Museum Tales of Twentieth-Century Art

Author(s): HAL FOSTER

Source: Studies in the History of Art , 2009, Vol. 74, Symposium Papers LI: Dialogues in
Art History, from Mesopotamian to Modern: Readings for a New Century (2009), pp.
352-375
Published by: National Gallery of Art

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/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']

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 HAL FOSTER

Princeton University

Museum Tales of Twentieth-Century

art given over to a vast array of disparate proj-

rativity of twentieth-century art, problems ects, and art history to a broken terrain of dis-
My rativity that subject might
that ofmightis twentieth-century alsoforoneartpoint or two to problems possibilities art, in problems the for nar- art
also point to possibilities connected fields.2 One result is an increased
practice, curation, and scholarship alike. confusion about contemporary art as well as
But why be concerned with the hoary topic a decreased import for art history in the cul-
of art historical narratives now, and why as ture at large (not to mention a diminished
a modernist, a species of scholar often ambition in museum shows). Many factors
assumed to be hostile to such things? After are involved, of course, but our own aban-
all, it is fifty years since Ernst Gombrich donment of coherent model building and
deemed any story of artistic mentalities dan- compelling storytelling is surely one, and one
gerously Hegelian, thirty years since Linda within our control.
Nochlin spurned any account of master
artists as patriarchal, and twenty-five years
"The Conscientious, Continuous,
since Jean-François Lyotard rejected any
Resolute Distinction of Quality"
grand récit as totalistic.1
My purpose here is not to challenge these Some of the problems in my field have come
critiques, in part because I largely agree with into focus for me through the recent reopen-
them still, and in part because their work is ing of the renovated Museum of Modern
mostly done - in some ways done too well. Art, an institution at the center of several
For today, long after the Gombrichian stric- accounts of modernism in the past.3 From its
ture against Hegelian art- history, we have yet founding in 1929, its first director, Alfred H.
to recover the intellectual ambition of the Barr Jr., hoped that its collection might pro-
modern founders of the discipline: to develop vide the basis of subsequent histories of
philosophical concepts, to speculate about modernist art. In many ways, his expecta-
historical patterns, and to draw on other tions were more than fulfilled: at least in the
fields of cultural study and to develop them United States, MoMA has directed such his-
anew, as they once did. And though feminist tory as much as represented it.4
and poststructuralist critics were right to The son of a Presbyterian minister, Barr is
contest any exclusive canon in art and any often described as evangelical as well as ecu-
reductive telos in its history, we are now menical, and, given the different limitations
Olafur Eliasson, exposed to a problem that is no less severe: of early trustees and viewers alike, he did
The Weather Project, an apparent relativism that threatens to spread the gospel of modern art in a fairly
2003-2004, installation view
drain
Tate Modern, London; photograph
significance out of ambitious practice capacious way. Yet, despite this alleged
Art Resource, New York and scholarship alike, with contemporary catholicity, Barr was not simply "reportorial"

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in collecting and exhibiting: he was quite Abstract Art and Fantastic Art , Dada, Sur-
selective, for example, about the avant-garde realism. It was for the dust jacket of the for-
work he encountered on his important trip mer exhibition catalogue that he devised
to Holland, Germany, and the Soviet Union his famous flow chart of the fifty years of pro-
in winter 1927-1928. 5 Omissions occurred; duction then deemed the purview of the
no doubt, for practical reasons (lack of oppo-Modern (fig. 2). Although Barr saw this didac-
rtunity, funds, and support), some were bound tic diagram as provisional only (he revised it
to occur. But other omissions were made as early as 1941), it became the blueprint of
precisely because a narrative coherence the museum. In effect it draws the different
had to be forged in order for the very idea lines
of of modernist art into two fundamental
i. Alfred H. Barr Jr.,
modernist art to be advanced in the first "currents" represented by the 1936 shows: "torpedo" diagrams of the
place. Cézanne-cubist-geometrical and Gauguin- ideal permanent collection
of the Museum of Modern
In his early ät torpedo " diagrams, we see expressionist-nongeometrical. Barr nomi- Art, as advanced in 1933 (top)
Barr draw diverse practices into streamlined nates Paul Cézanne as the primary figure and 1 941 (bottom]
The Museum of Modern Art
trajectories. On the one hand, some now- (neoimpressionism is the only other category Archives, New York; photograph ©
familiar movements do not appear at all; on that leads to both currents), in part because The Museum of Modern Art,
licensed by SCALA / Art Resource,
the other hand, in a 1933 diagram, his first of his importance to both Henri Matisse and New York

attempt to model an ideal collection, the

origin of modernist art runs back well before
the date - circa 1880 - that soon became the
official point of departure for MoMA (fig.
1). Moreover, the propeller of this torpedo,
the motive force of modernist art, is desig-
nated to be "Non-European" as well as
"European Prototypes and Sources," and the
stem includes artists as varied as Goya,
Ingres, Constable, Corot, Daumier, Courbet,
Manet, Renoir, Degas, Homer, and Eakins,
all absent from the museum today.6 If under-
taken, this plan would have led MoMA to
promulgate a concept of modernism far more
open not only to other cultural and national
formations but also to political and realist
commitments. Obviously a Modern that
begins with such engaged artists as Goya,
Daumier, and Courbet would be a very dif-
ferent kind of place.
Much is altered in a torpedo diagram of
1941 (see fig. i, bottom); among other changes,
the starting-date is now "circa 1880," and the
stem includes the four post-impressionists
and neoimpressionists exhibited in the ini-
tial MoMA show: Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat,
and Van Gogh. One can understand Barr 's
desire to simplify: though circa 1880 is com-
plicated enough as a point of origin, it obvi-
ates some problems of coverage, political as
well as curatorial, raised by the 1933 dia-
gram.7 Other factors, however, drive the
shifts here. A new building on West 53rd
Street, designed in the International Style by
Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone,
had opened in 1939, and Barr had curated two
landmark shows in 1936: Cubism and

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2. Alfred H. Barr Jr., Cubism
and Abstract Art (New York,
1936), cover, offset
The Museum of Modern Art,
New York; photograph © The
Museum of Modern Art, licensed by
SCALA / Art Resource, New York

Pablo Picasso, whom Barr already regarded to Cubism and Abstract Art concludes: 'The
as the twin masters of the century to date (he shape of the square confronts the silhouette
arranged major retrospectives for them in of the amoeba").8 But the chart quickly turns
193 1 and 1939 respectively). the dialectic of the rational and the irrational
With his two currents Barr points, astutely, into a reductive opposition of two kinds
to a dialectic of rational and irrational of abstraction. The currents are abstracted
in other ways as well: the Cézanne-Cubist-
impulses in modernist art (his introduction

