SINCE

1900
ART
MODERNISM
ANTIMODERNISM
POSTMODERNISM
SINCE
1900
ART
MODERNISM
ANTIMODERNISM
POSTMODERNISM
HAL FOSTER
ROSALIND
KRAUSS
YVE
-
ALAIN
BOIS
BENJAMIN H. D.
BUCHLOH
DAVID JOSELIT
HAL FOSTER
ROSALIND
KRAUSS
YVE
-
ALAIN
BOIS
BENJAMIN H. D.
BUCHLOH
DAVID JOSELIT
art since 1900
modernism, antimodernism, postmodernism
Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois,
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, David Joselit
Groundbreaking in both its content and its presentation,
Art Since 1900 has been hailed as a landmark study in the
history of art. Conceived by four of the most inuential art
historians of our time, this extraordinary book has now been
revised, expanded and brought right up to date to include
the latest developments in contemporary art. For the new
edition, theoriginal authors Foster, Krauss, Bois andBuchloh
have been joined by Professor Joselit to provide the most
comprehensive critical history of art in the twentieth
and twenty-rst centuries ever published.
With a clear year-by-year structure, the authors present more
than one hundred and twenty articles, each focusing on a crucial
event such as the creation of a seminal work, the publication
of an important text, or the opening of a major exhibition to
tell the myriad stories of art from I,oo to the present. All the
key turning-points and breakthroughs of modernism and
postmodernism are explored in depth, as are the frequent
antimodernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art
and the world. This expanded edition contains new essays on the
De Stijl movement, the use of mannequins and the automaton in
Dada, and modernist graphic design between the wars, as well as
discussions of the global emergence of Chinese artists in recent
years, the inuence of gaming and social network technologies,
and the impact of the market on current practice.
The books exible structure and extensive cross-referencing
enable readers to plot their own course through the century and
to follow any one of the many narratives that unfold, be it the
history of a medium such as painting, the development of art
in a particular country, the inuence of a movement such as
Surrealism, or the emergence of a stylistic or conceptual body of
work such as abstraction or minimalism. Illustrating the text are
reproductions of more than seven hundred of the canonical (and
anti-canonical) works of the century. A four-part introduction
sets out the methodologies that govern the discipline of art
history, informing and enhancing the readers understanding
of its practice today. Two roundtable discussions consider some
of the questions raised by the preceding decades and look ahead
to the future. Background information on key events, places
and people is provided in boxes throughout the book, while an
expanded glossary, full bibliography and list of websites add
to the reference value of this outstanding volume.
Acclaimed as the denitive work on the subject, Art Since
is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the
complexities of art in the modern age.
With , illustrations, ,Io in colour
Hal Foster is Townsend Martin I, Professor of Art and
Archaeology at Princeton University. His many books
include Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics;
The Anti-Aesthetic; The Return of the Real; Compulsive
Beauty; Design and Crime; and Prosthetic Gods.
Rosalind Krauss is University Professor at Columbia
University. She is the author of Passages in Modern
Sculpture; The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths; Bachelors; The Optical Unconscious;
and The Picasso Papers.
Yve-Alain Bois is Professor in the School of Historical
Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
His books include Painting as Model; Formless: A Users
Guide (with Rosalind Krauss); and Matisse and Picasso.
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is Andrew W. Mellon Professor
of Modern Art at Harvard University. He is the author of
Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry; German Art Now;
and numerous monographs on artists such as Andy Warhol,
Raymond Pettibon, Marcel Broodthaers, Gerhard Richter,
Carl Andre, Gabriel Orozco and Dan Graham.
David Joselit is Carnegie Professor of the History of Art
at Yale University. His books include Feedback: Television
Against Democracy; Innite Regress: Marcel Duchamp
; and American Art Since .
On the jacket:
Gerhard Richter, Marian, I,8, (detail). (cv ,-:)
Gerhard Richter.
