Strategic Ambiguity in Avant-Garde Painting

Abstract

ions as a way of coping with the inconceivable atrocities that were committed during the Second World War. By affecting the viewer with a sense of the spiritual or the transcendental, the works served as an opportunity to confront the issues of alienation and to gain some sense of inner insight, a logical response to the artist’s contemporary cultural context. Artists respond to their specific contexts; the particular dynamic that interests me is the artist’s response to influences, the deliberate response motivated by his or her relation to precedents. One symptom of modernity is the pervasiveness of historical self-awareness. The first half of the twentieth century saw a progression of modernist artistic factions that strove to surpass precedents in the achievement of originality as well as an artistic ideal. To avant-garde artists, precedents act as challenging presences, in need of transformation in order for their contemporary effort to realize its full voice. The complete rejection of an artistic precedent and the reinvention of the terms of art was not an agenda held by all modernist movements, groupings, or individuals not all artists or movements set out to create a revolution nor was it the primary motivation of the four artists considered here. However, most progressive art is based on an idealistic philosophy. Donald Kuspit has suggested that Edouard Manet’s psychological relationship with the history of art could be envisioned as a modernist anxiety, one that carried an