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geometrical line (which includes "the Bauhaus).13 On the other hand, Barr decided
machine aesthetic/' constructivism, and to track through this heterogeneous field
the Bauhaus) is removed from its socio- with a restrictive story about abstraction, to
economic context of the second industrial which he assumed a mimetic relation. If
revolution, while the Gauguin-expressionist- modern art was predominantly formal, as he
non-geometrical line is detached from its thought it was, so would his approach be
physio-psychological substrate in the bodypredominantly formalist - that is, according
and the drives. ("Modern architecture/7 to the Anglo-American version of this per-
which also appears in the chart, was already spective that foregrounds the intrinsic prop-
aestheticized by Henry-Russell Hitchcock erties of artworks and proposes possible
and Philip Johnson in their 1932 show Mod- connections between them in an autonomous
ern Architecture : International Exhibition, history of art. Moreover, if the development
as was "machine art" in the 1934 show of of this art was progressive (in all senses: con-
that title organized by Barr and Johnson.)9 tinuous, ameliorative, liberal), as, again, Barr
Clearly, the Cézanne-cubist-geometrical thought it was, so would his narrative be
line was primary for Barr, aesthetically and progressive (it is a key term in his writings).14
institutionally, yet either current could be By temperament and training, he was inclined
made to serve the most essential purpose, to a mix of connoisseurship and historicism:
that of narrative coherence.10 The cubist Barr was schooled in the first as a graduate
current did so already in 1936; the expres- student at Harvard, especially in the cele-
sionist one would do so significantly with the brated museum course taught by his mentor
rise of abstract expressionism in the late Paul Sachs, and schooled in the second as
1940s; and in all major presentations of the an undergraduate at Princeton under the
permanent collection, the two currents have medievalist Charles Rufus Morey, who first
been intermingled with this continuity in inspired him to speculate in terms of histor-
mind. Barr insisted on such coherence early ical charts.15 These methods were overcoded
on. For instance, in his introduction to Art by a formalism already pronounced in both
in Our Time (1939), the first show in the 53rd art criticism and art history, as typified by
Street building, he pledges to "follow the Roger Fry and Heinrich Wölfflin respectively.
development of modern art in clear logical But, above all, it was the need for narrative
sequence"; and again in his foreword to the continuity that tended Barr toward this
first catalogue of the collection, Painting formalist-historicist perspective (which was
and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern also practiced, less self-consciously, by col-
Art (1942), he writes: "It is one of the func- laborators like Hitchcock and Johnson).
tions of the Museum to give a core, a spine, An apparent contradiction arises here,
a background for study and comparison, a however, for modernist art privileges mo-
sense of relative stability and continuity to ments of originality, that is, points of dis-
an institution dedicated to the changing art continuity, as Barr understood. Yet it is
of our unstable world."11 In fact Barr defined precisely the forte of the formalist to redeem
the very task of the museum as "the con- discontinuity for continuity, to recoup each
scientious, continuous, resolute distinction break "dialectically" as the next term in a
of quality from mediocrity": a kind of motto series of formal innovations. This formalist
for MoMA, the words were inscribed at the view of the history of art as problem solving
entrance to the permanent collection.12 runs from Wölfflin (if not Giorgio Vasari)
Thus Barr was somewhat divided in through Barr to Clement Greenberg and
thought and practice. On the one hand, beyond,no with no exemption granted to
American of his generation knew more modernist art; on the contrary, Barr and
about a great range of modernist art, and Greenberg felt that "modernist painting"
he advanced a multidisciplinary perspective exemplified this process.16 Barr did privi-
true to the avant-garde (the departments lege "innovative moments" in collecting
of MoMA - painting and sculpture,- pho- and exhibiting, but in so doing he could not
tography,- drawings, prints and illustrated be true to the ramifications of each break.17
books; architecture and design; and film As-noted, his 1936 chart turned the subjec-
were based loosely on the divisions of the tive dialectic of the rationality and the ir-

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rationality into a formal opposition of ab- Subsequent installations were arranged
straction. Also reduced is another dialectic, by William Rubin (director of painting and
a social one represented by German Dada and sculpture from 1973 to 1988) and by Kirk
Russian constructivism, which addresses Varnedoe (director of the same department
the bourgeois institution of autonomous art: from 1988 to 2001). Of course they had more
the first movement is concerned to negate it, art to cover, and what they did share with
the second to transform it. His own interests Barr they treated somewhat differently; yet
aside, Barr had to curtail this dialectic, too: neither one transformed the deep structure
after all, he was in the service of just such a of the Barr presentation. In fact Rubin, a
bourgeois institution of autonomous art - the distinguished Picasso scholar, made cubism
most important one, in the making, of mod- even more central and the genealogy of the
ernist art. Thus, for example, Barr was com- two currents even stricter than Barr did; as
pelled to read the Soviet aspect of this a result, he was often questioned for his lin-
dialectic, which he knew well from his ear presentation (even though his first con-
1927-1928 trip, in a very partial manner, as cern was stylistic coherence). In his second
a passage from " cubism to pure geometry/7 installation, after the 1984 addition to the
in which the actual dialectic of Russian con- museum (by Cesar Pelli), Rubin mostly
structivism, in particular its shift into a alternated masters with movements: post-
"productivist" position of art adapted to impressionism, Picasso and cubism, small
industry, simply disappears.18 Thus Barr galleries for expressionism and futurism,
was led to opt for formalist coherence over Piet Mondrian and constructivism, a large
historical complexity, institutional con- one for Matisse and fauvism, and small
tainment over the avant-garde transforma- spaces again for Vassily Kandinsky and Paul
tion of art vis-à-vis everyday life.19 Klee, followed by Dada and surrealism. Sig-
Ironically, Barr was not able to present nificantly, the break in this installation
the collection as he saw fit until the museum between the second and the third floors fell
was expanded in 1964 (in a design by John- between surrealism and abstract expres-
son), only three years before his retirement sionism: in effect, one passed from "Europe"
in 1967. Again, despite his awareness of to "America."
avant-garde diversity, the painting and sculp- Varnedoe affirmed this change of the guard
ture department dominated the installation, at midcentury in his presentation of 1996.
with painting the privileged medium (as it Under the pressure of postmodernist art
remains to this day). As Barr had promised, (with its great interest in Marcel Duchamp),
Cézanne and his contemporaries led the he brought in more Dada and surrealism,-
way, followed by Matisse and the Fauves, the his version was also less linear, more com-
School of Paris and a few Americans, and bative, less rigorous stylistically, more strin-
Picasso and the cubists (three galleries), with gent chronologically. In fact, Varnedoe
the purists and the futurists, the Dutch and sometimes broke up the particular isms in
the Russians, behind; the Dadaists and the order to juxtapose different works of the
surrealists appeared on the next floor, with same moment. He also pushed the presen-
the abstract expressionists and others. With tation further into the 1950s and 1960s: the
the exception of Constantin Brancusi, sculp- trio of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns,
ture was mostly set on the periphery or rel- and Cy Twombly was given a gallery, and
egated to the new court outside, and other abstract and Pop painting of the period was
departments were positioned in separate also well represented (though not much else).
rooms (as they still are today) - this at a However, this move toward the present
time when the practical predominance of brought pressures of its own - signal ones for
painting and the formalist precept of any account of MoMA today.
medium-specificity were challenged on all
sides. In the 1960s, sculpture, transformed MoMA Restarts
and expanded, was primary for many artists,
and photography, also transformed and John Elderfield arranged the present instal-
expanded, had begun to reconfigure the aes- lation in the expanded building with his
thetic field (as it had in the 1920s). team of Ann Temkin, Joachim Pissarro, and

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Ann Umland (flg. 3). An esteemed curator, told in an introductory brochure, leads pri- 3. Installation view of the
exhibition Painting and
Elderfield has worked in painting and sculp- marily from Cézanne to Picasso, the cubists, Sculpture: Inaugural
ture for three decades, yet his final show in and abstractionists like Mondrian, while Installation , The Museum
the old galleries, Modern Starts (2000), was "the path of expressive color" runs chiefly of Modern Art, New York,
November 20, 2004
cause for concern to some: a vast array of dis- from Van Gogh to Matisse, the fauves, and The Museum of Modern Art,
parate works grouped under generic titles like the expressionists. Clearly the Barr narrative
New York; photograph Art Resource,
New York
"People," "Places," and "Things," it seemed is still in place. Yet after the first gallery
to advance an ahistorical thematicism at the presentation ramifies quickly. By the
odds with principal motives of modernist time
art the viewer reaches the gallery called
"Crossroads: 1914-1928," figures as dis-
(motives dear to Barr, no less): its tendency
parate as Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger,
to abstraction, its rigor about its own formal
and Brancusi appear together; and in the
development, its suspicion of conventional
next space, diverse Dadaists, suprematists,
meanings. In retrospect, however, Modern
and constructivists vie with one another.
Starts was a way for Elderfield to bracket pre-
vious presentations and to air out the Thereper- is some affiliation and much differ-
manent collection. ence, here and elsewhere, and sometimes
In the new installation, the Elderfield the combinations test the old criterion of nar-
team has sought a way between the stylis- rative coherence. Beyond juxtapositions that
tic chronos of Barr, Rubin, and Varnedoe range from the incisive to the odd, there is
and the thematic posthistoire of Modern little curatorial mediation offered (wall texts
Starts (which is the default mode of muse-seem to be almost taboo).20
ums with lesser collections, such as Tate Whereas the fifth floor covers sixty years,
Modern). The presentation still begins, now
the fourth spans only thirty - 1940 to 1970 -
already a sign of the proliferation of modes
on the fifth floor, with post-impressionism,
Cézanne, and Vincent van Gogh in charge. and the leap in scale in postwar art. It too
begins in the way expected since Rubin,
"The path of structural innovation," we are

