiro and T. J. Clark. In his last chapter, "The Denouement of Anarchist Modernism," Antliff chronicles the rise of formalist critics, the ascendancy of the Bolshevik party, and the crackdown on World War I dissidents. More broadly, he restores the relevance of anarchism, and its impact on the theory and practice of art, to the history of "the First American Avant-Garde."