I couldn’t portray a woman in all her natural loveliness. I haven’t the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is a mere pretext for a decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to expose the Absolute, and not merely the factitious woman.
—Georges Braque, circa 1908

Subject, with her, is often incidental.
—Wallace Stevens, on the poetry of Marianne Moore, 1935

Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny—very tiny, content.
—Willem de Kooning, 1963

Although we have lately been advised that “the days when one could sit down with an easy mind to write an account of something called modernism are over,”[1] there nonetheless remains very little in our experience of the arts even in this first decade of the twenty-first century that can be separated from the traditions that were established by what used to be called the modern movement but that nowadays tend to be known collectively as modernism. As I shall be using the term here—that is, modernism as a movement in literature as well as the visual arts—it was never monolithic in style, ideas, or impact. It encompassed a broad range of styles, from realism and symbolism to pure abstraction, and a variety of anti-styles we associate with the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism.

In its heyday, which by my reckoning dates from the 1880s to the 1950s, it was as easily identified by the traditions it rejected as by the innovations it embraced. What it mainly rejected in the pictorial arts were the moribund conventions of nineteenth- century academic instruction, which had elevated a narrowly conceived mode of depicting the observable world to the status of an aesthetic and cultural absolute. What modernism rejected in architecture was ornament, decorative embellishments, and explicit references to historical precedent. As far as painting and sculpture are concerned, modernism introduced a radical revision in the very concept of representation, the implications of which are admirably summarized in George Heard Hamilton’s introduction to his classic history, Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880–1940:

In the half-century between 1886, the date of the last Impressionist exhibition, and the beginning of the Second World War, a change took place in the theory and practice of art which was as radical and momentous as any that had occurred in human history. It was based on the belief that works of art need not imitate or represent natural objects and events. Therefore artistic activity is not essentially concerned with representation but instead with the invention of objects variously expressive of human experience, objects whose structures as independent artistic entities cannot be evaluated in terms of their likeness, nor devalued because of their lack of likeness, to natural things.[2]

What was most conspicuously embraced by modernism in the literary arts were so-called free verse (vers libre) in poetry, which entailed an abandonment of traditional rhyme and meter, and the “stream of consciousness” technique in fiction, which was introduced to literature in English by James Joyce but was made more accessible to public comprehension by the popularization of Freudian psychoanalytical therapy. These innovations entailed a rejection of nineteenth-century narrative conventions in favor of more hermetic literary structures based on myth, symbolism, and other devices more commonly found in poetry, especially modern poetry, than in prose fiction.

Moreover, owing to the resolute and often vindictive resistance that such innovations met with in the arena of public taste, it was probably inevitable that ways would be sought to circumvent that resistance. It was, in any case, in direct response to such prohibitions that the modernist impulse was driven to create institutions of its own in order to safeguard the survival and prosperity of its aesthetic initiatives. It was probably inevitable, too, that in the early history of these institutions, an attempt would be made to minimize the sometimes controversial content of modernism—not only its sexual explicitness but its political provocations as well. After all, in a period when even as blameless a book of short stories as Joyce’s Dubliners met with refusal by its first printers on the grounds that certain passages were deemed to employ improper language, and a masterpiece like Ulysses was legally banned in the United States, there was ample reason to be cautious about publicizing the content of certain modernist works.

On the large and thorny question of modernism’s content and its relation to modernist form, however, it must also be said that certain modernists have themselves been complicit in minimizing its content even under conditions where prudence was no longer required, as the epigraphs quoted above from Georges Braque, Wallace Stevens, and Willem de Kooning suggest. For anyone who was present on the New York art scene in 1953, for example, when de Kooning exhibited the first of his sensational Women paintings at the Sidney Janis Gallery, the much quoted claim made ten years earlier, obviously in reference to abstract painting, that the content in the creation of a work of art is “very tiny,” would have sounded absurd. The ferocity with which de Kooning attacked his subject in the Women series left no one in doubt about the importance of its content—both for the artist and viewer—and the unraveling of de Kooning’s talent in the aftermath of the Women paintings, when he returned to a mode of abstraction that was sadly depleted of both form and content, only underscored the point.