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with late surrealist and early abstract expres- the recent shows focused on the relationships
sionist paintings that prepare the great de between Cézanne and Camille Pissarro, and
Koonings, Rothkos, Newmans, and Pollocks Picasso and Matisse, led the curators in this
that follow, and, in keeping with the Varne- direction). But are these openings enough?
doe installation, the next gallery is devoted Again, the Elderfield team allows for more
to Rauschenberg, Johns, and Twombly. Yet conversation, even contradiction, among
the presentation opens up in subsequent works, yet there is far more contestation in
galleries devoted to 1960s abstraction, Pop, the modernist field than is suggested here.
minimalism, and postminimalism. Some This agon is essential to modernism, and
artists in this suite of spaces were not hereto- therefore worthy of the fullest articulation
fore accredited by MoMA, both established possible,- it does not receive that attention
ones like Dan Flavin and Robert Smithson here.22
and rediscovered ones like Yayoi KusamaA partial opening is also evident in other
and Lee Bontecou. Others, such as Jacques
departments. They are still set up in separate
Mahé de la Villeglé, Romare Bearden, Richard
spaces, yet the presentations are not so cate-
Hamilton, and R. B. Kitaj in the Pop gallery,
gorical. Even as photography is sequestered
and Dieter Roth, Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark, in the old building, some of its procedures are
and Hélio Oiticica in the minimalist and evident in works included in the painting and
postminimalist rooms, were seen rarely,sculpture
if galleries (for example, in Dada and
surrealist montages); at the same time, a
at all.21 Some practices are still not an easy
fit for the Modern: an alcove given overpainterly
to quality has returned in contem-
conceptual and institution-critical work porary
by photography (primarily through dig-
Robert Morris, Marcel Broodthaers, and ital composition and grand scale). Conversely,
others seems grudging; and if the post-
some collages that might be expected in
minimalist examples are rather benign (little
painting and sculpture are found in drawing,
of the aggressive corporeality of this art is and
evi-architecture juxtaposes some images
and objects that could have appeared in
dent here), the institution-critical selections
are relatively innocuous (no Michael Asher, prints or painting and sculpture (though the
for example, let alone Hans Haacke). And implicit
yet, crossover here is as much with a
whether one regards canonicity as the kiss design store as with the rest of the museum).
of grace or of death, it is not guaranteed In short, medium-specificity is pressured
here: "The installation will frequently be
somewhat - but, again, is this enough? This
refreshed/' the curators caution, "so that
pressure points to the rich complexity of
both modernist practice and its contempo-
the larger history set forth will remain vital
and open-ended." This leeway will be use- rary aftermath, but it is only indicated, not
ful, for, although abstract expressionism explored.
is How did photography impinge on
painting in the modernist epoch? How does
surely a thing of the past, advanced art since
the 1960s is not so settled: for artists and his-
it signify in our putative digital age? What are
the various relationships between art and
torians alike, it remains an archival thresh-
old, open to creative misreading and critical
design through the twentieth century? What
réévaluation (as we will see, the breakareat"new media" in the 1920s, the 1960s, and
1970 is a ragged one). the 2000S, and what are the connections
The Elderfield team has thus loosened the among them? We might have expected an
canon of painting and sculpture - slightly. institution as authoritative as MoMA at
One effect is to ease the presumption thatleast to pose such questions. Clearly, the
every work on view is of world historicalcurators faced a double bind: to be innova-
importance: though MoMA still believes its tive regarding the permanent collection
story to be definitive, it does not feel soand responsive to experimental practice,
final here. And though it remains a story ofand yet true to the Barr tradition of narra-
heroic individuals (still nearly all men), theytive coherence and the territorial logic of
appear to be linked less by an oedipal nar-departmental division. In this conflict, an
rative of fathers and sons (the struggle firstambivalence toward narrative becomes all
with Cézanne, then Picasso . . . ) than by sib-but structural - a different example of the
ling rivalry and cousinly attraction (perhaps mimetic relationship that obtains between

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MoMA curation and modernist art (a rela- lems raised by the new installation, such as
tionship that cannot help but obscure a criti- the apparent divide between modernist and
cal perspective). contemporary practices, would be mitigated
For all its merits, the new installation (more on which below).
fails most where it appears least new: it To investigate why the Modern is so affir-
remains divided into medium-specific depart- mative would require far more work. Cer-
ments, and in this division it remains dom- tainly all institutions like MoMA depend on
inated by painting and sculpture in general massive investment, affective as much as
and by painting in particular. To be sure, economic. And yet the Modern has always
sculpture is the less important medium for required an extra dosage of deep belief: this
much of the twentieth century, with most point goes to the heart of the evangelism of
models of modernist art defined in relation Barr, who passed it on to his successors.
to painting (if sometimes antagonistically so), This urgent need for belief stems from the
but not to the extent still implied at the double imperative to overcome the early
Modern. Even prominent sculptors included hostility to modernist art and to negotiate the
on the upper painting and sculpture floors, troublesome sense that much of it must be
such as David Smith and Donald Judd, are taken on faith - indeed, to counter the per-
largely pictorial in orientation (this is true of sistent suspicion that some of it might
Picasso and Matisse too, of course, but alsowell be fraudulent, a sham put over on the
of Alberto Giacometti, who is generously rep- public. (The philosopher Stanley Cavell has
resented as well), while most work to do argued that this suspicion has structured
with the corporeal, let alone the informe the reception of modernism, even when this
and the entropie, is either absented or cleaned reception is sympathetic,- certainly it would
up (as is the case with three exemplars of appear to call out for the kind of "conviction"
these three modes - Hesse, Piero Manzoni, that his interlocutor Michael Fried has seen
and Smithson). Much of Dada and surrealism as equally fundamental to this reception.
is placed behind glass, literally, and, except Yet surely today this belief is not as neces-
for Jean Dubuffet, the brut- ish aspect of sary as it once was, and other kinds of invest-
twentieth-century art is not very evident; ment, including the critical, might be
neither are the nastier bits of Cobra, Fluxus, entertained.)24
Nouveau Réalisme, Arte Povera, Process, Because of this will to affirmation, MoMA
body art, and so on. Consistent with previ- also offers little sense of the catastrophic in
ous presentations, the skirting of most art twentieth-century history at large - the rev-
with any overt politics remains a scandal. olutions, depressions, genocides, hot and
Despite its apparent neutrality, then, cold wars. For many friends of the museum
MoMA is still emphatically affirmative. In all these subjects are beyond its domain, but can
its major dispensations - from Barr the evan- one argue so when they impinge on so much
gelist through Rubin the professor to Varne- of its art? The same claim cannot be made
doe the humanist - the Modern was entirely of complex entanglements with Fordist
celebratory, and in this advocacy it has always industry, authoritarian politics, mass cul-
tended to miss (or to dismiss) the critical, the ture, technological transformation, and
subversive, and the scabrous in twentieth- media spectacle: these are even more intrin-
century art.23 For all its aforementioned sic to much of the art.25 Certainly it is vapid
openings (which might also be seen as pro- to expect that a plenum of "context" can
tective in part), the Modern begins in this somehow be provided - but why not a pre-
same spirit under Elderfield. Yet obscured sentation that also allows for such prob-
thereby are various forms of critique not lematics, with other kinds of objects, images,
only within modernism but of modernism - and documents (from within the collection
critiques in recent art and theory alike that and without) brought into play too? Such an
elsewhere have transformed the field. It installation would necessitate both a rework-
ing of separate departments and an opening
might be difficult to present these critiques
in a museum setting, but not impossibleto (to
political art, but interdisciplinary practices
can be addressed alongside medium-specific
argue so is to make excuses). In fact, if they
were presented at MoMA, some of the prob- ones, just as political practices can be pre-

