It is comforting to remember, given the depressing results of postmodernism’s refusal to make distinctions between the detritus of popular culture and anything else, that part of what made Modernist art modern—and radical—in the first place was its deliberate embrace of materials without art-historical precedent and sources of inspiration remote from the time-honored subject matter of Western art. Modernists at the beginning of this century explored the possibilities of everything from newspaper to scrap metal, from the debris on café tables to the ritual objects of Africa, seizing them as both raw materials and points of departure that permitted or provoked unprecedented formal inventions.

Adopting “non-art” materials and prototypes was obviously a self-conscious declaration of independence from tradition. Part of African sculpture’s fascination for Picasso, for example, was its distance from the Greco-Roman aes ...

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