AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States

by Janet Wolff

Overview

Early twentieth-century art and art practice in Britain and the United States were, Janet Wolff asserts, marginalized by critics and historians in very similar ways after the rise of post-Cubist modern art. In a masterly book on the sociology of modernism, Wolff explores work that was primarily realist and figurative and investigates the social, institutional, political, and aesthetic processes by which that art fell by the wayside in the postwar period. Throughout, she shows that questions of gender and ethnicity play an important role in critical, curatorial, and historical evaluations. For example, Wolff finds that the work of the artists central to the development of the Whitney Museum was relegated to a secondary status in the postwar period, when realism was labeled "feminine" in contrast to the aggressive masculinity of abstract expressionism.

The three key periods considered in AngloModern are the early twentieth century, when modernist art and existing and new realist traditions coexisted in a certain tension; the postwar period, in which modernism claimed superiority over realism; and the late twentieth century, when a retrieval of the realist and figurative traditions seemed to occur. Wolff concludes by considering this re-emergence, as well as the limitations of earlier discussions of the struggles of realist and figurative art to endure the currents of modernism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801487422
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	03/04/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.56(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Janet Wolff is Professor of Arts at Columbia University. She is the author of several books, including Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, and The Social Production of Art.

What People are Saying About This

David M. Lubin

Janet Wolff is a refreshingly clear thinker and lucid writer. She consistently brings art history into dialogue with critical theory. Her intellectual background in the not-often complementary fields of social history and sociology drives her scholarship in yet a third field, art history, and does so in an enriching manner.

Michael Leja

AngloModern makes a valuable contribution to the scholarship on modern art, modernism, and identity. Most importantly, Janet Wolff rethinks modernist assumptions, moving in directions that are timely and essential.

Keith Moxey

The myth that modernism in the arts represented a march toward abstraction has been repeatedly challenged. In Janet Wolff's remarkable new book, however, the ideological strategies by which this myth was created and disseminated are exposed and examined. Wolff demonstrates how masculinist bias and ethnic prejudice have been responsible for our inability to take modernity's realist tradition seriously.

Editorial Reviews

Janet Wolff's lucid book, like many a post-modern cultural critique, aims to deconstruct rigid hegemonies or as the author puts it, 'narratives of fixity.'... AngloModern effectively exposes some problematic aspects of the prevailing modernist discoures.

Times Literary Supplement

Janet Wolff's lucid book, like many a post-modern cultural critique, aims to deconstruct rigid hegemonies or as the author puts it, 'narratives of fixity.'... AngloModern effectively exposes some problematic aspects of the prevailing modernist discoures.

-- "Times Literary Supplement"

From the Publisher

"The myth that modernism in the arts represented a march toward abstraction has been repeatedly challenged. In Janet Wolff's remarkable new book, however, the ideological strategies by which this myth was created and disseminated are exposed and examined. Wolff demonstrates how masculinist bias and ethnic prejudice have been responsible for our inability to take modernity's realist tradition seriously."

Keith Moxey

"Janet Wolff is a refreshingly clear thinker and lucid writer. She consistently brings art history into dialogue with critical theory. Her intellectual background in the not-often complementary fields of social history and sociology drives her scholarship in yet a third field, art history, and does so in an enriching manner."

David M. Lubin

"AngloModern makes a valuable contribution to the scholarship on modern art, modernism, and identity. Most importantly, Janet Wolff rethinks modernist assumptions, moving in directions that are timely and essential."

Michael Leja