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sented with autonomous ones,- in fact the dif- not only of modernist art and culture but also
ferent presentations might well articulate of liberal-democratic-capitalist subjectivity
one another more effectively. In any case, and society.30
such an approach would be far more true to To be fair, there are oblique indications of
the heterogeneous nature of twentieth- this trauma in two works in particular: the
century art in general.26 great Max Beckmann triptych Departure
In short, even if the first task embraced by (1932-193 3) (fig. 4), which effectively con-
the museum is formalist, it need not be the cludes the fifth-floor display, and the bleak
only task. So often other approaches are dis- Picasso canvas Charnel House (1 944-1 945)
missed as "didactic," yet Anglo-American (fig. 5 ), which appears early in the fourth-floor
formalism can be didactic as well (certainly display. However, placed as an envoy to a
Barr understood his own to be), and fre- postwar presentation that is still largely
quently the caution against didacticism only American, Departure asks to be read as an
disguises a condescension toward audience ambiguous allegory of passage from the old
or an apologia for aura. After all, artistic European order to the new American one; its
singularity and historical specificity are force is also muted by other works in the
hardly opposed; on the contrary, aesthetic gallery that bear an illustrational relation to
form registers social particularities and, if disparate events of the period.31 And though
pressured, can reveal them to us.27 This is Charnel House , painted in the mode of Guer-
more true, not less, of abstract art. For nica , has great power, its treatment of mass
example, rather than distanced from the death is quite general, and it too is muted by
world of commerce, such art can be under- adjacent works by Dubuffet, Giacometti,
stood to partake of its abstraction, the and Francis Bacon that allude to trauma in
abstraction of the commodity. As we know, the universal register of existentialism. In
the autonomy of the artwork easily slips short, the midcentury cataclysm is evoked,
into the cult of the commodity, and it does but only abstractly, and in any case the
so at the renovated Modern at a level of installation sweeps up this evocation in a
exquisite sublimation not witnessed hereto- progressive narrative, one that suggests that,
fore: this beautiful space of disinterested despite the devastation of Europe, the best
contemplation is also a great shrine of finan- of its culture was recovered - indeed that
cial fetishes (the priceless masterpieces) and prewar modernism was reborn in a postwar
refined capital (the elegant refashioning of the "Triumph of American Painting," a new
building).28 testament in the modernist dispensation.32
Implicit in this reconstruction story, as we
know, is a liberal ethos that associates
The Cataclysm at Midcentury
modernist experiment with political liberty.
The Modern does acknowledge one great To be sure, this association had its virtues,
event, one traumatic hiatus, but only tacitly. for it challenged the antimodernism of
In keeping with the two previous installa- most totalitarian regimes (and some liberal-
tions, the new presentation breaks at 1940, democratic politicians); and yet, as various
as do most courses in twentieth-century art critics have demonstrated, this association
today, and this break points to the rupture was also exploited by the United States dur-
produced by World War II and the Holocaust ing the cold war (though perhaps not to the
- the rupture of "inner emigration" for some, extent that some have claimed).33 The
exile for many, death for countless others.29 strongest version of this modernist narrative
The break occurs between the fifth and the of historical recovery and political liberty was
fourth floors of the expanded building; apart prepared by Barr at MoMA, developed by
from this architectural divide, viewers might Greenberg in criticism, and affirmed by
not know of this historical trauma, and in Rubin at MoMA. For all three men, advanced
this regard too the new MoMA is in keeping art, especially abstract painting, did not
with the old. For in its affirmative account break with the artistic past but, on the con-
there remains an institutional silence about trary, preserved its greatest qualities through
the cataclysm at midcentury that remains self-critique.34 This construct of "modernist
fundamental to the postwar reconstruction painting" - in which some abstraction came

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to stand for modernism tout court - served abstract painting, which provided a greater 4- Max Beckmann,
to bracket other avant-garde practices, which sense of narrative coherence than could be Departure, 1932-1933, oil
The Museum of Modern Art, New
did indeed posit a break with tradition found elsewhere in the culture,- and, again,York; photograph © 2006 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York /
through such devices as the readymade, con- this effect was instrumental to postwarVG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, licensed by
structed sculpture, the found image, col- reconstruction. Art Resource, New York

lage, and photomontage (as highlighted in The construct of "modernist painting"

Dadaist, constructivist, and surrealist oeu- involved a key displacement and condensa-
vres that Greenberg and others tended to tion of political ambition onto aesthetic
dismiss). Of course, this bracketing was first ambition, of a demand for social transfor-
performed in an earlier instance of artistic mation onto an advocacy of formal innova-
reconstruction, after the rupture of World tion. Greenberg proudly admitted as much
War I; in this respect "modernist painting" in 1957: "Some day it will have to be told
is recuperative in its very historical origins how 'anti-Stalinism/ which started out more
(a point that returns to the previous discus- or less as 'Trotskyism/ turned into 'art for
sion of the Barr criterion of "continuity"). But art's sake,' and thereby cleared the way,
this bracketing was only confirmed in this heroically, for what was to come" - that is,
later instance of reconstruction, after the for modernist painting in postwar Amer-
rupture of World War II, when continuity ica.36 The power of this displacement and
was again disrupted and when a neo-avant- condensation should not be underestimated:
garde recovery of such antitraditional devices it allowed for a notion of a "dialectic of
as the readymade (in the John Cage circle, in modernism" that subsumed "the perpetual
Fluxus, and so on) had to be contained as revolution" of Trotskyite politics into the
well.35 In this way "modernist painting" continuous renovation of Wölfflinian art
served not only to displace avant-garde prac- history.37 (The force of this notion lingered
tices but also, and just as important, to paper into my own generation of artists and crit-
over historical rupture: in effect, this con- ics, for whom "modernist painting" still
struct concentrated history on one medium, offered a semblance of historical purchase

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 and political significance.) Although the rience produced by holocaust - both actual,
Elderfield account of postwar art is less as in the Shoah, and threatened, as with the
Americocentric than previous presentations,nuclear terror that followed.38 Such a search
it still uses the arc of "modernist painting" for radical beginnings in art and architecture
to bridge the midcentury cataclysm - now towould appear not only to register the horror
attest retrospectively to the success of cul- of this brutish history but also to turn away
tural reconstruction. Benign though it mightfrom it, to distance it.
appear in the midst of the Bush empire, this Similarly, one could press the question of
affirmation of the liberal-capitalist order iswhether a traumatic sense of war and holo-
still triumphalist, and it is still at work in the caust was sublimated in the self -presentation
art history intimated at the Modern. of abstract expressionism in terms of the
Such is the first narrative difficulty intragic (fig. 8). The experience of "the abyss"
twentieth-century art studies I have wantedor "the void" in a Pollock, a Newman, a
to underscore here. To attend to this mid- Rothko, or a Gottlieb seems to open onto
century cataclysm is not necessarily to such a historical sublime - that is, to a col-
fetishize trauma or to reduce the historical lective trauma so awesome as to defy rep-
to the traumatic as such (that move tends to resentation.39 But abstract expressionism
disallow narrative altogether), but rather to tends to treat this trauma in a manner at
inquire into the working over of historical once universal and subjective, with the effect
rupture - even historical unrepresentability that viewers can both feel the frisson of this
- in twentieth-century art. With any luck, historical sublime and recoup it as aesthetic
this inquiry might prompt different storiesintensity - and even be empowered along
to be told. For example, one could explore the way (in keeping with the Kantian account
whether the postwar aesthetic of the brut- of the sublime as an eventual bolstering of
ish , as put forth variously in the Art Brut the ego). In short, this great art might produce
advocacy of Dubuffet and others, the neo- a subjective grace transcendental to its his-
5 . Pablo Picasso, Charnel
House, 1944-1945, oil and primitivisms of Cobra artists like Asger Jörn tory, but the precondition of this subjective
charcoal
(fig. 6), and the neobrutalist strategies of grace might well be collective trauma, and
The Museum of Modern Art, New
York; photograph © 2006 Estate of
architects like Peter and Alison Smithson one that is entirely historical.40
Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society
(fig. 7), might be understood as a compli- The other side of this traumatic disconti-
(ARS), New York, licensed by Art
Resource, New York cated response to a pervasive crisis in expe- nuity in some aspects of midcentury cul-
ture is a troublesome continuity in other
aspects of the culture. In order for the liberal
affirmation of modernist art to be viable
politically, it had to be cleansed of fascist
taint on the one hand (as with some futur-
ism), and removed from communist affilia-
tion on the other (as with some Dada and
much constructivism). One effect of this
purge was a tendency to oppose modernism
and totalitarianism bluntly, in a manner
that obscured possible connections between
advanced art and authoritarian politics; this
too is a topos that could be explored further
by artists, curators, and scholars.41 Just as
important, this opposition also occluded
partial commonalities at the level of mass
culture - between, say, the culture indus-
tries of the United States and Nazi Ger-
many. This claim, first made provocatively
by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in
The Dialectic of Enlightenment as early as
1947, also remains to be explored further. (At
a time when a new kind of totalitarian kitsch

