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AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States

by Janet Wolff
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2003
172 pp., illus. 30 b/w. Trade, $45.00; Paper, $18.95
ISBN: 0-8014-3923-X; ISBN: 0-8014-8742-0.

Reviewed by Bill Seeley
Department of Philosophy, Brooklyn College

pseeley@msn.com

Janet Wolff's AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States is a study in the sociology of modernism. The individual case studies in each chapter are designed to track the way conceptions of gender, ethnic identity, and social class conspired to shape the the concepts 'modern' and 'modernity' in the first half of the twentieth century. Wolff defines modernism broadly as "the painting of modern life." Her central claim is that, during the period identified with early modernism, painters in England and the United States applied stylistic conventions ordinarily associated with realism in landscape painting and portraiture to the project of painting modern life. Wolff's case studies, thereby, confirm that the exclusion of this type of work from the modernist cannon is a retroactive move more indicative of the social, institutional, and ideological forces that shaped the art establishment of the mid-century than the aesthetic practices of the early twentieth century.

Wolff divides the history of the conception of modernism into an early twentieth century period when modernist abstraction was not antithetical to realist concerns; the postwar period when abstraction asserted its prominence as an avant garde art form; and a late twentieth century revisionist period during which the realist tradition was "retrieved" as important to a (re)conception of modernity. The general approach of the book is exemplified by her discussion of a group of artists who were central members of the Whitney circle in the period preceding the opening of the Whitney Museum in New York in 1931. This group is defined by two salient facts: the artists were women painting in an, albeit modern, realist style. Wolff reports that of the 24 artists identified with the group, 17 were included in the museum's collection catalog at its opening, and 11 were included in a show memorializing the life work of the museum's first director, Juliana Force, who was Gertrude Whitney's assistant at the various incarnations of the Whitney Studio from 1914—1930, in 1949. The marginalization of these works, according to Wolff, does not occur until realism is tagged "feminine" relative to the aggressively masculine abstract expressionist (ab)use of paint in the period following the 1949 show.

Although AngloModern is rich in art critical insight, the author's primary project is to unpack the social forces that shape modernity as an art historical category. The purpose of each case study is to dramatize the observation that the postwar sense of modernism is a retroactive construction whose purpose is to contextualize mid-twentieth century American painting as central to the history of art as an avant garde enterprise. In this regard Wolff implores the reader to conceive her own category of the 'AngloModernism' as a heuristic rather than as an attempt to reify modernism as a more encompassing cultural field. Wolff argues that styles and periods are conventions, explanatory heuristics whose purpose is to categorize objects relative to the ideological biases of the perceiver, or to make sense of a world in the context of a worldview, not to reveal the essential properties of objecthood. She, therefore, conceives her own categorization of early Twentieth Century realism in England and the United States as an epistemological device, a conceptual framework designed to reveal social and intellectual currents ignored by the mid-century definition of modernism, not a novel, previously unrecognized, form of modernism itself.

AngloModern is a well written, informative book whose readable prose style should make its subject matter readily accessible to readers outside the fields of cultural criticism and art history. My one critical comment is that Wolff assumes a great deal of prior knowledge of contemporary discourse on the part of her reader. For instance, on page 37 she asserts that, "The recognition that modernism in the visual arts has always had strong masculinist (and often misogynistic) tendencies is by now well established," and thereby defers an crucial part of her thesis to a set of cited articles. Although Wolff's comment identifies an established critical position, this expository strategy renders a critical component of her argument opaque to the naive reader. Further, an educated reader wants to know how she interprets the standard argument. This information is not tangential. Wolff's central thesis is the claim that art historical concepts are retroactive constructs shaped by social, institutional, and ideological forces, epistemological devices constrained by ordianarily unnoticed forces of cultural production. This stance entails that the information she elides is, in the context of her sociological project, essential for contextualizing, and, thereby, coming to a full understanding of her own claims.

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