Similarly, Wallace Stevens’s observation that in the poetry of Marianne Moore, “Subject … is often incidental,” may indeed apply to some of the poet’s minor later work, but elsewhere Moore’s poetry positively bristles with difficult subjects. In the early masterpiece from the 1920s called Marriage—a work that, in my view, occupies a place in Moore’s literary oeuvre akin to that of The Waste Land in Eliot’s—the intensity and indignation prompted by the subject of matrimony is anything but “incidental.” Its treatment is ferocious, as the poem’s opening lines attest:

This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise
out of respect for which
one says one need
not change one’s mind
about a thing one has believed in,
requiring public promises
of one’s intention
to fulfill a private obligation:
I wonder what Adam and Eve
think of it by this time,
this fire-gilt steel
alive with goldenness;
how bright it shows—
“of circular traditions and impostures,
committing many spoils,”
requiring all one’s criminal ingenuity
to avoid!

In a new edition of The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman (Viking, 2003), Marriage runs to eight and a half pages, and remains to its very last lines one of the most caustic poems in the language—one of the scariest, too.

Georges Braque was a far gentler soul than either Willem de Kooning or Marianne Moore, and it was characteristic of his moral delicacy to wrap his statement about the artist’s subject in a mantle of modesty, only to disclose in the end that, like so many other modernists, his too had been a pursuit of the Absolute. Braque’s version of the Absolute no doubt differed from that of the true firebrands of modernism—among them, Piet Mondrian, Mies van der Rohe, Ad Reinhardt, and Donald Judd—yet where would any of them have been without the prior existence of Cubism, the creation of which was owed to Braque’s collaboration with Picasso? It might even be said that Braque created the foundation upon which these firebrands were able to take their stand.

What, then, were the institutions that were either created or commandeered to accommodate modernism’s battle of the Absolutes? Some of them have become so well established as fixtures of our cultural landscape that we can hardly imagine a time when they didn’t exist—among them, the art galleries, with their one-man shows of new art; the art museums that vie with each other for the privilege of being the first to embrace what is certain to be controversial; the “little magazines,” literary quarterlies and small presses without which modernist literature would never have prospered; the more problematic writers’ “workshops,” which seem now to have degenerated into an academic racket; and the Armory Show-type of large international exhibitions that grew out of the various “independent” and “secessionist” modernist movements of a century or more ago.

Virtually all of these art institutions were created by artists working in collaboration with amateur, non-institutional collectors, just as the little magazines, small presses, and literary quarterlies were created by poets and critics who understood that mainstream publishers were not in a position to respond to the challenges of modernist literature without the kind of spadework that only non-institutional amateurs could provide. As Lionel Trilling wrote in his essay “The Function of the Little Magazine”:

To the general lowering of the status of literature and of the interest in it, the innumerable “little magazines” have been a natural and heroic response. Since the beginning of the [twentieth] century, meeting difficulties of which only their editors can truly conceive, they have tried to keep the roads open. From the elegant and brilliant Dial to the latest little scrub from the provinces, they have done their work, they have kept our culture from being cautious and settled, or merely sociological, or merely pious. They are snickered at and snubbed, sometimes deservedly, and no one would venture to say in a precise way just what effect they have—except that they keep the new talents warm until the commercial publisher with his customary air of noble resolution is ready to take his chance, except that they make the official representatives of literature a little uneasy, except that they keep a countercurrent moving which perhaps no one will be fully aware of until it ceases to move.[3]

Now, nearly sixty years after Trilling wrote “The Function of the Little Magazine” to mark the tenth anniversary of Partisan Review, the kind of “little magazine” he described in that essay is virtually extinct —as, of course, is Partisan Review. Some literary quarterlies have survived, but diminished in number and—with the shining exception of The Hudson Review—in quality as the blight of deconstructionist, post-structuralist, and other varieties of anti-literary “theory” has triumphed over literary intelligence. When we look back today on the much-maligned New Criticism, which was largely the creation of modernist poets—among them, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound—it looks like a Golden Age compared to the kind of academic obscurantism and political shadow-boxing that have supplanted it.

