Online Books by Questia Media America, Inc.
Modern Art and Society: An Anthology of Social and Multicultural Readings Book by Maurice Berger; Icon Editions, 1994

PREFACE
It is the purpose of this book to expand the discourse of modern art history to include the paintings, sculptures, photographs, performance pieces, videos, and multimedia expressions of people who have heretofore frequently been excluded from modernist studies. These essays do more than simply embrace the notion of a socially oriented or multiculturalist art history; instead, they often analyze the mechanisms--both social and aesthetic--that have created the dominant culture's resistance to difference. Some essays, for example, speak to the need for art history to redefine its relationship to the greater social exigencies and urgencies that stimulate and define cultural production: Kenneth Silver examines the relationship between the rise of French modernism and the political events of the First World War; Mason Klein looks at the social and artistic milieu that shaped Marcel Duchamp's transgressive exploration of sexuality; Andreas Huyssen analyzes the cultural politics of Pop Art; and my own essay discusses Eva Hesse's personal politics of sensual and sexual liberation and their connection to the desublimatory discourses of intellectuals and other artists in the 1960s. Other pieces address the question of the artist's social responsibility, as well as the role of racism, sexism, class, and ideology itself in shaping aesthetic representations: Linda Nochlin asks whether Edgar Degas's antiSemitism should matter in the art historical evaluation of his work; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explores the implications of racist depictions of AfricanAmericans in nineteenth-century popular and high culture; Abigail Solomon-Godeau reveals the ideological implications of Paul Gauguin's demeaning exotification of tribal women; and Lawrence Levine assesses the manipulative and sometimes counterproductive tactics of New Deal photodocumentation of the Depression era's rural poor.

Still other essays open pioneering windows onto aspects of context and meaning sometimes underestimated or ignored by art historians: Maud Lavin examines the function of androgyny in the proto-feminist phoromontages of Hannah Hch and other women artists and filmmakers of the 1920s and 1930s; Jonathan Weinberg liberates from the art historical closet the homoerotic content of Charles Demuth's paintings; Ida Rodrguez-Prampolini elucidates Diego Rivera's intellectual concept of history and its role in his political activism; Ann Gibson explores why the Abstract Expressionist canon champions Jackson Pollock while it casts aside the often equally brilliant work of the African-American Norman Lewis; Douglas Crimp meditates on the role of cultural activism in producing a credible institutional response to society's indifference to AIDS; and Lucy Lippard explores the meaning and possibilities for multiculturalism in the 1990s.

More than a primer on modernism's exclusions and biases, this anthology will hopefully be seen as a valuable methodological tool for art historians. Through various theoretical and critical processes, these essays, whether they discuss the work of one artist or many, offer new ways of thinking about the visual arts. They suggest various reformations of critical thinking, a range of methods, to quote Cornel West in this book's first essay, to dispose of "the monolithic and the homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in light of the concrete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing." It is ultimately only through this broadening of the discourse that art history can flourish and survive in an increasingly diverse and global society.