Book Series: Theories of Modernism & Postmodernism in the Visual Arts
This series is sponsored by History of Art (UCC) and published by Routledge (New York).
It is intended as an opportunity for major scholars in the field to consider the shape of the twentieth century: its essential and marginal moments, its optimal narratives, the strengths and weaknesses of its self descriptions.
It is hoped that the series as a whole will be helpful for those who find that it can be revealing to put a little pressure on the assumptions that are made in everyday scholarship regarding what is, and isn’t, crucial to an understanding of 20th-century art.
The books in this series were originally lectures, each given at University College Cork over a period of three years (2004-6). The authors were each encouraged to respond to previous efforts: the notion was that the series might grow to resemble a protracted exchange, in which each person has months or years to consider how to respond to what has been said. That speed seems entirely appropriate to a subject as intricate, and as prone to overly quick assertions, as this. Readers may begin the series with any book, but taken as a whole, and read in sequence, the series is intended as perhaps the world’s slowest and best-pondered conversation on modernism.
Volume 1: James Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents (2005)
In this bracing engagement with the many versions of art history, James Elkins argues that the story of modernism and postmodernism is almost always told in terms of four narratives. Works of art are either seen as modern or postmodern, or praised for their technical skill or because of the politics they appear to embody. These are master narratives of contemporary criticism, and each leads to a different understanding of what art is and does. Both a cogent overview of the state of thinking about art and a challenge to think outside the art historical box, Master Narratives and their Discontents is the first volume in a series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.
Volume 2: Stephen Bann, Ways Around Modernism (2006)
Stephen Bann examines the arguments for the centrality of French modernist painting. He begins by focusing particularly on the notion of the modernist break, as it has been interpreted with regard to painters like Manet and Ingres. He argues that ‘curiosity’, with its origins in the seventeenth-century world-view can be a valid concept for understanding some aspects of contemporary art that contest the modern, suggesting ways of sidetracking the modern by adopting a lengthier historical view.
Volume 3: Richard Shiff, Doubt (2007)
In an age where art history’s questions are now expected to receive answers, Richard Shiff presents a challenging alternative. In this essential addition to the series, Richard Shiff embraces doubt as a critical tool and asks how particular histories of art have come to be. Shiff’s turn to doubt is not a retreat to relativism, but rather an insistence on clear thinking about art. In particular, Shiff takes issue with the style of self-referential art writing seemingly 'licensed' by Roland Barthes. With an introduction by Rosie Bennett, Doubt is a study of the tension between practicing art and practicing criticism.
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Series Preface
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