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is pervasive in American culture, the thesis
seems less tendentious than it once did.)42
In this case it is hidden continuities, not
denied discontinuities, that might provide a
productive site for critical work and narra-
tive construction alike.43

The Divide at Century's End

For all its aesthetic insights, then, the con-
struct of "modernist painting" also did much
ideological service: it helped to bracket the
rupture with conventional modes of art that
the avant-garde had posited, to paper over the
cataclysm at midcentury, and to occlude the
spread of the culture industry in art institu-
tions and in society at large. However, by the
1960s this construct had broken down as an
engine of practice, and the new MoMA
acknowledges this break too, again tacitly but
emphatically, in its architecture. If the hia-
tus between the prewar and the postwar is
bridged too smoothly from the fifth to the
fourth floor, the gap between the modernist
and the contemporary is not bridged at all: we
just drop from the fourth to the second floor,
where recent art is plopped down in galleries
cavernous enough to contain King Kong - and
contemporary art is indeed the gorilla in all
museums of twentieth-century art (fig. 9).44
This is the second node of narrative diffi-
culty I want to underscore here.
The MoMA curators designate 1970 as
the time of this turn from modernist to con-
temporary art, a dating that is somewhat
arbitrary (again, the construct of modernist
painting was in trouble before then). Of
course they intend this date only as a thresh-
old when medium-specific protocols of art
making, exhibiting, and writing came under
general strain, with the conceptual critique
of the art object, the minimalist opening
onto ambient space, the "expanded field" of
site-specific art, and so on (some of this
work appears on the fourth floor, some on the
second, the division made without apparent
rationale except for considerations of scale).45
Yet even in this respect, the break at 1970
might distract viewers from the more sig-
nificant date of transformation, certainly in
society at large, which is 1968. Although
somewhat mythical today, the events of
1968 did force a crisis in many institutions,
including some within the art world (think,

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6. Asger Jörn, The Timid for example, of the activities of the Art This is a predicament not only for the
Proud One , 1957, oil
on board
Workers Coalition, not to mention the rise Modern but for all museums of twentieth-
Tate Modern, London; photograph of feminist art groups, or indeed of institu- century art. "You can be a museum, or you
Art Resource, New York
tion critique - all spurred, in one way or can be modern, but you can't be both/7
7. Alison and Peter another, by the different movements of the Gertrude Stein once remarked, in a classic
Smithson, Eduardo Paolozzi, New Left). But neither the political events formulation of the historical avant-garde.
and Nigel Henderson, Patio
and Pavilion, 1956, from the nor the artistic developments are explored by Yet, at least in the United States, museum
exhibition This Is Tomorrow, the museum. Again, how to represent these and modem coexisted for some time, and
Whitechapel Gallery, London
Photograph by permission of Simon
phenomena and how to mediate them are dif- MoMA is the primary case in point. The
Smithson ficult questions to answer, but not impossible question for such museums today is differ-
ones to pose: the danger lies at both extremes, ent: can they be both modernist and con-
with too direct a connection claimed or none temporary? Backed by the trustees, MoMA's
at all, and the latter is the case at MoMA. director, Glenn Lowry, has insisted that the
What we are offered there instead is a rather Modern must be both, but this is an over-
random presentation of three or four decades determined decision whose very insistence
of market-tested art, as if 1968, with all its suggests a degree of desperation.47
ramifications, had never occurred. Granted, In part this overdetermination is histori-
much of the art is worthy, and the installa- cal. When the Modern was founded in 1929,
tions in this space are temporary in any no great divide between modernist and con-
case,- nonetheless, if any logic exists here, it temporary yet existed, and as late as 1947
seems to be one of curator and trustee fiat, MoMA agreed to sell to the Metropolitan
with each party given a pick of an artist or Museum artworks that had become estab-
two.46 As a result, the contemporary gal- lished, thereby to remain focused on the
now and the new.48 However, this agree-
leries appear either as a prehistorical pen, a
8. Jackson Pollock, purgatorial space without any historical ment was voided only six years later, and the
One: Number 31 1950, 1950,
oil and enamel on unprimed story yet, or, worse, a posthistorical sand- permanent collection became the central
canvas
box, an entropie space whose narrative ener- concern. The Modern continued to buy and
The Museum of Modern Art, New
gies have already
York; photograph © 2006 The stalled: so much for the old to receive contemporary art not only out of
Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York,
MoMA credo of "the conscientious, con- its old mission of advocacy but out of a new
tinuous,
licensed by Art Resource, New Yorkresolute distinction of quality. " will to power: almost all parties wanted to

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 9- Anish Kapoor, Marsy as,
2003, installation view
Tate Modern, London; photograph
Art Resource, New York

stay in the hunt, in effect to use the mod- MoMA insists on the connection between
ernist reserves to back the contemporary the modernist and the contemporary but
acquisitions, and this strategy holds to this indicates the opposite in the great gap
day. As long as the modernist included the between the modes of presentation for each.
contemporary, the contradictions of this Before the new design was chosen, some
arrangement could be managed; today, how- onlookers counseled a period museum for
ever, no such relation, let alone equation, modernist art in midtown, with another
can be assumed. If it exists at all, it must be structure for contemporary art somewhere
demonstrated. It is not so here: the new else.49 Essentially that is what we have now,

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io. Rosalind Krauss, the historical avant-garde, it also recovered
Klein diagram
From "Sculpture in the Expanded
the devices of this practice - indeed, in some
Field," October 8 (Spring 1979): 37 cases, it turned them into conventions.53
The doubling of modernism by postmod-
ernism might be indicated through a signal
account that, like the new MoMA, takes
1970 as an artistic threshold. In "Sculpture
in the Expanded Field" (1979), Rosalind
Krauss presented a structuralist account of
site-specific practice that developed out
of minimalism: neither modernist painting
nor modernist sculpture, such art emerged
but within the same building, where the as the negative of these categories, accord-
modernist and the contemporary are effec- ing to Krauss, and soon opened onto other
tively forced together in a shotgun marriage categories, such as "architecture" and "land-
dressed up as a Cinderella ball. Yet the split scape" and "not-architecture" and "not-
here is not only between the modernist and landscape" (fig. 10). 54 These terms provided
the contemporary: within the painting and the points of reference by which the new
sculpture galleries alone, there are several dif- practices could then be plotted - practices of
ferent modalities of space - white cubes in "marked sites" between landscape and not-
the upper galleries, the spectacular space of landscape (as with much work by Robert
the atrium, the vast space of the Contem- Smithson), "site constructions" between
porary Galleries, the black box of the New landscape and architecture (as with much by
Media Gallery - and there are tensions within Mary Miss), and "axiomatic structures"
each.50 One could make a virtue of these con- between architecture and not-architecture (as
tradictions and stage the diverse spectator- with much by Sol Le Witt).55 The particulars
ships evoked by the different practices - of this account are not my concern here,-
thereby to show, for example, how Dada what is significant is how it suggests that
solicits an active response, whereas cubism postmodernist art was initially propped on
intimates an analytical one,- how minimal- modernist categories (with all the ambigu-
ism delineates space precisely, whereas ity of dependence and independence implied
projected-image art produces an immersive by this word), but that it soon "troped" these
environment; and so on.51 As it is, how- categories, in the sense that it treated them
ever, spaces and spectatorships collide with as so many foreclosed practices or given
one another in a sequence of shocks that terms to be manipulated as such. This map-
are likely to exhaust viewers more than ping might also be used to register certain
enlighten them. shifts over the past four decades, for in some
ways this expanded field of art has now
Like the first narrative difficulty, the cat-
aclysm at midcentury, this second one, the imploded, as terms once held in signifi-
divide between the modernist and the con- cant tension have collapsed into arbitrary
temporary, might prompt productive work in compounds - as in the many combinations
practice, curation, and scholarship.52 Cer-of the pictorial and the sculptural, or of art
tainly it compels a reconsideration of twoand design, in contemporary production (fig.
models of postwar art that have guided many11). (There are exceptions here, of course, but
artists and critics over the past three decades:they are exceeded by examples of static pas-
postmodernism and the neo-avant-garde.tiche, which represents postmodernism tout
Both models worked to open up a space for court for many viewers.) This is but one
contemporary practice, yet, despite thisindication of how postmodernist art, which
shared rhetoric of aesthetic rupture, eachemerged as a troping of modernist categories,
was also connective: even as postmodernism now appears to be trumped in turn, as our
sought to leave modernist painting behind, design-and-spectacle culture routinizes its
it carried this construct forward as a dis- original disruptions (fig. 12). 56
cursive point of purchase; and even as the The model of a formalist modernism chal-
neo-avant-garde sought to move beyondlenged by an expansive postmodernism no

