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This chapter presents the text of a lecture on the role of visual medium in art-historical study. It addresses the relationship of art history to the existential acts of painting and looking at painting and describes how the so-called story of modern art has been narrated in the history literature. It also considers how modern histories can accommodate the unfamiliar that is normally part of the story.

This chapter examines the developments in visual arts and society in Ireland during the period from 1900 to 1921. This period saw a simultaneous increase and falling off of interest in the visual arts. The three key developments during this period include Hugh Lane's founding of a gallery of modern art, the revival of Irish artistic crafts, and attempts to reform art schools including the R.H.A. and the Metropolitan School of Art.

This chapter is concerned with the role of Alfred Stieglitz and his magazine Camera Work in forging a connection between modern art, modern literature, and photography. It argues that Camera Work incorporated influences from snapshots, film, and advertising photography that were unknown to and antipathetic to Stieglitz himself, insofar as these influences informed the modern painting featured in the magazine.

Linear stories of modern art's development have characteristically been formalistic ones, and although such narratives have not always treated abstraction as essential to artistic progress, they have generally given art that is abstract a central role to play. In particular, abstract art proved crucial to narratives that construct postwar American modernism as the inheritor of earlier twentieth-century European modernism, and which serve to ratify American artistic hegemony. This chapter proposes to take one small step towards widening the focus by examining abstraction from the perspective of Chinese art. To take such a deliberately oblique perspective on abstract art's history, it hopes to lay bare some of the cultural closures that are often found in discussions of artistic modernity, and offers a more globalized perspective than is frequently the case.

The understanding of a shared source of creativity among the sane and insane came to the fore with the exhibition and collection of patients’ work in both France and Brazil in the 1940s. The visual evidence of a common creativity was often underwritten by discussions of artistic quality and how the patients’ work looked “futurist” or “surrealist.” This chapter turns to 9 Artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro, an exhibition of the creative work of nine of Dr. Nise da Silveira’s patients. The exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art São Paulo in 1949, one year after the museum’s founding. The chapter examines how the patients’ work became key to the discourse of modernist abstraction and its institutionalization in Brazil, just as it was regularly exhibited in the very spaces of Brazil’s first modern museums. Such circumstances differ notably from French artist Jean Dubuffet’s contemporaneous theorization of art brut, which is also addressed in this chapter.

Art collector Ramón Cernuda discusses how Cuban art was consolidated during the first half of the twentieth century, especially after the emergence of two generations of modern artists that are now considered the core of the vanguardia (also known as the Havana School). Cernuda notes that the international art market increasingly valued the work of Cuban artists such as Amelia Peláez, Víctor Manuel García, René Portocarrero, and Wifredo Lam. These artists appeared in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in major museums and private galleries, as well as in specialized art magazines and books. As Cernuda underlines, Cuban vanguardia painters reached a broad audience with Alfred Barr Jr.’s 1944 exhibition, Modern Cuban Painters, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Ironically, the wide success of Cuban artists abroad led Cuban collectors to pay attention to them.

Chapter One examines pastiche in the shopping mall and cultural heritage site Xintiandi, before discussing the site’s buried modern art histories marred by cross-cultural conflicts. Xintiandi physically surrounds China’s first communist meeting site of 1921, today memorialized as a museum. The complex was designed with reference to the vernacular homes of its formerly foreign occupied French Concession setting, and is officially celebrated for its “East-meets-West” and “Old-meets-New” architecture, even while the construction demolished most of the site’s existing homes and dislocated thousands of working class residents. This chapter analyzes how Xintiandi’s seemingly benign East-meets-West façades mask collusions between the Chinese Communist Party’s autocratic state power and capitalist development, while romanticizing Shanghai’s modern cosmopolitan legacy. The chapter analyzes examples of Xintiandi’s repressed cultural histories, including the revolutionary art and design experiments of Pang Xunqin, founder of the 1930s avant-garde collective, The Storm Society, leftist writings and art promoted by Lu Xun, and the major Cultural Revolution Era debate sparked by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1972 documentary, Chung Kuo Cina. The chapter argues that the official admonishment of Shanghai-based cultural projects by Pang and Antonioni speak to collisions between Shanghai’s semi-colonial past, Maoist socialism, and Cultural Revolution Era totalitarianism that still resonate in Shanghai today.

This chapter situates Mário Pedrosa’s early theses on Gestalt in relation to his reception of psychiatric patients’ work, in particular Dr. Nise da Silveira’s patients in Rio de Janeiro. As the leading art critic, Pedrosa’s writing on formal autonomy and aesthetic response was foundational to the understanding of geometric abstraction in the 1950s. The author argues that Pedrosa’s theoretical grappling with patients’ work prompted his turn to Heinz Werner’s theorization of physiognomic expression and perception. In doing so, Pedrosa articulates an understanding of abstract geometry as expressive rather than rational or purely visual. Accordingly, this chapter’s discussion of physiognomic Gestalt displaces the well-established alignment of geometric abstraction, modern rationality, and Brazil’s expanding industrialization in the 1950s. The chapter also demonstrates how patients’ creative expression was not uniformly aligned with a surrealist or art informel aesthetic, as continued to be the case in Western Europe.

