Modern Art History Research Articles

'Reactions to Renoir keep changing'

'Reactions to Renoir keep changing'

Editors' Statement: Futurism

This issue of the Art Journal is dedicated by its Editors and Authors to Joshua C. Taylor, who, following the lead of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and James T. Soby, helped restore Futurism to its rightful place in the history of modern art. His catalogue for the 1961 Futurism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art has become an invaluable resource for students of this subject, as has his book of the same year, The Graphic Work of Umberto Boccioni. M.W.M.

Some Reflections on the Cézanne Events at the Museum of Modern Art

A number of marvelous shows awaited New Yorkers last fall; two of the most anticipated were Women Artists, 7550–7950 at the Brooklyn Museum and Cezanne: The Late Work at The Museum of Modern Art. No one could have been disappointed with their beauty; their intentions, however, provoked many, and in very different ways. The women's show, for the first time on a massive scale, presented the enormous scope and variety of women's painting, even as it existed in intrinsically sexist societies. The show accomplished no less than to urge viewers to reevaluate and reassess art history as it has been known. Iconography, style, intentionality, genius—circumscribed art-historical “givens” began to come unhinged. Virile myths of fragile women dwindled before our eyes; art-making possibilities multiplied geometrically. The Cezanne show, on the other hand, far from opening up new questions, firmly girded itself with art-historical cliches and propounded a very old and very conservative version of modern art history.

Towards a Definition of Academic Art

One of the most striking developments in the history of art during the last few years has been a preoccupation with academic art. This art has had to be content, within modern art history, with the role assigned to it by the “avantgarde”; it remained in the background as the art against which the most creative artists reacted while our attention was concentrated on the results of the reaction. Now the roles are in some sense reversed.

Geistesgeschichte and Art History

A multiplicity of genres flourishes in 20th century art history, and this variety may be taken as its most salient characteristic. Art historians adopt any one or several of a number of avenues of approach in their intellectual study of the visual arts: materials and technique; problems of authorship, authenticity, dating, and provenance; structural and symbolic elements; function; iconography and iconology; artistic biography and archival documentation; psychology, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology; social, religious, cultural, and intellectual determinants; even Marxism. These interests are well known and have been widely discussed in the pages of Art Journal and elsewhere. Less commonly recognized, or admitted, is the existence of another method of investigation that has characterized modern art history: Geistesgeschichte and the history of ideas. Because this method has contributed to modern art historical interpretation, it deserves greater recognition and understanding. To these goals the following ...

American Painting: On Space and Time in the Early 1960's

In the last decade, a number of movements have inserted themselves in our lives—Pop, Op, Color Field, Hard Edge, Minimal. Whatever their differences, they all share two important characteristics. They suggest, to a greater or lesser degree, the stoppage of time or the denial of duration and the reduction, if not the elimination, of the third dimension or depth. As such, these movements mark a major reorientation of two of the most distinguishing features of modern art—the fluidity and flux of time and also of space. It may well be that the early 1960's may come to be viewed as a watershed in the history of modern art, a time when tendencies, once underground, thrust themselves forward to alter the course we had been so used to following. These tendencies, as well, raise questions concerning the relationship of art to life and the interaction of art and life in our own day. It would seem that as canvas after canvas has been exorcized of visual incident in this decade, the problems thus engendered have grown and become, as it were, more problematical. I would like to consider here aspects of these problems in regard to painting early in the decade, one of the decisive moments in modern art.

Molzahn, Muche and the Weimar Bauhaus

Legends die hard, even those of very recent origin. The Bauhaus legend is that of a Bauhaus style created as a cooperative effort in architecture and the applied arts. Less established is the notion of a Bauhaus style in painting and sculpture. Gropius, its assumed originator, has in his writings and speeches many times emphatically denied the existence of such a style. Most students of modern art history think of “Bauhaus” in terms of the clear-cut steel and glass box of the Dessau Bauhaus, most specifically of that of the studio part of the compound finished in November, 1926. Designed by Gropius and built as a cooperative effort of his studio with the help of some advanced students, it stood, until it was bricked up by the Nazis, (now restored) as an early landmark of transparent architecture, which Mies van der Rohe, the last director of that ill-fated institution before its final demise in 1933, could only fully realize on a large scale in the United States.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection of Modern Art

Peggy Guggenheim was one of the most important (and celebrated) art world figures of the twentieth century. Born into a wealthy New York family, she traveled throughout Europe during the 1920s and 1930s where she was a witness to the major art movements through her association with artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, to name a few. With a keen eye and exalted social standing, she amassed one of the most significant modern art collections in private hands. This volume is the only complete book on her exceptional collection. Through several essays and extended captions, every aspect of Guggenheim's collection, which was donated to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1979 after her death, is explained. The breadth of the collection is astonishing: from the earliest examples of abstraction by Piet Mondrian to the controlled abandon of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings (whose career she single-handedly launched), her intuition regarding the important trends was almost clairvoyant. The book begins with an essay devoted to the concept of structure as it relates to the cubist work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque; the lyrically expressionistic work of Wassily Kandinsky and the spare constructivist work of Lissitzky, among many others. Guggenheim was also deeply interested in surrealist and dada work examples of which are well represented in the collection including the fantastical landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst's whimsical collages. Sculpture formed an important part of Guggenheim's collection, many of which were installed to glorious effect on the well-manicured grounds of her home in the Grand Canal, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. Withexceptional care and thoughtfulness, she was able to strike a remarkable balance between more classically-inspired work, such as the soft and refined curves of Henry Moore's figures, and more avant-garde work of Alberto Giacometti whose ghostly, attenuated figures were some of the most haunting works produced this century. In the end, the book chronicles not only the development of a great collection and the life of the socialite eccentric who built it, but, more importantly, the history of modern art.

On the Relevance of Early Modern Art to Contemporary Education

It seems impossible to determine what constitutes a proper education in contemporary art. This is due largely, though not entirely, to the history of modern art where the success of the outrageous has made cowards of us all. The one weakness to which art professors are no longer prone is that of asserting the safe perpetuity of their own tastes. One of them, Lester Longman, has written that under these conditions, where permanent criteria of value are lacking, “art cannot in any sense be taught, although we still get paid for going through the motions.” If that is so it is also true that the motions have become correspondingly more spectacular. And in this connection the relation between what we call innovation and what we call creativity is a matter of immense importance.