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 19141930, 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.