History of Modern Art Painting Sculpture Architecture Arnason Hh

History of Modernistic Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. by H. H. Arnason, Harry Northward. Abrams, New York, 1968

H. H. Arnason's History of Modern Art is guaranteed to become a bestselling textbook. In terms of the higher market, the book has all of the "proper" ingredients: it is generously illustrated with black and white reproductions and colorplates of the highest quality; information technology contains more information on more painters, sculptors and architects from more countries than any other single volume published to engagement; information technology pursues its subject from the beginning of the 19th century to the tardily 1960s; finally, information technology faces virtually no competition—in that location simply are no high-quality textbooks for the modern menses of art history. Arnason's contribution does not alter the latter situation, but the majority of college teachers will probably find it irresistible nevertheless: information technology seems an ultimate in comprehensiveness, something which many professors notwithstanding desire for their courses and their students.

If Arnason'due south History of Modern Art was conceived every bit a commercial product aimed at students, I guess it should exist judged an eminent success. But what it does with its subject must as well exist considered, and in this connection I would like to heighten a question: if a student (or any reader) knew everything in this book, what would he know? That is, what would he know virtually the genesis, development, character and meaning of modern fine art, or about the subject field of art history which tries to brand sense out of that subject? My own conclusion is this: at best, the reader might find that modern art is interesting—certainly non meaningful; and art history will emerge as a sort of idle cataloging enterprise, as well without meaning.

Starting time, the fine art. Arnason admits in his preface that his book has no thesis. As he says, "The thesis of this volume, insofar as information technology has a thesis, is that in the study of art The just primary evidence is the piece of work of fine art itself." This defoliation betwixt a methodological assumption and a personal estimation of one'due south subject is feature of the ambivalence which pervades the text. For instance, Arnason never comes to grips with the question of what characterizes modern in relation to pre-modernistic art, of what nosotros hateful when we say "modern" in the first place. Nevertheless, certain features of "modern fine art" do emerge indirectly, and a few of these ought to be cited.

Above all, modern fine art seems to exist terribly complicated. Within its complications, moreover, is couched its involvement value. The reader is constantly reminded of the international scope of modern art, of its internal relations involving past, present and future, of the new media it has spawned, of the vast number of artists who etch its fabric, of its experimentalist tendencies, and of the difficulty of organizing it into any comprehensible or clearly-divers units. In other words, modern art represents a challenge—which is fine, except that the reader of this text is apt to come abroad with the impression that modern fine art came into beingness in order to provide him with that challenge, and that information technology continues to develop in order to go along him on the defensive. Any thought that the mod artist may share with the mod viewer sure experiences, feelings, or concerns with being is therefore bypassed in favor of humble astonishment at how complicated the subject is.

Arnason deals with the complexity of modernistic art in a manner that is reminiscent of family-tree diagramming. And equally he pursues his subject toward the electric current moment, its complexity becomes more than than a challenge: it becomes an obsession. Mondrian'due south The Cherry-red Tree (1908), for instance, is relatively simple: it "combines the tortured expression of Van Gogh, the not-descriptive color of the fauves, and the linear pattern of art nouveau in a piece of work that is still private and structural in a plastic sense." Forty years subsequently, nonetheless, Arshile Gorky is a thicket of interrelations: he "illustrates most specifically the line betwixt Picasso, European surrealism, and American abstract expressionism." As if these ingredients did not represent enough of an accomplishment on Gorky's function, the artist is cited as having been influenced by Cézanne, as likewise beingness a friend of Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, and Frederick Kiesler, and as "bringing together aspects of Kandinsky's complimentary Brainchild, Miro's and Masson's organic surrealism and residues of Picasso." In such terms, neither Gorky, nor Gorky's paintings, nor the study of Gorky'south paintings (non to mention Mondrian's), emerges as a homo miracle. Arnason tries to defend himself against a decision similar this, usually by pointing out that all artists cannot exist studied "in depth" in a survey such equally History of Modernistic Art. Unfortunately, nevertheless, the treatment of Gorky is typical of the kind of treatment given to "major" every bit well every bit "minor" artists; circumlocution is the only feature distinguishing "superficial" and "in depth" study.

Actually, Arnason does subscribe to a kind of humanism, but it is a humanism related more to the pop notion of the mysteriousness of art than to the bodily business of making or experiencing art in terms that narrate modern sensibility. His inability to grasp those terms is revealed in the opposition of what are called "formal" and "expressive"values. This is particularly clear in the discussions of Cubism. Duchamp, for case, used "cubist faceting and simultaneity for expressive rather than formal purposes" (italics mine); the Nude Descending a Staircase "is not simply a cubist painting: it is a painting in which cubist means are used for some peculiarly personal expressive effect"; afterwards 1913, Picasso and Braque affected a "reintroduction of subject, of personality-in the figures, arid of mood in the picture every bit a whole." In his endeavour to translate art humanistically, Arnason leaves his reader wondering what a Cubist painting is that is "but a Cubist painting," or what Picasso and Braque did earlier 1913 in terms of "subject," "personality," or "mood in the motion-picture show."