As for the fate of literature itself in the hands of the mainstream book publishers, we find that virtually all of the major houses in this country are now wholly owned subsidiaries of foreign conglomerates whose standard of achievement has less to do with literary quality or innovation than with access to media promotion, movie and television tie-ins, prize-winning, and other coefficients of high profitability. Mercifully, we can still count on a number of smaller presses and some of the better university presses to save the situation, but the downside of this benefit usually entails significantly reduced royalties for the worthy writers who do get published.

Exactly how it came to pass that a nation as prosperous as ours could not summon the resources to resist the takeover of its book-publishing industry by an ailing Europe remains to be explained, but that takeover is now a fait accompli, and we shall be obliged to suffer its consequences for a long time to come.

In some respects, the institutions that now serve the visual arts—especially the museums and the galleries—might seem to present a much rosier prospect, for even in periods of low economic growth they have continued to prosper. Indeed, headlong and often heedless expansion of both collections and exhibition space and the funds required to support them has been the rule in the art museums for some years now. Modernist art of various persuasions has been the driving force as well as the principal beneficiary of this very expensive expansiveness as museums have hastened to respond to new artistic developments while at the same time attempting to catch up on the earlier innovations they missed out on. This museological scenario is now so familiar to us that we sometimes forget that the compulsion on the part of museums to keep abreast of radical innovations in contemporary art—and even, when possible, to anticipate and assist in creating a demand for them—was itself a momentous innovation in the way museums come to identify their interests and responsibilities. For it obligated the museums to become, in effect, not only collectors but promoters of the art in which they were now seen to have a vested interest—a vested interest, that is, not only in the objects acquired for their collections but in the careers and celebrity of the artists who created them.

Hence the elements of hucksterism and entrepreneurial cynicism that have coarsened the character and spirit of so much museum activity today. When we enter a monstrosity like Tate Modern in London nowadays, we are straightaway put on notice by the noise, the crowds, the theatrical lighting, and the general atmosphere of vulgarity and tumult that art has been used as a bait to attract a segment of the public—free-spending youth—for which aesthetic achievement is, if not a matter of indifference, certainly not a compelling priority. And to assure a steady supply of the only kind of new art that is guaranteed to be a turn-on for this public, there are the proliferating productions of Charles Saatchi’s gang of YBA’s—Young British Artists—and the Tate’s own atrocious Turner-Prize-winners, who can be counted upon to maintain the requisite standard of titillation.

Unlike the old Tate Gallery, our own Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has not had to change its name but only its character to adjust to the new entrepreneurial standard. I wonder how many of the people who went to ogle Matthew Barney’s freak show at the Guggenheim have any idea that this museum, with its once incomparable collection of paintings by Vasily Kandinsky, was founded in 1930 as an institution devoted to the achievements of abstract painting. (Its original name was the Museum of Non-Objective Painting.) Yet, just as its influence in that respect was contributing something important to the emergence of Abstract Expressionist painting in New York—the young Jackson Pollock, among other artists, worked as a guard in the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in its early days—the Guggenheim initiated the first of its ongoing efforts to reinvent itself—a project that has left the museum stripped of anything that can be called an identity and required, among other depredations, the sale of a great many of its Kandinsky holdings and works by other modernist masters. Today it is an institution better known for its exhibitions of Norman Rockwell and Harley Davidson motorcycles and its branch museums abroad than for anything that advances an understanding of modernist art.

Two of the other New York institutions that were founded to serve the interests of modernist art—the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art—are also at a crossroads that will determine their future course but for very different reasons. MOMA is now in the throes of yet another of its periodic expansion plans, one of the biggest in its history, and this is expected to provide the museum with far more space for the showing of its permanent collection as well as its temporary exhibitions program when the expansion is completed in 2005. Meanwhile, the museum and its public are making do with an abridged, unappealing facility in Long Island City, MOMAQNS, for a reduced exhibition schedule, and a theater on East Twenty-third Street in Manhattan for its popular film program.