This chapter presents an essay about the radical empirical aesthetic view that to be human is to humanize. It contends that modern art creates a revolution in man's view of himself as it broadens the ways in which he relates to the world and the ways by which he is informed, and that the most fruitful philosophical statement of the meaning of modern art is to be found in the thought of William James and John Dewey, interpreted as a radically empirical philosophy of experience. This essay attempts to show the unusual significance of radical empiricism for contemporary art.

This chapter examines the function of the ugly in Aesthetic Theory, with particular emphasis on the primitive and the archaic. It first considers the meaning of the ugly in relation to Theodor Adorno's understanding of classical aesthetics and his assessment of modern art. It then discusses Adorno's argument against Igor Stravinsky in The Philosophy of Modern Music, and especially his claim that the composer has regressed to classical tonality and flirted with folk art and the primitive as a means of critiquing modern culture. It also explores Adorno's distinction between two modes of the ugly: a positive formalist version utilized by Arnold Schoenberg and a negative one in Stravinsky. It argues that Adorno was more deeply involved in the interpretation of primitive, non-European art than expected, and that he admits the archaic and ugly to the realm of art as a reminder of past and present horror.

This chapter critiques the categorization of South African heritages, particularly the works of the people from Vha-Venda and Va-Tsonga, into transitional art—arts that were theorized as neither primitive nor modern but somewhere in between. The Vha-Venda and Va-Tsonga art, which are among the most prominent and longstanding traditions of black sculptural carving in the southern African region, have been placed by South African art historians and critics in the category of “transitional art.” Their goal is to dignify a wide variety of artifacts produced by then contemporary black Africans living in townships, rural communities, and urban peripheries, vesting them with this in-between theoretical space. However such a categorization had been too general—it had failed to present the distinct qualities of these artifacts.

This chapter presents several interconnected arguments about modern art cinema. First, modern cinema was a historical phenomenon inspired by the art-historical context of the two avant-garde periods, the 1920s and the 1960s. Second, modern cinema was the result of art cinema's adaptation to these contexts rather than the result of the general development of film history or the “language” of cinema. Third, as a consequence of this process of adaptation, art cinema became an institutionalized cinematic practice different from commercial entertainment cinema as well as from the cinematic avant-garde. And last, another result of this process is that modern cinema took different shapes according to the various historical situations and cultural backgrounds of modernist filmmakers. There are three terms—modern, modernist, and avant-garde—that need distinction and clarification at the outset so as to lead us to various possible conceptions of cinematic modernism. The chapter also examines the origins of the concept of the “art film” as an institutional form of cinema.

This chapter explores an attempt at the creation of an Islamic “art music” for a relatively new community of Muslim intellectuals in Jakarta. It uses the compositions of Trisutji Kamal, a composition student of the Amsterdam Conservatory and professor at IKJ, the Jakarta Arts Academy. The chapter outlines the Suharto-era rise of the modernist Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICTM), and a pair of arts institutions: Taman Ismail Marzuki, a performing arts complex (the Jakarta Arts Center) that showcases modern arts from around the world, and IKJ, Institut Kesenian Jakarta, or the Jakarta Arts Institute, an institute for the education and patronage of the arts. The chapter focuses largely on Kamal's composition “Persembahan” (A Worship) as an example of an artistically successful hybrid emerging from this intellectual movement that combines Islamic elements and art music and blurs the lines between art and religion. Unique parts of the piece feature a religious text in Arabic, a mixed choir, and a set of rebana frame drums, which together give the impression of qasidahan, the activity of singing Arabic songs of praise, a rural pesantren tradition formerly denigrated by urban classes, now re-dressed for the proscenium stage. It is argued that the new middle class, while accepting the idea of newly composed art music and the Islamic elements therein, is not prepared to embrace Muslim art music with the associated, respectful etiquette of the concert setting.

Traditional Islamic principles of representation have rarely been applied to Arab cinema. The colorful non-spatial painting of miniatures and the ornamental rhythms of the arabesque, basically structured by light and shadow, almost never found their way to the screen. Nearly all Arab film makers stuck to classical rules of Western art instead. The rules of conventional Western composition were adhered to, even though the encounter with European art had started comparatively late. The twentieth century saw not only the spread of three-dimensional realist plastic art and central perspective, but also a confrontation with a new idea of art, based on the dichotomy between fine arts on the one hand and arts and crafts on the other. This conception promoted the artist as an individual genius, and further undermined the position of traditional arts and crafts genres. Increasingly, these were either cultivated on the margins or completely integrated into modern art.