ART, HISTORY OF....

For all the immediacy and force of so much great art, many of us welcome the instruction of connoisseurs and historians like H.W. Janson, whose famous "History of Art" first appeared in 1962. Such surveys have their shortcomings, of course, but they often help to make art more fully comprehensible, placing it in a narrative line, highlighting interpretive detail, guiding our untrained eye to see a great deal more than we would otherwise see.
Janson's book was for years a staple of art-history classrooms, and efforts like it have followed since, some concentrating less on the entire sweep of Western art than on some period within it, like H.H. Arnason's "History of Modern Art." Now we have "Art Since 1900" (Thames & Hudson, 704 pages, $85)--all 704 oversize pages of it, with 637 reproductions. It appears to be the latest such book, bidding to be a magisterial guide to the art of the modern period, broadly defined. What are we to make of it?

It helps to begin by looking at a small but telling detail, like the smile on Leonardo's "Mona Lisa"--the index, in this case. If you thought Picasso and Matisse were the most important figures in 20th-century art, you might want to adjust your scale of values. For the authors, Marcel Duchamp--the man who put a urinal on a pedestal and called it art--is the reigning deity. He garners more references than either Picasso or Matisse. Among critics, Clement Greenberg is awarded due recognition (35 citations). But he must share space with the likes of Walter Benjamin (30), Michel Foucault (24) and Jacques Derrida (10). Then there are entries on topics you don't normally find in art books: "castration anxiety" (nine entries), "fetish, fetishism" (26) and "Oedipus complex" (eight). What exactly is going on here?
Call it the mainstreaming of postmodernism--and a play for the college-textbook market. Since the early 1980s, the authors have been at the forefront of "the new art history," an interpretive school whose fullest expression can be found in October magazine, a quarterly they founded in 1976. (The name is meant to evoke revolutionary associations.) It was in October that Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh led the charge against the traditional, aesthetic appreciation of art, supplanting it with psychoanalysis, political ideologies such as Marxism and various forms of French theory, like those derived from linguistics. According to this school of thought, a painting isn't merely an abstract or representational image on canvas but a social "text" to be interpreted and deconstructed.
"Art Since 1900" begins by offering four "methodological introductions." The idea is to prepare the reader, if possible, by explaining the different modes of interpretation that the authors will use--for instance, "formalism and structuralism." A good thing, too, because forewarned is forearmed.
Did you think that Picasso's wonderful 1942 sculpture "Bull's Head"--in which a bike's saddle serves as the bull's head and its handlebars the horns--was a brilliant feat of prestidigitation, in which the forms of one thing are transfigured into another? Well, you were wrong, or at least naive. Here is what the authors say: "This metaphoric transformation indicates that, contra [Roman] Jacobson, Picasso is not bound to the metonymic pole. Instead, he seems to particularly relish composite structures that are both metaphoric and metonymic."
Such prose can be found throughout the book. The funny part is that, when you parse the passage from which this excerpt is taken, it comes to something much simpler, something close to, well, "a brilliant feat of prestidigitation transforming one thing into another." The authors routinely dress up commonplace observations in the jargon of theory. Just as often, they mix obscurantism with ideology. The Guggenheim Museum's plan to expand its New York landmark into a series of international satellites is, according to the authors, nothing more than "the forced unlocking of noninvested surplus capital and the propulsion of it into motion. This is the way late capitalism has industrialized sectors of social life--such as leisure, sport, and art--hitherto thought impenetrable by industry's hallmarks: mechanization, standardization, overspecialization, and division of labor."
As for the evolution of painting and sculpture, "Art Since 1900" presents a familiar "postmodern" narrative. Essentially, the authors see art proceeding more or less as we have been given to understand--Cézanne's late work to Cubism to abstraction--until the antimodernist reaction of Marcel Duchamp and his "Readymades" (commercial objects transferred to the gallery or museum). These overturned the idea of a subjective, individually invented style as the vehicle of artistic content. And indeed, one probably does have to accord Duchamp a large measure of recognition since--by making art a kind of joke on its own higher aspirations--he exercised a considerable, if baleful, influence on the artists who came after him.
For the authors, painting all but came to an end in the early 1960s. It was then that, in the authors' view, Conceptual Art triumphed over orthodox painting and sculpture. About the only "major" artists that they consider worth discussing after 1965 are: Josef Beuys, who parlayed the story of his rescue as a downed Luftwaffe pilot in World War II into a career as performance artist; Hans Haacke, whose "project" involved creating photographic installations to expose the allegedly nefarious economic and political underpinnings of contemporary life; body artists like Vito Acconci, one of whose works consisted of biting himself all over, inking the toothmarks and printing them on paper; and Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman, who have used photography to "critique" fine art and consumer culture.

It's one thing to include these people in a history of modern art--they have, after all, acquired considerable reputations. But to do so to the exclusion of figures of equal or greater importance--Richard Diebenkorn, Fairfield Porter, Brice Marden, William Bailey, Chuck Close--is a fatal flaw. "Art Since 1900" presents a history so skewed as to be nearly useless.
Indeed, "Art Since 1900" is less a historical narrative than an extended piece of art criticism arguing for a particular point of view. In this one respect the book has something in common with Paul Johnson's recent "Art: A New History." The difference is that Mr. Johnson's approach is traditional and art itself is, for him, front and center; his insights grow out of his close look at the works of art that he is writing about. In "Art Since 1900" works of art are subordinated to one theory or another, reduced to little more than illustrations. And most of the theory itself is tendentious in the extreme, pushing a political "reading" of culture that amounts to a tired paean to Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin.
It's appalling to think that a book like this may enter classrooms and inflict itself on young minds with little or no acquaintance with art history. So I have a suggestion for parents of high-school students: Find out whether the college that your child hopes to attend plans to assign "Art Since 1900" in its art-history courses. If so, apply elsewhere.