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SECOND
EDITION
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specication for the book itself is:
Trimmed page size: 27.7 x 21.6 cm
Hardback
816 pages with 744 illustrations, 510 in colour
ISBN 978-0-500-23889-9 48.00
(price subject to change without notice)
Thames & Hudson
181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX
www.thamesandhudson.com
A landmark study in the history of modern art
revised, updated and expanded
The book is important, not because it gives neat answers but because it raises questions
Sir Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate
Turn off The Culture Show and Late Review, put down Time Out and read this book
instead. It has a good clear structure, providing a year-by-year account of what
happened. It provides facts and dates but also philosophy. It attempts to bring the
past into the present Matthew Collings, The Guardian
A survey that understands, brilliantly, that the job of survey books is not to paint
a picture of a territory, but to provide a map that others may use to navigate their
own course TomMorton, Blueprint
The signicance of Art Since 1900 cant be underestimated: psychoanalysis and
poststructuralism are now inescapable methodologies that must be taken on board
by mainstream art history Claire Bishop, Artforum
The denitive history of twentieth-century art spectacular, and painstakingly
conceived Gaby Wood, The Observer
The level of discussion is simply far more interesting than in any other guide to
twentieth-century art Norman Bryson, University of California, San Diego
This is no ordinary survey it opens theoretical and historical perspectives on
twentieth-century art with a sparkling clarity every reader will appreciate
Mignon Nixon, Courtauld Institute of Art
A remarkable collective work. It criss-crosses the entire twentieth century in complex
and fascinating ways. Written by four of the most innovative scholars of modern art
history today, it is a landmark Briony Fer, University College London
SECOND
EDITION
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6 Carlo Carr, Interventionist Demonstration, 1914
Tempera and collage on cardboard, 38.5 x 30 (151 8 x 113 4)
5 Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Speeding Horse and House, 191415
Gouache, oil, wood, paste-board, copper, and painted iron, 112.9 x 115 (441 2 x 451 4)
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, which retains the traditional
sculptural methods of modeling and bronze-casting, the work
incorporates industrially produced materials as called for in
Boccionis own manifesto: leather, found fragments of glass,
shards of metal, preformed elements of wood. One of the rst fully
nonrepresentational sculptures of the twentieth century, it com-
pares most adequately with the abstract sculpture produced in
Russia at that time by Vladimir Tatlin.
Insofar as collage surfaced as the key technique in the contradic-
tory range of Futurisms attempts to fuse avant-garde sensibilities
with mass culture, Carrs Interventionist Demonstration [ 6] is a
central example of the Futurist aesthetic as it came to a climax just
before World War I. Indeed, the work incorporates all of the
devices with which Futurismwas most engaged: the legacy of divi-
sionist painting; the Cubist fragmentationof traditional perceptual
space; the insertion of clippings fromnewspapers and found mate-
rials from advertising; the suggestion of kinesthesia through a
visual dynamic set up by the collages construction as both a vortex
and a matrix of crisscrossing power lines set as mutually counter-
active diagonals; and last, but not least, the juxtaposition of the
separate phonetic dimension of language with its graphic signiers.
Typically enough, the phonetic performance of language in
Interventionist Demonstration is in almost all instances ono-
matopoeic. In directly imitating the sounds of sirens (the wail
evoked by HU-HU-HU-HU), the screeches of engines and
machine guns (TRrrrrrrrr or traaak tatatraak), the screams of
people (EVVIVAAA), it is distinctly different fromthe structural
analysis of the phonetic, the textual, and the graphic components of
language in Russian Cubo-Futurist poetry or the calligrammes of
Apollinaire. The juxtapositionof anti-Germanwar slogans (Down
with Austro-Hungary) with found advertising material, or the
concatenation of Italian patriotic declarations (Italia Italia) with
musical fragments, continues the technique of Cubist collage but
turns this aesthetic into a new model of mass-cultural instigation
and propaganda. Its glorication of war is further registered in the
drumbeats evoked by the words ZANGTUMB TUUM.
