Anglo-Modernism: Gender, Ethnicity and Value

Abstract

Janet Wolff: AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States (Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 2003), 29 b&w illns, 172 pp., hardback ISBN 0-8014-3923-X, £25.95, paperback ISBN 0-8014-8742-0, £11.50. It is now fast becoming conventional to begin books and articles on modernist subjects by acknowledging that the last decade or so has seen an enormous growth in a literature concerned to revise the ‘modernist paradigm’ which is said to have dominated art-historical understanding of twentieth-century art during the century of its birth. Repudiating what we seem communally to think of as the legacy of Clement Greenberg and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, we are looking for other and more inclusive ways of writing the history of ‘modern’ art than they provided. Among the areas of attention that have benefited from such revisionist initiatives, British art has seen a series of strong scholarly attempts to recast the form of our understanding of modern art outside the inherited pattern. Beginning with Charles Harrison's English Art and Modernism (1981) and continuing most recently with Lisa Tickner's Modern Life and Modern Subjects (2000) and the collection The Geographies of Englishness (2002), early twentieth-century British art has been recast as modern in ways that established explanations do not allow, while artists such as C. R. W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, or Walter Sickert have been the beneficiaries of growing scholarly literatures. In the United States, exhibitions such as the American Century: Art and Culture show at the Whitney Museum in 1999 have given new attention to the period 1900 to 1950 in American art and begun to give its variety and its non-modernist strands their proper due. There is a new attention to the Ashcan artists and to modern ‘realist’ traditions in the work of art historians such as Rebecca Zurier and Michael Leja, whose recent book Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp makes considerable strides in reformulating the narrative of American painting around 1900.