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 1 1 . Jessica Stockholder,
Your Skin This Weather
Bourne Eye-Threads e)
Swollen Perfume , 1995-1996,
installation view
Dia Art Foundation, New York, and
Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York;
© Jessica Stockholder,- photograph
Cathy Carver

12. Jorge Pardo, Project, 2000

Dia Art Foundation, New York, and
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York;
photograph Cathy Carver

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 longer drives important developments in art practice of everyday life - recouped it for
or in criticism, and the same can be said of the very institution that was to be chal-
the historical double of postmodernism, the lenged in the first place.
model of a prewar avant-garde recovered by Critics have exposed the historical lacunae
a postwar neo-avant-garde (that is, of Dadaist in this argument and posed other models of
devices or constructivist structures, say, neo-avant-garde repetition.58 More impor-
recovered in Fluxus or minimalism). Like the tant, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed critical
discussion of postmodernism, the debate elaborations of neo-avant-garde practices,
about the neo-avant-garde runs back at least and the 1990s and 2000s saw various attempts
to the 1960s when, for radical critics like Guy to recover unfinished projects of the 1960s
Debord, the avant-garde was already bank- and 70s as well - to set up a further "neo"
rupt as an agent of transformation. "Dadaism relation of recovery vis-à-vis occluded work
sought to abolish art without realizing it," of the recent past (fig. 13). But to what extent
Debord wrote in The Society of the Specta- can this recent past serve as a basis for con-
cle (1967), "and Surrealism sought to realize temporary work? So much art of that era
art without abolishing it."57 These failures was antifoundational in nature, concerned to
were reciprocal for Debord, and any attempt exceed given mediums or to replace them
to revive such strategies, as in the various with new techniques, and, for all its desire
neo-Dadas and neo-surrealisms of the 1950s to be transparent to its public, it was more
and 60s, were farcical: far better to have often opaque in this very antifoundational-
done with the artistic avant-garde and to ism (with consequences for art audiences
turn to direct political action. This posi- today). One result is that today the recursive
tion, which evokes the famous charge of strategy of the "neo" often appears as atten-
Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis uated as the oppositional logic of the "post"
Bonaparte (1852) - that history occurs twice, often seems tired: neither suffices as a strong
the first time as tragedy, the second time as paradigm for practice.
farce - was upheld by Peter Bürger in his Yet is ours truly a period without para-
1 3 . Sam Durant, Reflected influential Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). digms, of so many scattered projects (as was
Upside Down and In fact, Bürger extended this critique. The suggested at the outset)? Are we simply
Backwards , 1999, wood,
acrylic, asphalt, and CD
repetition of the historical avant-garde in swamped in the double wake of post-
players the neo-avant-garde was not only farcical; it modernism and the neo-avant-garde? If this
Collection of Gaby and Wilhelm
Schürmann, Aachen, Germany;
also reversed the original project to reconnect were strictly the case, such surveys as one
courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles the institution of autonomous art with the finds in the contemporary galleries at MoMA
might be excused as reportorial rather than
decried as symptomatic. However weak in
comparison with postmodernism and the
neo-avant-garde, some models do exist, albeit
provisional and partial ones, and there is
some commonality in practices that take
up ethnographic procedures of fieldwork,
archival methods of research, navigational
metaphors in new media, and so on: they
want only further critical articulation and
curatorial application. Some narratives also
await further tracing and testing. A partial
geneaology of advanced art could be charted
through various notions of "site" developed
over the past four decades - from physical
locations through institutional parameters
and discursive spaces to the controversial
proposal of "relational" situations set up
in many exhibitions today. Another par-
tial genealogy could be traced through var-
ious understandings of the body - from its

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full-blooded presence in performance art
in the 1960s and 1970s through its sexual
complication in the early 1980s and its staged
abjection in the early 1990s to its apparent
virtualization in much contemporary work.
Yet another story might be told through var-
ious transformations of the image from Pop
to the present.59
Narratives, grand and otherwise, can be
oppressive, yet all of us need stories - situated
ones, critical ones - to focus our practices.
Without such stories we are left open to just
one narrative, perhaps the grandest of all,
that continues unabated, even unabashed:
the narrative of modernization. In the first
decades of the twentieth century, many mod-
ernists were seized by its dynamic of tech-
nological transformation, imperial conquest,
and social upheaval, and they responded
with varieties of "futurism," "primitivism,"
and "constructivism." Today this dynamic
has reached a far more penetrative register
of media, market, and empire (already nat-
uralized as "globalization"), and some artists
again struggle to address it. Often these
responses are far from critical: witness all the
elaborate installations, often with projected
images, that produce immersive experiences
in which representation and space, media and
body, are no longer felt to be distinct. Such
projects might engage the new intensity of
spectacle that accompanies the new level of
modernization, but frequently they do so in
a way that simply acclimatizes us to it aes-
thetically (fig. 14). 60 Other practices are
more reflexive on this score. Consider, as just
one kind of instance, the disjunctive com- and others (fig. 15). In its articulate mix of 14. Olafur Eliasson,
The Weather Project,
bination of advanced and archaic means, of modes, the best of this work refuses the 2003-2004, installation view
new and outmoded media, put into prac- totality of any one version of spectacle,- andTate Modern, London; photograph
Art Resource, New York
tice variously by William Kentridge, Tacita in its ethnographic and archival methods, it
Dean, Thomas Hirshhorn, Gabriel Orozco, seeks out possibilities for the future in pos-
Pierre Huyghe, Stan Douglas, Matthew sibilities overlooked in the present or lost in
Buckingham, Joachim Koester, Sam Durant, the past.

