Stories of Art by James Elkins

Author:James Elkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2024-05-31T12:03:15+00:00

Competing Versions of The Last Hundred Years of Art

The story of art has at least four possible endings. In Gombrich, Modernism is the exhilarating ending of a long history, full of promise but with ambiguous undertones. It is a muted ending, because in the master narrative, Modernism was revolutionary but it was made possible by giving up a great deal of what had been achieved in the past.

A different picture of the last hundred years is painted in Stokstad and the recent editions of Gardner. There Postmodernism is the challenging and problematic moment when western tradition partly dissolves into a mixture of innumerable other traditions. It’s as if the authors think that time must pass before they can perceive recent art as history, so any history necessarily ends in unresolved questions. To some degree this is true – we’re all immersed in the culture – but it’s also a way of not coming to terms with the present. History itself seems to divide, branching into dozens of question marks.

The History of Art: A Global View ends in a more celebratory mode, with a chapter on “the global contemporary.” Along with some other recent textbooks, it effectively embraces the contemporary international art market, de-emphasizing the ending and dissolution of earlier traditions. The history of art culminates in the fusion of many traditions into a single global conversation. The strength of this is its realism and openness to market forces; one of the weaknesses is the strangeness of telling many histories but having them all end in a single blaze of worldwide art.

A fourth possibility is that the story has no ending one way or the other. H.H. Arnason’s History of Modern Art begins with a summary of the master narrative, concentrating on the depiction of “three-dimensional space” from Van Eyck to the invention of photography. At the end, he says that the 1990s had “no dominant style, medium, or movement,” and the book closes with a list of 37 recent artists in no particular order.

These divergent solutions reflect the fact that the shape of the last hundred years is still contested by art historians and critics. Out of the melée I’ll pick just three cases.

1. The art historian and critic Robert Rosenblum proposed a new way to think about the shape of Modernism beginning in the early 19th century. In the standard story, France is talked about a lot. Most examples of prehistoric art are taken from France; France is the main example of Medieval art; France is mentioned in the chapter on the Renaissance; and France is at the center when it comes to post-Renaissance art. In histories of Modern art, France predominates until the United States takes center stage after the Second World War (Figure 3.7, top). Yet that emphasis is not entirely fair: There were Medieval styles throughout Europe, and Renaissance art was also made in Spain, Germany, England, Hungary, and elsewhere. By the 19th century, many countries throughout the world were participating in the fine art enterprise.

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