One result of the tendency within art history towards politicised-or at least socially grounded-models of explanation over the last thirty years or so has been that historians of modernism have become increasingly interested in the ideological co-ordinates of the phenomenon, which now appear extraordinarily diverse and complex. We can register this through the differences between the kind of texts Herschel B. Chipp and his collaborators thought appropriate to include in their classic anthology Theories of Modern Art (1968), and those that Charles Harrison and Paul Wood selected for their Art in Theory, 1900-1990 (1992). Whereas the texts brought together by Chipp et al. were all by artists, or by critics closely associated with them, excepting four grouped in a separate section on 'Art and Politics', Harrison and Wood give extracts from writings across a range of intellectual fields and genres, including philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics, and more impressionistic kinds of social and cultural criticism. Chipp et al. (like most art historians of their day) wrote as if politics only intruded on art in certain special circumstances; Harrison and Wood assume that the practice of art is always in some sense ideologically invested. From this more sophisticated model of artistic determinations has emerged a clearer picture of the sheer hybridity of cultural radicalism in the period prior to World War I-a phenomenon strikingly demonstrated, for instance, in Gunter Berghaus' fascinating study of Futurist politics.2 The usual distinctions of right and left, conservative and radical, are confounded in the enthusiasms of modernist artists and their critical supporters. Marx, Morris, Bakunin, Bergson, Nietzsche, Sorel, Freud, Nordau, Langbehn, and others rub shoulders in seemingly improbable combinations. Anarchism, syndicalism, and socialism are bedfellows with Theosophy, other forms of mysticism, and strident elitism. Hostility to bourgeois society and aspirations to some kind of utopian future are mixed up with regressive nationalisms, racism, and male chauvinism. Different modernist groupings and individual artists (as well as their critical supporters) forged different combinations of ideas from this range of sources to validate their own practices and to judge those of their contemporaries and rivals, depending partly on national context-with all that that implies about cultural traditions and variations in the social and political conditions of artistic production. Yet for all the agonistic rivalry between them, some principles of commonality were recognised at both a national and international level that distinguished Modern Art from traditional culture everywhere, and which made possible the great international exhibitions of the period. What makes this complex of ideas seem such a stew of incongruous elements is not just their sheer diversity or even contradictoriness, but also their issue in the great events of the twentieth century. For here are ideas that are part of the genealogy of both fascism and communism, and that in some sense justified a whole range of positions in relation to the vast and bloody struggles of both 1914-18 and 1939-45, as well as the smaller but no less brutal episodes that occurred in the interlude between. Yet in those more optimistic and innocent days before the mechanised slaughter of World War I, before the Bolshevik Revolution changed the nature of left politics irrevocably and forced a new awareness of the complexities of building s cialism, and before fascism showed what the aestheticisation of politics meant in human terms, would-be cultural radicals could more easily afford to be intellectually promiscuous and not bother themselves overmuch with the implications of their more outr6 positions. That anarchist ideas were one component within modernist ideologies has long been recognised, and several specialist studies have sought to define their significance for the Neo-lmpressionists and for Picasso, with varying degrees of persuasiveness. In recent years, there have also appeared essays that trace the links between some pre-war American modernists-notably Adolf Wolff and Man Rayand anarchist culture in the United States.3 The argument of Allan Antliff's new book Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde, however, is much larger than the existence of such individual connections: it is rather