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1 5 . Matthew Buckingham,
The Six Grandfathers (also
known as Slaughterhouse
Peak, Cougar Mountain,
and now Mount Rushmore)
in the year s 02,002 C.E.,
2002, black and white digital
c-print
Courtesy of Murray Guy, New York

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NOTES 8. Barr 1986, 91. Here Barr also alludes to Apollo and
Dionysus, that is, to Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of
i. See E. H. Gombrich, "In Search of Cultural His- clearly, this dialectic is on his mind.
Tragedy;
tory" (1967), in Ideals and Idols: Essays on Values
in History and in Art (London, 1979); Linda 9. Nochlin,
Barr aestheticizes "machine art" in the extreme:
"Why Are There No Great Woman Artists?" his(1971),
foreword to the catalogue is a litany of the "beau-
in Women , Art , and Power and Other Essays ties" of machine objects. "Our whole aim," Johnson
(New-
York, 1988); and Jean-François Lyotard, The remarked
Post- decades later to Sybil Kantor, "Hitchcock's
modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge and mine[,] was to beat out the functionalists." And
(1979),
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi further:
(Min- "We wrote against the constructivists." See
Kantor 2002, 292, 298.
neapolis, 1984). An ambivalence toward historical
narrative is a leitmotif of my text; suffice it10.
toIn
say
"Cubism and Abstract Art," Barr terms it (the
at the outset that attitudes toward such narrative
Cézanne-cubist-geometrical line) "more important"
are specific to time and place, to discourse and (Barr 1986, 90). In his introduction to Defining Mod-
institution.
ern Art, Irving Sandler disputes this view, but not
2. Feminist and poststructuralist critics can hardlypersuasively.
be blamed for this relativism (as neoconservatives Ii. Barr, quoted in Grunenberg 1999, 36; Barr,
are wont to assert); moreover, they were essential to
"Chronicle of the Collection of Painting and Sculp-
whatever reinvigoration the discipline of art history
ture [1940-1963]," reprinted in The Museum of
experienced over the past three decades. Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad,
3. The historiography of modernist art is makeshift, ed. John Elderfield (New York, 1994), 183. No
more so than that of modern architecture. There doubt political events in Europe in the 1930s and
some of the greatest practitioners - Le Corbusier and 1940s - and, even before, the antimodernist reactions
Walter Gropius, to name just two - produced early in the 1920s - pressured this pledge (more on which
accounts and were quickly championed by peer his- below).
torians like Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner. 12. Grunenberg 1999, 36.
The dominant narratives of modernist art, on the
other hand, have stemmed from curatorial and criti- 13. See Kantor 202, 159. In their territoriality, how-
cal figures - in the United States, Alfred H. Barr Jr. ever, these departmental divisions are not evocative
of the Bauhaus.
and Clement Greenberg above all.
In my discussion of MoMA I have drawn espe- 14. Elderfield comments: "Of course, Barr - and
cially on John Elderfield, Modern Painting and Sculp-therefore his successors - inherited the formalist
ture: 1880 to the Present at the Museum of Modern context of Fry and the Bauhaus, which shaped the
Art (New York, 2004); Mary Anne Staniszewski, Theinstitution. And Barr's obsession with genealogy is
Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installa- simultaneous with the so-called neo-Darwinian
tions at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, Modern Synthesis of 1930s and 1940s paleontology,
Mass., 1998); Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.,
which combined Darwinism and Mendelian genetics
and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Mod-to offer the view of a single-evolving human lineage"
ern Art (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); and Christoph (Elderfield 2004, 25). Barr once contemplated a career
Grunenberg, "The Modern Art Museum," in Con- as a paleontologist.
temporary Cultures of Display, ed. Emma Barker
(New Haven, 1999). 1 5 . In fact Morey had first attracted Barr to art his-
tory through his contextual approach to medieval art;
4. See Alfred H. Barr Jr., "A New Art Museum" this interest persisted for Barr, but it was submerged
(1929), in Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of in his curatorial practice.
Alfred. H. Barr, Jr., ed. Irving Sandler and Amy New-
man (New York, 1986). 16. See Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting"
([i960] 1965), in Modernism with a Vengeance
5 . Barr showed great interest in other avant-gardes, 1957-1969, in The Collected Essays and Criticism,
but not always as a collector or curator: see, for 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian (Chicago, 1993), 4:85-93.
example, his "Russian Diary," in Barr 1986. On sig-
nificant gaps in the collection, see Elderfield 2004, 17. Elderfield 2004, 25. Kantor observes: "He consis-
37. Barr is described in the aforementioned terms in tently filled in the collections with 'pioneer' works
both Kantor 2002 and Elderfield 2004. that had precipitated a moment of change" (Kantor
2002, 369).
6. His first exhibition, at Wellesley College in 1927,
was titled Exhibition of Progressive Modern Paint- 18. Barr 1986, 139. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
ing: From Daumier and Corot to Post-cubism. "Cold War Constructivism," in Reconstructing
Modernism, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, Mass.,
7. In September 2005, a slight adjustment in the ini-1990); and Hal Foster, "The Uses and Abuses of Rus-
tial gallery highlighted this complication with the sian Constructivism," in Art into Life: Russian Con-
addition of such figures as Édouard Vuillard, Edvard structivism 1914-1932, ed. Richard Andrews (Seattle,
Munch, James Ensor, Henri Matisse, and André 1990).
Derain.

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19- See Alfred H. Barr Jr., "Art at Mid-Century/' in 27. For an incisive argument from this position, see
Art since 1900: Modernism, Anti-Modernism, Post- Yve- Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge,
modernism, ed. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve- Mass., 1990), xi-xxx.
Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (London,
28. I quote from my original review, "It's Modern
2004). This approach favored the "white cube" mode
but Is It Contemporary?" in the London Review of
of gallery presentation, with its contemplative spec-
Books 26, no. 24 (December 16, 2004): 23-2$: "In
tatorship. In the 53rd Street building, Barr did much
a sense abstraction still rules [at MoMA], but it
to establish this mode of exhibition against both old
is not the pictorial-spiritual variety of the White on
Salon precedents and new avant-garde alternatives; White of Malevich - it is architectural-financial.
on this point see Staniszweski 1998 and Grunenberg
'Raise a lot of money for me, I'll give you good
1999.
architecture/ Taniguchi is said to have said to the
20. One example of a weird juxtaposition is Roberttrustees. 'Raise even more money, I'll make the
Delaunay next to Marc Chagall, and a misleading architecture disappear.' . . . 'Transcendent aesthetic
one is Ellsworth Kelly next to Hans Hoffmann. The experience' in its privileged form of immaculate spa-
curators changed things a little as of September 2005tial effect sure does cost a lot. And that is the defini-
tive quality of the new MoMA: a sublimation that is
(entirely so in the contemporary galleries). The place-
ment of Claude Monet, Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and at once aesthetic, architectural, and financial."
others between Dada and constructivism on the one
29. The brochure for this floor does cite Theodor
side and Mondrian on the other is unexpected, to be
Adorno on the impossibility of lyric poetry after
sure, but to what end?
Auschwitz, yet this misunderstood line has become
21. On the other hand, extended coverage can thin rote, almost ritual - a kind of kitsch lyric of its own.
out epochal work. For example, however welcome,
30. See Barr 2004, 320.
the new additions to the Pop room weaken the
impact of Andy Warhol (one would not know at 3 1 . These include Diego Rivera's Agrarian Leader
MoMA that he is to the generations of the 1970s and Zapata (1931), Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus Stairway
1980s what Jackson Pollock was to the generations (1932), and various tableaux from the Migrations
of the 1950 and 1960s). Series (1 940-1 941) by Jacob Lawrence (concerning
the northward movement of African Americans).
22. Of course one cannot exhibit what one does
Such juxtapositions are provocative, but the
not have; that plain fact must qualify any critique.
rationale is not clear (unless it is simply that the
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh underscores the agonistic
new MoMA is not altogether hostile to committed
dimension of modernism in his review of the new
figuration).
Modern, "Our Own Private Modernism," Artforum
(February 2005): 140-142, 201, 206. See also Yve- 32. In his book on the abstract expressionists, The
Alain Bois, "Embarrassing Riches," pages 137-139, Triumph of American Painting (New York, 1970),
194, and 200-201 in the same issue. Irving Sandler reiterated the story elaborated by
Greenberg and others in large part out of the materi-
23. On this issue of affirmation, recall the Primi-
als provided by Barr.
tivism show of 1984, which framed the imperial
encounter with tribal cultures as a benign exchange 33. See Max Kozloff, "American Painting During the
of artistic forms, or the High eû Low show of 1990, Cold War" (1973); Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expres-
which presented the social war between high art and sionism: Weapon of the Cold War" (1974); David and
popular culture as a benign exchange of source Cecile Shapiro, "Abstract Expressionism: The Poli-
images. tics of Apolitical Painting" (1977), all reprinted in
Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical
24. See Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We
Debate (New York, 1985); and Serge Guilbaut, How
Sayl A Book of Essays (New York, 1969), 188; and
New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract
Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and
Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War
Reviews (Chicago, 1998), 1-74.
(Chicago, 1983). For partial ripostes, see Elderfield
25. Barr can be surprising here: for example, his 2004 and Michael Kimmelman, "Revisiting the Revi-
introduction to Cubism and Abstract Art contains a sionists: The Modern, its Critics, and the Cold War,"
section on politics that is incisive for its time. in Elderfield 1994.