A liberation of language: parole in libert
Zang Tumb Tuum of 1914, the rst collection of Marinettis free
word poetry was prefaced by his slightly earlier manifesto of
Futurist poetry, Destruction of SyntaxImagination without
StringsWords-in-Freedom. Using a set of expressive typographic
and orthographic variations and an unstructured spatial organiza-
tion, Zang Tumb Tuum tries to express the sights, sounds, and
smells of the poets experience in Tripoli. This assertion of words-
in-freedom emerged from a long and complicated dialogue with
late-nineteenth-century Symbolist poetry and its early-twentieth-
century legacy in France. Although deeply inuenced by, and
dependent upon, the example of Mallarm, Marinetti publicly
declared his opposition to the French poets project. Insisting that
The first Futurist manifesto is published | 1909
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94 1909 | The first Futurist manifesto is published
Eadweard Muybridge (18301904)
and tienne-Jules Marey (18301904)
T
he Englishman Eadweard Muybridge and the Frenchman
tienne-Jules Marey are yoked in time and by work:
not only do they share the same birth and death dates,
but also together they pioneered the photographic study of
movement in ways that inuenced not only the development
of Futurist art but also the modern rationalization of labor
and, it could be argued, of spacetime in general.
First known as a photographer of American West and Central
American landscapes, Muybridge was enlisted in 1872 by
Leland Stanford, the millionaire ex-governor of California, in a
racing dispute about the gait of horses. In Palo Alto, Muybridge
photographed horses with a battery of cameras; typically, he
arranged the images in rows and reshot themin a grid that could
be scanned both horizontally and vertically. A book, The Horse
in Motion, which Stanford bowdlerized, appeared in 1882,
the same year that Muybridge sailed to Europe for a lecture tour.
In Paris he was welcomed by Marey, the famous photographer
Nadar, the Salon painter Ernest Meissonier, and the great
physiologist Hermann von Helmholtzsome indication of the
range of interest in this work that registered perceptual units
beyond the limits of human vision.
Unlike Muybridge, who considered himself an artist, Marey
was a physiologist by training who had previously worked on
graphic methods to record motion. When he rst saw work by
Muybridge in the science journal La Nature in 1878, he turned
to photography as a more precise and neutral way to register
discrete movement. Marey rst devised a photographic gun
with a circular plate that yielded near-instantaneous serial
photographs froma singular viewpoint. He then used a slotted
disk in front of the camera to break up movement in set
intervals that could be registered on a single photographic plate;
it was this work that he rst described as chronophotography.
In order to avoid superimposition, Marey clad his subjects
entirely in black, with metal-studded strips along arms
and legs (bits of paper were used for animals). Along with
the singular viewpoint, this device effectively restored a
spatio-temporal coherence to the very perceptual eld that
was otherwise fragmented. It was more scientic than the
Muybridge approach, which did not have a consistent point
of view or interval between images, but it was also less
radical in its disruption of the apparent continuumof vision.
It was this disruption that most intrigued the modernists
the Futurists in their pursuit of a subversive speed, and artists
like Marcel Duchamp in their search for spatio-temporal
dimensions not previously perceived. But could it be that, like
Muybridge and Marey, these artists were also involved in a
historical dialectic that far exceeded their work as individuals
a modern dialectic of a ceaseless renovation of perception,
of a perpetual liberating and redisciplining of vision that would
persist throughout the twentieth century?
1911, 1912 G L
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385 Abstract Expressionism | 1947b
4 Mark Rothko, Number 3/No. 13 (Magenta, Black, Green on Orange), 1949
Oil on canvas, 216.5 x 163.8 (851 4 x 641 2)
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1947b | Abstract Expressionism
lamenting the death of a bullghter [ 3]. Such posturing does not
necessarily characterize the working method of all the Abstract
Expressionists, but the very fact that it was possible at all (and that
it would be thoroughly imitated by legions of younger artists once
the movement had become widely successful, that is, by the mid-
fties) merits consideration. Gottliebs clouds hovering above an
allusive horizon, Klines broad and energetic brush-strokes in
slicker and slicker black paint [ 5], and Stills dry shards quickly
became patented gures of style. Even Rothkos horizontal parti-
tions of his vertical canvases [ 4] t into this category: were it
not for the sustained inventiveness of his color chords, and the
ensuing enigmas of gureground relations that his works contin-
ued to pose till the end, his art may have been exhausted by the
artists manic overproduction.
