Thursday, July 31, 2014

Modernism: Grand Narratives of Art History



André Masson, Battle of Fishes 1926
Sand, gesso, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas
(36.2 x 73 cm) MOMA

Wölfflin’s marginalization of Mannerism has a parallel in Barr and Greenberg, namely the marginalization of Surrealism in favor of abstract expressionism.  In Barr’s case, working under the influence of Greenberg, this was reflected in the narrative structure of the hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, which seemed to lead inevitably from Cezanne’s Bather (1885) to Pollock’s Lavender Mist (1950).  Surrealism was represented in two small rooms by a couple of Duchamps, two outstanding early Giacomettis and Masson’s Battle of the Fishes (1926).  One irony here is that Duchamp was in not a Surrealist, but that it was Masson, as well as Duchamp, who was a Surrealist, who pioneered the automatism that climaxed in Pollock.  It’s also true that even though Jean Arp was associated with the Surrealists, he could easily be located within the tradition of abstract, organic modern sculpture that includes Brancusi, Alexander Calder, and Henry Moore.  It took the likes of Kirk Varnedoe, nearly 30 years after Barr, to experiment with an alternate program structured by themes instead of historical narrative, and it was ironically the Met, not MOMA, that finally displayed Pollock as a terminus of Surrealist automatism in the Desire Unbound exhibition in 2001.  The point is that once a theory or narrative is adopted, the evidence may be made to fall into place by the rhetoric of museum display.  The historical marginalization of Surrealism is reflected and reinforced by its physical marginalization.  The parallel to the treatment of Mannerism is striking, as we’ll see later.


Schapiro concludes his discussion of the relationship between philosophy and painting by demanding a high level of detail in establishing that a particular worldview is reflected in painting at a given time, and a warning about overgeneralizing the particular mode of that reflection: The equation of the philosophy and painting requires specification of the traits, details, et cetera, of both the work and the worldview or philosophy.  However, the constructability of links between them, whether historical or intellectual, is relevant only for a theory of the unity of philosophy and painting of a time and place, but not for a general theory of unified worldview in art and philosophy (Schapiro, 1958-68:71).

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