6.

Conclusions

To my mind the four models of modernism, postmodernism,

politics, and skill are the cleanest arrangement of the existing
approaches to twentieth-century painting. I could have added or
substituted many others. Peter Bürger’s sense of modernism, for
example, encompasses Dada and surrealism; its dynamic opposition
between autonomy and politics is in places significantly different
from any of the theories I have picked.1 I have omitted some
politically engaged theories such as Karl Werckmeister’s, because
it is not clear enough to me how they impinge on the canons
of twentieth-century painting. Donald Kuspit’s psychoanalytic
criticism also implies a different shape to the twentieth century,
one that privileges journeys of self-critique and renewal and cuts
across movements and decades to assemble an idiosyncratic canon.2
Jay Bernstein proposed an alternative to Clark’s account in which
the materiality of the sign is “soldered repeatedly to the social” rather

1. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984).
2. For Donald Kuspit, see (among many others) The Critic Is Artist: The Intentionality of Art
(Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984).

153

RT4562_C006.indd 153 6/7/05 6:37:33 AM

 154 Master Narratives and Their Discontents

than set against it as a “contradiction.”3 Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,

preeminent among the theories I have not discussed, begins by
naming 1910 as the pivot of modernism after which “nothing
concerning art is self-evident any more.” His evaluation of avant-
garde art is implicit in several of the accounts I have mentioned, but
I did not include him because the extension of his ideas beyond
music, and beyond midcentury, is unclear.4 Thomas McEvilley
proposed a cyclic theory, in which skeptical periods related to
postmodernism have supplanted rationalistic periods such as
modernism several times since the Greeks. (Duchamp is McEvilley’s
candidate for the first appearance of the current postmodernism.)5
There are others. Ian Heywood’s Social Theories of Art extends
a line of theorizing about fine art from Hegel and Habermas
through Bürger; Matei Calinescu proposed a “physiognomy” of
modernism divided into five types; Ihab Hassan described a post-
modernism divided into a dozen categories; and Karsten Harries’s
Meaning of Modern Art proposes philosophic analyses of major
moments in modernism.6 Each of these is a strong candidate for

3. Paraphrasing Jay Bernstein, “Social Signs and Natural Bodies,” review of Clark’s Farewell to an
Idea, in Radical Philosophy 104 (December 2000): 25–38, paraphrasing p. 36. In my reading,
Bernstein’s reading at this point is one of Clark’s acknowledged choices and not a place where
something “goes wrong” in Clark’s account. (The expression is Bernstein’s; “Social Signs,” 36.)
4. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, vol. 88 of History and Theory of Literature, ed. Gretel Adorno and
Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1.
5. Thomas McEvilley, “The Art of Doubting,” in Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (New York:
Allworth, 1999), 3–30, especially pp. 26–29.
6. Ian Heywood, Social Theories of Art: A Critique (New York: New York University Press,
1997); Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch,
Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987); Ihab Hassan, “Pluralism in
Postmodern Perspective”; and Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art: A Philosophical
Interpretation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

RT4562_C006.indd 154 6/7/05 6:37:33 AM

 Conclusions 155

a foundational theory of modernism or postmodernism, and

I omitted them either because they are not primarily historical
in orientation or because I have been unable to determine if
they have had an effect on the wider community of artists and
scholars. And because I am also surveying nonacademic writers,
I will add that even L. Ron Hubbard, founder of scientology, has
a theory of modernist art, even if it is a bit vague: the modernist
painter has to be master of several styles, he claimed, but only to
put each in the service of “emotional impact.”7
I can expand the list of sources until it becomes an encyclo-
pedia. I am interested in the possibility of rearranging the theo-
ries, and I expect that each historian would manage this material
quite differently. At several points while I was writing this book I
was tempted to rearrange things so that Adorno could take center
stage. I also considered reframing the section on postmodern-
isms, either by choosing Fredric Jameson as a central example or
else by starting with Hubert Damisch. Gender theory, including
feminist art history, can be presented as potentially fundamen-
tal to each of the theories I have listed, forcing a revision of the
entire listing — although as I argued at the beginning, such an
account would have to show how the fundamental realignment
of interpretation embodied in identity theory or gender theory
has created senses of the past century’s high points and low

7. He mentions Hubert Mathieu, a painter I have been unable to trace. L. Ron Hubbard, “Art,
More About,” in Art and Philosophy of Art (Los Angeles: Bridge, 1998), 52–57.