In short, the seriality of Abstract Expressionism, in the end, had
much in common with that of the movement said to have precipi-
tated its demisePop art. Jasper Johns (born 1930) and Robert
Rauschenberg (19252008), whose rise to fame immediately
starting over, wrote Thomas B. Hess, and the whole image [is
kept] under rigorous control.
Signature style
As for designing a logo, a trap that Newman called the diagram
and which he paradoxically avoided by addressing the issue at the
outset when he opted for the simplest possible spatial markers (his
immediately recognizable vertical zips), one can also date its
beginning to 1948. A case in point is Motherwells lifelong Elegy to
the Spanish Republic series (more than 140 paintings), based on
an ink drawing conceived in 1948 as an illustration for a poemby
Rosenberg and destined for the second (never published) issue of
Possibilities : pulling out the tiny sketch from a drawer one year
later, Motherwell scrupulously reproduced it, with all its scumbling
contours and paint runoffs, on a somewhat larger canvas now
given the title At Five in the Afternoon, the famous refrain of an
elegy by the Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garca Lorca
3 Robert Motherwell, At Five in the Afternoon, 1949
Casein on board, 38.1 x 50.8 (15 x 20)
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736 Dada Fair | 1980
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735 1980 | Dada Fair
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Art and the market | 2007c
2 Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Magenta),19942000, installed in the Chteau de Versailles, France, 2008
High-chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating, 307.3 x 363.2 x 114.3 (121 x 143 x 45)
2007c | Art and the market
apostrophizes our present era of plutocratic democracy, sinking
scads of money in a gesture of solidarity with lower-class taste.
Appropriately, in fall 2008 Koons staged a show of his recent pro-
duction at that tourist Mecca, the royal palace at Versailles.
Two years later, Murakami caused great controversy with his
own exhibition at the same venue. The Japanese artist has
exploited the convergence of art, media, and market even more
thoroughly than Koons has. If the latter operates with smart selec-
tions from the repertoire of Western kitsch, the former develops
figures of his own branding inspired by the Japanese subcultures of
otaku (often translated as geek) and kawaii (cuteness). Otaku
fans tend to be male adolescents obsessed with particular charac-
ters in manga (comic books) and anime (television programs and
films); some are action figures to identify with, while others are
submissive girls to fantasize about. An early attempt by Murakami
in the otaku vein was Miss Ko2 (1997), a combination of a pixie
blonde girl with her hair in a ribbon and a buxom porn star in a
skimpy waitress costume. Miss Ko2 was not a hit among otaku
fansapparently she did not appear submissive enoughbut
Murakami has proved more successful with motifs that play on the
female-oriented subculture of kawaii, such as his zesty mush-
rooms, smiley flowers, toddlers called Kaikai and Kiki (his cor-
poration is titled in their honor), and, above all, Mr DOB.
Named after a manga character, DOB closely resembles a Mickey
Mouse whose head (that is all he is) spells out his name (D and B
appear on his ears, and his face is an O). Toothy and sinister in his
first incarnation, DOB was quickly refashioned as infantile and
cute; as it happens, Mickey evolved in similar fashion, and the
branding of DOB does seembased on that of the Disney star.
