Art Since 1900

Art Since 1900 opens each chapter with a momentous event in art history, and the first one is Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Using the events as a springboard, we see how modern art began (according to the authors) with new ideas on thinking. Radical styles in painting actually began years earlier in Paris, with Van Gogh and Gaugin pushing the limits of acceptability, but in this book it was Gustav Klimt’s open defiance of the establishment. Klimt’s dark subject matter is a proof, along with Freud’s work, that Vienna could be a place of rebel thinking. Preceded by artists like Gaugin and Toulousse-Lautrec, known for bizarre colors and strange subject matter, we can deduce that modern art was decades in the making.

    Another source of the change in taste, according to the first chapter, is the rejection of cliché. Years earlier, Auguste Rodin created his famous Balzac statue as a formless column, with no indication that the subject was a writer (Balzac wears a bathrobe, because he often wrote late at night.) Similarly, Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon removed the original plan to include a sailor (the client) and the medical student with a skull (memento mori). The chapter does not go into detail about the African symbolism in the painting, though it’s discussed in another essay titled Dread, Desire, and the Demoiselles.

    The second volume (it’s a two-book set) begins in 1945, when New York City and Chicago were becoming ground zero for the art world. Paris and Vienna were no longer the art capitals of the world, thanks to WWII driving the artists out, but keep in mind that years earlier, Paris and Vienna had pushed out Venice, Florence, and Rome. Where Paris was known for Chagall and Picasso, New York was now home to Pollock, De Koonig, and Mark Rothko, many of whom began in the WPA era. The authors make use of contemporary journalism, with sources from Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg in the chapter on American abstract-impressionism, followed by realism making a comeback.

    I’d read a similar book, titled Art Since 1945, back when I was in college. It ended with the 1980’s artists like Harring and Basquiat (both of whom were proteges of Warhol) and Barbara Kruger. In every generation the textbook gets bigger, giving more attention to artists who, fifteen years ago, got no love. Take for instance Nicole Eisenman, whose 1996 works are included here, but would not have been included in this book in 2000.

    The Young British Artists are another movement that got more extensive coverage since their 1990’s debut. However, the book’s discussion of their origin is a bit slim, attributing them to Margaret Thatcher’s increased support for business, and the resulting British neuveau-riche class that sponsored Britain’s emerging artists. It is an accepted fact that early 20^th century Britain didn’t have millionaires like Guggenheim and Rockefeller who bankrolled modern art, so Britain’s artists were a bit slower in their emergence. It wasn’t until the 90’s that the new British upper class would sponsor artists like Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread. I remember the YBA show at the Brooklyn Museum back in 2000, where Charles Saachi displayed his collection, aptly titled Sensation, as a way of introducing NY’s audiences to his country’s artists. It was like The Armory show 90 years earlier, where American audiences were introduced to Europe’s modern art. However, I was not ignorant of the YBA before the Saachi show; I’d seen the Chapman Brothers show at the Gogosian, and Whiteread’s pieces were displayed publicly back in 1994. Mayor Giuliani’s harsh criticism of Chris Offili’s Holy Virgin Mary With Elephant Dung only added to the publicity.

    The use of newsworthy events to begin each chapter makes sense, given that history will always be the biggest influence on art, and not the other way around. You have changes in economics, which leads to patronage, and then you have museums that can launch an artist’s career by giving him/her a platform. Not discussed in the book, though I would like to see it, is the subject of the artist neighborhoods in different countries. New York City had Soho, and I don’t know what the equivalent would be in London or Beijing. Chinese artist like Ai Wei Wei come at the end of the book, with a small entry, though Asian artists have been gaining ground for 15 years.

    I would read this book alongside Sanctuary (the studios of the YBA) and Dark Matter (how art has gone from commercialism to activism) in order to gain an understanding of the role of art in modern history. The authors make no effort to hide the fact that the scholarship is Eurocentric at the beginning, and US-centered after 1945. However, the USA had the Ashcan school in the years before 1945, with artists like George Bellows and his boxer painting, and then you had Edward Hopper’s streetscapes, but these guys don’t really come into play in the book. They were well-known in the USA, but rarely got any attention in Britain or Europe. I doubt that any of the artwork’s in the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing are well known outside of the USA.

    Let me sum up by saying that this book can satisfy an entire course on modern art. It makes great effort to include non-US artists, though there’s little attention to artists from Latin America, the Middle East, Australia, or Africa. That could change, however, and I imagine this book will need a third volume in the next decade.