At this point, we can only speculate about what this expansion will bring in the way MOMA’s permanent collection—and thus modernism itself—is to be presented to the public for the remainder of the twenty-first century. If there is good reason to be hopeful about this outcome, it is mainly because John Elderfield—no doubt one of the most qualified senior curators in the field today —has been called upon to head the curatorial committee that will oversee the installation of MOMA’s permanent collection in its new building. If there is also good reason to be anxious about the outcome, it is owing to the debacle of the museum’s MOMA2000 exhibitions, which radically recast the history of MOMA’s permanent collection to conform it to a “new narrative” emphasizing social content at the expense of aesthetic innovation. This was a shift in perspective that, among other losses, had the effect of consigning the history of abstract art—one of the central developments of modernist art—to the sidelines. Given the theme-park character that governed the organization of MOMA2000, there was no way that the aesthetics of abstraction could be given its due. It thus remains to be seen whether Mr. Elderfield will have sufficient authority to rectify such disastrous errors of judgment in the newly expanded MOMA.

About the future of the Whitney Museum, too, we can only speculate. Its recent history, marked by a succession of incompetent directors and a board of trustees that seemed at times to have lost its mind, has been so dismal that almost any change is likely to be a change for the better. The good news is that the Whitney’s plan for a harebrained expansion of its own has been cancelled for financial reasons, and the appointment of Adam D. Weinberg, a former curator at the Whitney, as the museum’s new director gives us reason to expect significant improvement. It will not be easy, however, for the Whitney to win back the respect it has lost among artists as well as the critics and the public. A good place to start would be either the overhaul or the outright abandonment of the Whitney’s Biennial exhibitions, which in recent years have gone from being merely ludicrous to wholly contemptible.

As for the international exhibitions like Documenta in Germany and the monster Biennials in Venice and Sao Paulo, they have now become the kind of cultural dinosaurs that have no useful functions to perform and therefore no reason to exist. There was a period, of course, when exhibitions like the 1910 Post-Impressionism exhibition in London, the 1913 Armory Show in New York, and the 1938 International Exposition of Surrealism in Paris, really did bring the public news of important avant-garde developments in modernist art. But the age of the avant-garde is long gone. Its celebrated scandals and audacities have passed into the possession of the academic curriculum, to be catalogued, codified, and otherwise processed for doctoral dissertations and classroom instruction. The pathetic attempts at artistic insolence, mostly having to do with sexual imagery and political ideology, that turn up in the Whitney’s Biennial exhibitions and the art departments of the colleges and universities are better understood as efforts to attract publicity and what in the business world is called market share than as anything that can be regarded as avant-garde. In a culture like ours, in which, alas, everything is now permitted and nothing resisted, the conditions necessary for the emergence of a genuine avant-garde no longer exist. It doesn’t change anything, either, to adopt the term “trangressive” as a substitute for “avant-garde,” for where boundaries no longer exist it is impossible to violate them. “Transgressive” is a term that belongs to the history of publicity rather than the history of art. Today there is no avant-garde, and the big international shows are mainly devoted to marketing and politics. Modern systems of communication have, in any case, rendered the big international shows irrelevant.

Far more important to sustaining the aesthetic vitality of modernist art, however, has been the institution that we do not usually even think of as an institution: I mean the commercial art gallery. The art gallery as we know it today is, after all, a modern creation, barely a century old, and it performs a service for art unlike that of any other institution. It keeps the public in constant touch not only with current developments on the art scene but also with revivals of the work of earlier artists that the museums and the critics may have overlooked or underrated, and it does so at no financial cost to the viewer. More often than not, it is the gallery dealer, not the museum curator, who discovers significant new talent, for nowadays most curators make their “discoveries” in the dealers’ galleries.

