ART SINCE 1900: MODERNISM, ANTIMODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM / Hal Foster, Rosalind

Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh.—New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, dist. by W. W. Norton,
March 2005.—704 p.: ill.—ISBN 0-500-23818-9: $85.00.

Written by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D.

Buchloh, art history faculty at Princeton University, Columbia University, Harvard
University and Barnard College respectively, this chronological survey is organized into
107 entries that focus on “key moments” in the history of twentieth- and twenty first-
century art. The authors define a key moment as “the creation of a groundbreaking work,
the publication of a seminal text, the opening of a crucial exhibition, or another significant
event”. Broken into two halves separated chronologically by World War II, this book is
available alternatively in a two-volume format. Geometric symbols in the text margins
provide pertinent cross-references to other articles (but not to page numbers), so the
intrepid reader can trace developments along national and transnational lines, group entries
according the thematic concerns or, of special concern to the authors, illuminate “the theoretical methods that
have framed the manifold practices" of art in the twentieth century and beyond.
Four unsigned introductory essays set the stage for the analysis used throughout the text:
psychoanalysis, social history, formalism and structuralism, and poststructuralism and deconstruction. The
authors claim that even though these methodologies might seem at counter-purposes, their clash instead
engenders a “dialogical” approach to analysis. Two roundtables, "Art at Mid-Century" and "The Predicament
of Contemporary Art," give the authors the opportunity to conduct this dialogue among themselves and for the
reader to glean the individual theoretical leanings of each. Indeed, it is only in the second roundtable that the
author of each introductory essay is revealed.
This survey breaks new ground in its overall application of theory to twentieth-century art and, as the
authors claim, in the way a discussion of photography is “woven into the text.” But given the book’s very
strong emphasis on theoretical analysis, it is difficult to figure who its projected audience might be. Ostensibly
a survey textbook, understanding it nonetheless presupposes that the reader already has a substantial grounding
in art theory. As much as the introductions attempt to establish a basis for the ensuing discussion, even these
are not accessible to the novice. It is unlikely most undergraduates, for example, will parse thoughts such as
this one: “Any attempt to transform autonomy into a transhistorical, if not ontological precondition of aesthetic
experience, however, is profoundly problematic.”
Definitions of terms and movements are often missing or oblique. Divisionism, for example, is referred
to as “. . . the idea that the eye could perform something like the prismatic decomposition of light in reverse,
that the ‘divided’ colors would resynthesize on the retina in order to attain the luminosity of the sun. . . .”
Missing from the discussion is any reference to how this effect is formally realized in the paintings of Georges
Seurat. The glossary, composed of entries that range from 60 to over 300 words, does not help illuminate these
gaps in the text; important and frequently used terms such as avant-garde are not defined, while anomie,
entropy and phallogocentrism are.
This book complements standard surveys with more narrative structures, such as H. H. Arnason’s
History of Modern Art (Upper Saddle River, N.J. : Prentice Hall, 2004), and extends years of coverage through
2003. The 637 illustrations, over 400 of them in color, add significantly to its appeal and value. It is
recommended for academic, museum and larger public libraries that already have other twentieth-century
surveys in their collections.

Tom Riedel, Distance Services Librarian, Dayton Memorial Library, Regis University, triedel@regis.edu