26. Here again the divide between the modernist 34. Greenberg in "Modernist Painting": "I cannot
and the contemporary might be somewhat narrowed. insist enough that Modernism has never meant, and
This approach might have other benefits as well, does not mean now, anything like a break with the
past" (Greenberg 1993, 4:92). My argument here is
such as a rethinking of our default understanding of
art, modernist and other, as redemptive, somehow not meant to take anything away from this great art
compensatory to a life thus deemed damaged or but simply to point to its discursive and institutional
otherwise incomplete. See Leo Bersani, The Culture framing.
of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
35. In other words, this second reduction was in line
with the first - the reduction of Dada and surrealism
(with their politics of the body and the unconscious)

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to "nongeometrical abstraction," and of construc- 44. Contemporary art is also the elephant in the
tivism and the Bauhaus (with their transformation room of art history, for so large is it that, like the
of art and design) into "geometrical abstraction." In blind men in the fable, even putative experts describe
the first instance, Barr insisted on modernist conti- different beasts from the little bits they happen to
nuity in the face of the antimodernist "return to touch. Indeed, if the first premise of art history is a
order," and in the second instance, Greenberg did the semblance of continuity, and the second is (as Wölf-
same, also in the face of antimodernist regionalisms. flin put it famously in his Principles of Art History of
191 5) that "not all things are possible at all times,"
36. Clement Greenberg, "The Late Thirties in New
both appear to be challenged in the present, for good
York" ([1957] 1960), in Art and Culture: Critical
and for bad, with the result that, for some commen-
Essays (Boston, 1961), 230. Typically, here his rhetor-
tators, art history has become as problematic as con-
ical construction delivers the argument as fact with-
temporary art. See Hans Belting, Art History after
out any demonstration. Encoded in this one-sentence
Modernism (Chicago, 2003).
definition of "Elio tic Trotskyism" (as T. J. Clark once
termed it) is a dismantling of the Leftist art commu- 45. For example, though they are peers in practice
nity, in New York and elsewhere, over this period and in prestige, Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman,
(Greenberg wrote this line well after the fall of and Eva Hesse are represented on the fourth floor,
Joseph McCarthy). In his essay in the present vol- while Richard Serra's work is placed on the second.
ume, Michael Leja suggests how this substitution of In a 1974 interview in Artforum, William Rubin vol-
culture for class runs deep in American society. unteered that "the dividing line" might be seen "as
between those works which essentially continue an
37. See Michael Fried, "Three American Painters:
easel painting concept, " dependent on private collec-
Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella" (1965),
tions and "the museum concept," and those works
in Fried 1998, 217-218.
which break with this line: "Earthworks, Conceptual
38. This kind of mimesis might be defensive, but it Works and Related Endeavors" ("Talking with
might also be critical (especially when it runs to par- William Rubin: The Museum Concept Is Not Infi-
odie excess); it might also be both at the same time. nitely Expandable/" Artforum 12 [October 1974]:
Here I follow Walter Benjamin in his discussion of 51-54).
modernist elaborations of "a poverty of experience"
46. I write here only of the first installation, which
after World War I; see Selected Writings , Volume 2:
appeared from November 2004 to September 2005.
1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland,
Subsequent installations have compensated for this
and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 731-736.
first one, sometimes with more political work, some-
Also see Hal Foster, "Dada Mime," October 105
times with more thematic surveys.
(Summer 2003): 166-176. As intimated here, some
materials for such a study can be found in the new 47. Perhaps a new need for belief arises, here less in
installation. modernist art per se than in its continued pertinence
to contemporary art. On the relation between the
39. These terms crop up frequently in the texts of
modernist and the contemporary at MoMA, see
abstract expressionists, especially Newman. See
Elderfield 2004, 17, 22-23, 52~53; on this relation as
Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism:
treated at another institution see Elisabeth Sussman,
Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven,
ed., Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston
1993)-
(Boston, 1985).
40. See "Art and Objecthood" (1967), in Fried 1998, The question of continued pertinence is raised in
168. the current debate over pictorial (often digital) pho-
tography in the manner of Jeff Wall. For some critics,
41. The most prominent accounts in this vein tend
such work signals a recovery of the tradition of mod-
to the reactive opposite, that is, to collapse the mod-
ernist painting: painting returns, as it were, in,
ernist and the totalitarian. See, for example, Boris
indeed as, photography. For others it is not much
Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde,
more than a return to Salon pastiche.
Aesthetic Dictatorship , and Beyond (Princeton,
1992). For a good example of a text that neither 48. The arrangement was loosely modeled on the old
opposes nor collapses the two, see Peter Hahn, relationship between the Musée Luxembourg and the
"Bauhaus and Exile: Bauhaus Architects and Design- Musée du Louvre, whereby works were sifted out at
ers between the Old World and the New," in Exiles + the former and, if found worthy, transferred to the
Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, Louvre ten years after the death of the artist.
ed. Stephanie Barron [exh. cat., Los Angeles County
49. It is a structure, however, given more importance
Museum of Art] (Los Angeles, 1997).
than the adjunct status of the P.S. 1 Contemporary
42. See my "Yellow Ribbons, " London Review of Books Art Center. See "The MoMA Expansion: A Conversa-
27, no. 13 (July 7, 2005). tion with Terence Riley," October 84 (Spring 1998):
3-30.
43. Again, attitudes toward narrative cannot be
fixed: for example, one can both oppose the false
continuity of "modernist painting" and question the
celebrated discontinuity of postmodernist art (more
on which below).

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50. The profusion of projected images has forced the 57. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967),
demand for the black box. Such spaces might present trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, Mass.,
a more profound problem for the white cube of the 1994), 136.
modernist museum than that created by the
58. See, for example, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-
"expanded field of sculpture/' which, posed against
Avant-Garde Art and the Culture Industry: Essays
(or beyond) the white cube, was still articulated in
relation to it.
on European and American Art from 19 55 to 197$
(Cambridge, Mass., 2000), and Hal Foster, The Return
5 1 . This is to say nothing of other kinds of spec- of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Cen-
tatorship in play here, from the receptions sponsored tury (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). In response, see Peter
by corporate patrons in the atrium to the pilgrimages Bürger, "On a Critique of the Neo-Avant-Garde," in
of tourists to view the priceless masterpieces: the Jeff Wall Photographs, ed. Edelbart Köb (Cologne,
spectacle of the new building cannot conceal how 2003).
riven this public is by differences of class, race, and
59. In the future retrospective, these latter two lines
nationality.
might even be reclaimed, problematically enough, for
52. Perhaps in some way the second difficulty is a the histories of painting and sculpture. For more on
deferred expression of the first, as if the traumatic the ethnographic, the archival, the site- specific, and
break at midcentury, repressed in part, returned in the navigational, see, respectively, Foster 1996; Hal
this different guise as an artistic divide at century's Foster, "The Archival Impulse," October no (Fall
end. 2004): 3-22. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another:
Site- Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cam-
53. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974),
bridge, Mass., 2002]; and David Joselit, "Navigating
trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, 1984).
the New Territory: Art, Avatars, and the Contempo-
54. See Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded rary Mediascape," Artforum (Summer 2005):
Field," October 8 (Winter 1979): 30-44. The next 276-279.
three paragraphs are adapted from "This Funeral Is
60. In this regard, "visualization" might be to the
for the Wrong Corpse," in Hal Foster, Design and
early twenty-first century what "abstraction" was to
Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London, 2002).
the early twentieth, with a similar set of reflections
5 5 . Suffice it to say that to structuralize is often to and resistances in art. See n. 28 above.
dehistoricize, as it is explicitly here for Krauss, who
hypostatizes terms like architecture and landscape.
If some of these practices were structuralist in spirit,
might they have also set up a space of stasis that in
turn prepared the condition of entropy we seem to
witness in art today? Here once more, Robert Smith-
son seems particularly prescient.
56. There is a certain relation between the expanded
field of art and the expanded scale of art museums.
See Foster 2002, 27-42.

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