RT4562_C006.indd 155 6/7/05 6:37:34 AM

 156 Master Narratives and Their Discontents

points that are different from the four I have proposed here.8
A strong psychoanalytic reading of modernism, such as Georges
Didi-Huberman’s, would force a rearrangement of the idea of
chronologies and schools and might result in an entirely differ-
ent understanding of twentieth-century painting.9 I am open to
many possibilities, but in relation to each of them I propose the
following hypothesis: the field of possibilities is narrower than
the wilderness of the literature might suggest. I would not mind
if the four are rewritten as five, as Calinescu has done, or shrunk
to the dyad avant-garde and kitsch, as Greenberg once did. What
matters is the low number: it is not 40 or 400, as it might well
have been given the enormous number of “isms” and artists.
It might seem that the root problem here is that all these
sources are from western Europe or North America. But I find
it is not the case that non-Western countries have produced
importantly different accounts that are waiting to be discovered.
What does exist outside North America and western Europe
are many texts that stress regional and national art and there-
fore appear partly or largely unfamiliar. Such texts can present
very different pictures of painting in the twentieth century: for
example, cubism is minimized in Chilean and Paraguayan texts,

8. But see especially Rozsica Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and
Ideology (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1981), which proposes new shapes for several
centuries in art history. The date of that book — 1981 — could be taken as an indication
that the aspiration to directly rewrite art history pertains to a moment in the history of the
discipline that is now past.
9. Georges Didi-Huberman, l’Image survivante: Historire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby
Warburg (Paris: Minuit, 2002).

RT4562_C006.indd 156 6/7/05 6:37:34 AM

 Conclusions 157

and art informe is emphasized in Scandinavian texts. It is possi-

ble to take such accounts as important alternates, and art history
can only be enriched by doing so. But how many of them are
different in underlying structure from the four basic models? In
my experience researching texts written outside western Europe
and North America, I have found that the altered narratives
tend to be dependent on Western texts, so that their unfamiliar
emphases and examples reduce to Western models.10 Texts by
Helen Gardner, Horst Janson, and E.H. Gombrich have been
translated, adopted, and often pirated for use in many different
languages and cultures. The most widely disseminated model for
world art history, Gardner’s Art through the Ages, is driven by a
modernist sense of art history, enriched in later editions by con-
tributions made by social art historians, and that dual emphasis
remains when the text is translated and adapted.11 There must be
hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people whose
knowledge of art history is based on abridged or augmented
versions of Gardner’s book. Examples I have seen from India
and China were done outside copyright law, and therefore also
beyond the supervision of the original editors and publishers.
Even the many auction catalogs produced outside Europe
and the United States depend on the framework provided by

10. Elkins, Stories of Art (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 147–51, and passim.
11. Helen Gardner et al., Gardner’s Art through the Ages (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt College
Publishers, 1996); the same applies to Marilyn Stokstad, Art History (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1995) and many others.

RT4562_C006.indd 157 6/7/05 6:37:34 AM

 158 Master Narratives and Their Discontents

texts such as Gardner’s. The Christie’s branches in Hong Kong,

Singapore, Taipei, Melbourne, and Sydney, together with the
Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, produce a library of volumes each year.
The prices they report depend on many factors, yet beneath
them — often buried so deeply as to be nearly invisible — is the
structure of art history as it is taught in southeast Asian schools,
and that structure depends — often subtly but sometimes
directly — on the basic theories I have outlined.
My hypothesis, then, is that interpretations of modernist
painting derive largely from the four models I have outlined.
They can account for the majority of the reasons why any given
work or movement in twentieth-century painting is valued. To
this working hypothesis I add a puzzle: Why aren’t there dozens
more theories of equal influence? Why is it that such a small
number of models can capture the judgments that drive so many
different practices? Why did a century so crowded with compet-
ing notions of painting end up generating such a small number
of interpretations?
Several possibilities seem equally plausible. I am sometimes
tempted to take the line Adorno adopted in relation to the
avant-garde: that the best accounts come from a small number
of people who take the field seriously, whereas the majority are
content with received versions of history. Or it can be urged that
art history does not depend on such models but works instead
by encounters with individual objects, in which the particulari-
ties of the objects determine the path of the inquiries. In that

RT4562_C006.indd 158 6/7/05 6:37:34 AM

 Conclusions 159

view, overarching theories of modernism or postmodernism have

no grip on real-life experiences of painting. Both of these are
plausible, but it is not my purpose here to explore them. What
surprises me, and what I find significant for understanding the
myriad judgments that have been applied to paintings in the past
century, is that the wilderness of writing on twentieth-century
painting is really an orderly place where the majority of judg-
ments are received opinions, derived from a very small number
of models.

RT4562_C006.indd 159 6/7/05 6:37:35 AM

RT4562_C006.indd 160 6/7/05 6:37:35 AM