This is a cultural service more often enjoyed than acknowledged, but for many of us the art galleries have been a fundamental part of our aesthetic education. In this connection, it is worth recalling Clement Greenberg’s tribute to the late Betty Parsons, whose gallery introduced Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Richard Pousette-Dart, among other artists, to gallerygoers of my generation. In 1955, on the tenth anniversary of the Betty Parsons Gallery, Greenberg wrote:

Mrs. Parsons has never lacked for courage. It is not a virtue signally associated with art dealers (or, for that matter, with art critics or museum directors either), but then she is not, at least for me, primarily a dealer. I have seldom been able to bring her gallery into focus as part of the commercial apparatus of art (I am not sneering at that apparatus); rather, I think of it as belonging more to the studio and production side of art. In a sense like that in which a painter is referred to as a painter’s painter or a poet as a poet’s poet, Mrs. Parsons is an artist’s—and critic’s—gallery: a place where art goes on and is not just shown and sold.[4]

Just as modernist art in America was, initially, an extension and appropriation of European modernism, so was a gallery like Betty Parsons’ in a tradition that grew out of the precedents set by Vollard and Kahnweiler in Paris and Alfred Stieglitz’s “291” gallery, which introduced Cézanne and Matisse as well as Marsden Hartley and John Marin to the New York public even before the Armory Show and long before the museums awakened to the achievements of modernism. The same could be said of the Weyhe Gallery’s efforts on behalf of Gaston Lachaise and Alfred Maurer and the exhibitions devoted to Stuart Davis at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery. At every stage in the history of modernism in America, it was the galleries that set the pace in recognizing artistic achievement. This is not to suggest that all of our art dealers are sainted figures, but merely to point out that in New York, anyway, we are blessed with an extraordinary number of galleries that are places “where art goes on,” and they should be given their due in any account of modernism and its institutions.

Finally, it is inevitable—or at least expected—in any discussion of modernism that the question of “postmodernism” will rear its ugly head. Or should I say, its wrong-headedness? For the entire concept of postmodernism is based on a fundamental misconception—a belief that the modernist era in art and culture is over and has been supplanted by something radically different. What we find this usually means when we get down to specific cases is a mode of art or thought in which some element of modernist sensibility has been corrupted by kitsch, politics, social theory, gender theory, or some other academic, pop-oriented, anti-aesthetic intervention. Modernism has aged to be sure, as modernity itself has aged, and in the process modernism has undeniably lost its capacity to shock or otherwise disturb us. But except for the short-lived antics of Dada and Surrealism, shock was never the essence of modernism. It was, rather, an inspired and highly successful attempt to bring art and culture into an affective and philosophical alignment with the mindset of modernity as we know it in our daily lives. Modernism endures, and does so, in part, anyway, by virtue of the institutions it has created to serve the needs of a public that is today more enlightened intellectually and aesthetically than at any other time in our history. Postmodernism, in contrast, has created no institutions of its own, largely because postmodernism is nothing but a mindset of deconstructive attitudes in search of a mission.

Looking back on the history of modernism in the twentieth century, what is especially striking is the violence that was directed against its achievements by the most horrific totalitarian regimes in recorded his- tory: the Nazis in Hitler’s Germany and the Communists in Stalin’s Russia. And if we ask the question of what it was about modernist art that prompted such a massively destructive response, I believe the answer is clear: modernist art was seen to provide a spiritual and emotional haven from the coercive and conformist pressures of the societies in which it flourished. Modernism represented a freedom of mind that totalitarian regimes could not abide. It is in this sense, perhaps, that the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition that Hitler devoted to modernist art in Munich in 1937 may now be seen to have marked the beginning of the “postmodernist” impulse. And just as modernism survived the determined efforts of Hitler and Stalin to impugn and destroy its artistic achievements, so, I believe, will modernism and its institutions continue to prosper in the face of the nihilist imperatives of the postmodernist scam.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. Art in Its Time: Theories and Practice of Modern Aesthetics by Paul Mattick (Routledge, 2003), page 9. Go back to the text.
2. Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880–1940 by George Heard Hamilton (Yale University Press, 1967), page 15. Go back to the text.
3. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society by Lionel Trilling (Viking Press, 1951), page 97. Go back to the text.
4. “Foreword to the Tenth Anniversary Exhibition of the Betty Parsons Gallery,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1993), Volume 3, page 256. Go back to the text.