Although Japan does not hold to the separation between high
and low culture that once marked the modern West, Murakami
still spans socioeconomic registers in a way that might be unprece-
dented. His bright mutants like DOB appear both in the costliest
paintings and sculptures and in the cheapest merchandise (stick-
ers, buttons, key chains, dolls, etc.); they can be found in major
museums as well as in convenience stores. The graffiti artist Keith
Haring had some of this market range in the eighties; his signature
figures of the radiant baby and the barking dog also extended
fromT-shirts to art work. Yet his Pop Shop was small beer com-
pared to the Murakami corporation, which offers such services as
advertising, packaging, animation, exhibition development, and
website production. At one point, the multitasking Murakami also
3 Damien Hirsts The Dream(2008) shown at the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever auction exhibition at Sothebys, London, September 2008
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761 Chinese contemporary art | 2010a
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760 2010a | Chinese contemporary art
that despite the much greater complexity of transporting 1001
people to Kassel as opposed to shipping 1001 chairs there, it is very
likely that the average Documenta visitor had no contact what-
soever with, and perhaps no awareness of, the Chinese tourists of
Fairytale, while every visitor would have noticed the presence of
1001 chairs that connote traditional Chinese identity. Part of Ais
fairytale concerns how objects communicate as envoys of persons
or nationsand what better image for such stand-ins than empty
chairs? Fairytale, then, juxtaposed two different publics that were in
danger of completely missing one another: a public composed of
Chinese citizens discovering a European city for the first time, and a
public composed of largely European and American art enthusiasts
discovering a set of Chinese artifacts. Each group no doubt brought
their own preconceptions and expectations to the experience and
therefore inevitably took away meanings that had as much to do
with themselves as with their encounter with the foreign. In other
words, Fairytale provides a highly nuanced and multilevel enact-
ment of globalization, not as a small, unified world, but as a world
of people and things that travel at different speeds in which connec-
tions are missed as often as they are made.
In his understanding of the work of art as a composition of
different publicsparticularly of a Chinese public encountering
the West, and a Western public encountering Chinese material
cultureAi provides an apt introduction to contemporary art in
China, which since the mid-nineties has been an object of fascina-
tion and financial speculation in the West. The art historian Wu
Hung has argued that exhibitions are central to an understanding
of contemporary Chinese art through their capacity to open small,
temporary, but often virulent public spheres where an intellectual
and artistic vanguard can incrementally broaden the scope of artis-
tic freedomas well as political speech in China. The first watershed
exhibition after the end of Mao Tse-Tungs Cultural Revolution in
1976a decade during which open intellectual and cultural life
was severely suppressed and artistic production was narrowly
channeled into official Socialist Realist representations inservice to
the statewas organized by a group called the Stars in 1979. This
was the same year that Chinas leader Deng Xiaoping initiated the
market reforms that were to set off Chinas massive economic
growth in the ensuing decades. The members of the Stars (which
included Ai Weiwei) worked in diverse styles, but what historians
identify as their most significant accomplishment as a group was
their invention of the unofficial exhibition in China, typically
presented alongside official presentations as a kind of parasite.
The Stars show in 1979, for instance, was installed outside the
east gate of the National Art Gallery in Beijing during the National
Art Exhibition for the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the
Peoples Republic of China; it was closed down by the police,
leading to a demonstration convened at Beijings famous Democ-
racy Wall, and it ultimately garnered a front-page story in the
New York Times, as well as the consternation of the highest ranks
of the Chinese government.
Ten years later, in 1989, just months before the Democracy
Movement (known in China as the June Fourth Movement) was
brutally suppressed by the army in Tiananmen Square, another
important exhibition China/Avant-Garde was closed down twice
during its two-week run. This exhibition surveyed a lively range of
artists groups and experimental activities that occurred between
1985 and 1989 as part of what was called the New Wave, and it
encompassed experiments in several media, including performance
and installation. This efflorescence of art activity arose partly in
response to new flows of information about modern art and crit-
ical theory from abroad during the eighties, and partly due to a
domestic infrastructure of unofficial art journals, including the
Beijing-based weekly Fine Arts in China and the Wuhan quarterly
The Trend of Art Thought, which tied together diverse practices
4 Ai Weiwei, Fairytale, project for Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany, 2007
Qing Dynasty wooden chairs (16441911)
5 Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism: Marlboro, 1992
Oil on canvas, 175 x 175 (687 8 x 687 8)
3 Ai Weiwei, Sunower Seeds, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, 2010
Installation view