Comments like the above reveal Arnason'south key uneasiness in the face of abstruse painting, an uneasiness rooted in the false supposition that formal ways role decoratively rather than expressively. In a book that is largely nearly abstruse fine art, the consequences of such an assumption are tragic. To continue with Cubism: the style is described equally representing a profound change in Western painting, only information technology emerges as "a discovery," later on which "there was only a brusque footstep to the realization that a painting could exist, independent of figures, landscape, or still life, every bit an abstract organization of lines and colour shapes integrated in diverse means on the moving-picture show surface." This alarming sentence, implying that abstract artists substantially brand "arrangements," undermines almost half a century of painting and sculpture expression.

The mistreatment of Cubism is only one of countless mistreatments that recur throughout Arnason's History of Modern Art. Occasionally, these mistreatments presume a scope that reaches beyond 1 artist, style, or move. In his word of Pollock, for instance, Arnason mentions the large size of the drip paintings and their difference from the easel tradition. From this, he concludes: "This was the final interruption from the Renaissance thought of painting discrete from spectator, to be looked at as a cocky-contained unit. The painting became an environment, an ensemble, which encompassed the spectator, surrounding him on all sides." In this case, both the Renaissance and the modernist traditions of painting (again, not to mention Pollock as an private) become totally dislocated. Renaissance painting sought an extension of viewer space, while modernist painting has sought to create objects with an integrity that is separate from the viewer'southward. In other words, Arnason mistakes the two sensibilities for one another on the nigh profound level of their corresponding aspirations and formal means.

Art history fares no better than fine art in this survey. The notion of historical significance is a case in point. Numerous artists and architects are presented as being meaning: Cézanne, Picasso, Brancusi, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mondrian, and and so forth. But what does it mean to say that an artist is pregnant? In terms of this book, it evidently means that he somehow "anticipated" what will happen after him, provided a "bridge" to the future: "The significance of Seurat's technique . . . in not bad measure resides in the cosmos of an ordered, geometric structure closely approximating the pure abstract fine art of the twentieth century"; Matisse'south Joy of Life "was an ancestor of brainchild in mod painting"; the Fauves "established a precedent for the whole series of revolutions that accept characterized the history of art since the beginning of the century"; Picasso's bronze Head of Fernande Olivier "is historically of the greatest significance every bit the kickoff step toward an entirely new kind of sculpture—that of construction or aggregation"; Picasso's Glass of Absinthe "gives one of the first sculptural expressions to the passion for the 'institute object' which . . . reached its climax in the junk sculpture and popular art of the 1950s and 1960s"; in Rousseau's Funfair Evening, "the picture show plane controls the design and the organization of depth to a caste that is prophetic of a major business of art even in the 1960s."

Arnason'southward blazon of history presents fine art as forever looking alee, destined somehow to chronicle to the future instead of possessing identity or meaning in the present. His organisation presupposes evolution in art in a dangerously misleading way—that is, past implying that art has a goal toward which it is striving, some pointwhich, in one case reached, will somehow mark information technology as a success or justify its struggle. But fine art doesn't work that way; information technology knows simply where information technology has been and, in its most witting moments, where information technology is in its present. Hence, art history can depict how an artist has evolved from one situation into some other. To suggest that he is evolving toward the future, however, is to deny the human limits of both art and art history.

The assumption that art evolves toward the future is, I remember, the most serious methodological flaw in Arnason's book. The others are more annoying than misleading or distortive. For example, the report depends heavily on the concept of one artist influencing another: "Pollock departed from the tradition of Renaissance and modern painting before him and, although he had no direct stylistic followers, he afflicted the course of experimental painting after him." And so along. This kind of statement occurs throughout the text, just it never comes to mean anything. Certain paintings are said to "recall" other paintings or to be "reminiscent" of them, but the run into that takes place when one artist looks at the work of another is never investigated with any precision, nor with any thought nearly how this come across has changed in mod as opposed to pre-modernistic art. Besides, Arnason fails to investigate how the concept of "fashion" equally a methodological tool has changed in the case of mod art.

Nor is there any effort in Arnason's volume to make sense out of artistic quality. Like and so many art history texts, this one implies that quality somehow results: that is, when an artist does plenty things in one picture—like bringing together Cubism and Surrealism, abstraction and primitivism, or creating a new kind of space, a new awareness of his medium, and and so on. In other words, quality emerges as an result of art historical description rather than its stimulus. Afterward all, the union of Cubism and Surrealism does non make a picture good; it matters for art history only because it is contained in good pictures. But Arnason never examines this aspect of the discipline; thus, his volume can only aid to prolong the confusion regarding how art history is "objective."

I could go on: a book as faulty as this one presents countless problems. Fifty-fifty the writing mode is ponderous and vague, riddled with phrases and terms that simply do not make sense: how is Mondrian'southward Red Tree "nonetheless individual"? What are "residues of Picasso"? What does it mean to say that Rousseau'south painting is prophetic of a major concern of fine art "even" in the 1960s? Although I take concentrated primarily on the treatment of painting, my comments apply to the considerations of sculpture and compages likewise. Through it all, I experienced a feeling of desperation: no wonder so many artists and students of art history despise art history! But then I realized that Arnason's History of Modern Fine art only appears to be a history of art.

—Carl Belz