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Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism

London: Thames and Hudson, 2005. 2 vols.: vol. 1, 1900-1944, 352 pp., 210 color ills., 106 b/w. $46.88; vol. 2, 1945-2003, 424 pp., 236 color ills., 128 b/w. $46.88; both vols. $84.38. Also available in one vol.: 704 pp.; 413 color ills., 224 b/w. $95.00

Review by Nancy J. Troy

Who among those of us assigned to teach the survey of art history has not struggled with the very concept of the comprehensive overview? In many colleges and universities, a foundational survey nevertheless remains the bread and butter of the art history program, the centerpiece of a disciplinary practice that Henri Zerner described two dozen years ago as “an uninspired professional routine feeding a busy academic machine.” (1) The survey text has been the indispensable corollary to this deeply entrenched yet problematic curricular offering. According to Mitchell Schwarzer in 1995, “The survey text is art history at its most grandiose, promising to reveal the complex truths of humanity through art. It is also,” he continued, “art history at its most political, reducing cultural and individual differences to questionable hierarchies and generalities.” (2) When, five years earlier, Bradford Collins had addressed the challenge posed by the survey text, he, like Schwarzer, was writing about books that seek to present works of art in relation to the vast sweep of world history, and he noted, “The writing of a completely acceptable overview of art’s history, impossible under any circumstance, has been rendered even more absurd by the growing pluralism within our field, which is why I think it may be time to rethink the entire introductory enterprise.” (3) The solution that Collins proposed, “a collection of separate, lengthy and in-depth analyses of major monuments, a book that would leave the issues of continuity to the individual instructor,” introduces the possibility of an intellectually rigorous alternative to the dominant evolutionary paradigm, one that could be adapted to the most general of surveys or to a particular field within the history of art. “I can imagine, too,” Collins wrote, “that such a book might include essays that offer competing points of view on a given work or monument…. Perhaps what we need in this area, given the methodological diversity within our field, is a range of quite different options.” (4) Some years later, Mark Miller Graham argued for a radical deconstruction of the traditional survey, which he condemned for its ties to “the authority of the panoptic gaze and the privileged perspective.” (5) First on his list of remedies is this advice: “Stop using the present generation of survey textbooks…. Those who teach the course must get hold of its agenda.” Graham’s list continues with calls to “stop fetishizing completeness”; “eject the canon and thematize the content”; “embody and engender the discipline of art history”; and, finally, “teach the conflicts … the actual debate and disagreement that constitute the scholarly process.” (6)

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