5

MODERNISM AND FORM IN AFRICA, BRITAIN, AND SOUTH ASIA

After midcentury, the tie of art and form only got stronger. Critics, of course, regularly suggested that the art world had moved on.¹ Yet in Britain the various activities of Herbert Read at this time show the breadth of the theoretical and institutional hold of formalism: its spread in art education through the Society for Education through Art, its popularization in exhibitions and talks via the activity of the Arts Council of Great Britain, its universalist and transhistorical view of art in exhibitions such as 40,000 Years of Modern Art, and its partial professionalization in the early activity of the British Society of Aesthetics. In America, by midcentury, formalism was equally firmly entrenched. Since the turn of the 1930s, Alfred Barr at MoMA had been promoting an account of modern art based in large part around form. The formalist vision of modern art was further reinforced by Albert Barnes at his institute (with the support of John Dewey) and a host of critics, art historians, and philosophers, such as James Johnson Sweeney, Thomas Munro, and Robert Goldwater. In 1939 and 1941 Clement Greenberg published the essays “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and “Towards a Newer Laocöon” that first set out his historical narrative of medium specificity in modern art, preparing the way for his full and near-final formulation in “Modernist Painting” of 1960. Even as the dominance of the large-scale abstract art favored by Greenberg began to be questioned, that essay, along with the activity of younger critics including Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss, would set the terms of debate about modernism for the 1960s and decades after.

In this final chapter I turn to a less familiar history than that of modernist criticism in the United States: the case of modern art and its cultural authenticity (or “originality”) in Africa and South Asia as well as Britain.² In historical terms, these histories highlight the remarkable spread and widely consequential nature of formalist art theory beyond the scope of Europe and the United States. Just as significantly for present-day accounts of modernism, the chapter redescribes the structure of originality and belatedness that continues to dog attempts to attend to modernism beyond a supposedly central Western line. Two very different models of a global modernism emerge that parallel the grand and modest (or high and post-) formalisms described in the introduction to this book. The model that upholds the self-confidence of modernism and high formalism is a “real primitivism,” one that pits true universalism against the inequality of claiming that some are “belated” or “not yet modern” compared to others.³ Yet given the problems with universalism highlighted by the history told in this chapter and book as a whole, we may be left with only a modest formalism to hold on to, and this may be something to embrace rather than to fear. Moving past universalism still leaves us with a recognition of the value that form might play in making contact, but it is now a recognition that takes contingency as its watchword and understands that learning to see for yourself has nothing to do with learning to tell others how they should see.

What the Artist Should Do: Aesthetic Education and Early Modernism in Nigeria

Thinking of things as formed, I have stressed throughout this book, promises a way to understand the activities and even people that made those things. How easy, then, to slip almost imperceptibly from sympathetic attempts to engage with others into overconfident pronouncements about the way that others make and see. Writing in 1949 on 40,000 Years of Modern Art, Read suggested that we look beyond the “obvious” fact that “certain modern artists have at certain periods of their development been influenced by primitive art” to the less obvious “universality of art.”⁴ Looking back in time and across cultures, for Read, we could clearly see the “eternal recurrence” in art of the features now labeled “modern.”⁵ There were nonetheless limits to the artistic universality that Read could accept. Inspecting examples of twentieth-century Chinese painting ten years later in his preface to Sullivan’s Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century, Read wrote that “too many” of the pictures reproduced in the book in question showed “an uneasy compromise” between “the East and the West.”⁶ (Read was here referring to reproductions of works such as Pan Yuliang’s Pears and Floral Cloth, 1943, Anhui Provincial Museum, Hefei.) The lesson here was not art’s universality but instead the fact that the “currency of art is debased if it is robbed of its native core.” Despite the apparent influence of Japanese prints, Western art, for Read, had “evolved from naturalism to abstraction . . . without interference from an alien culture.” In modern China the reverse was true, with a sad attempt made “to see the world with Western eyes.” In as much as the aim “leads to an imitative art (with only a slight difference of accent),” Read wrote, “the Western critic will be inclined to deplore it as one more example of the general leveling and lowering of taste and sensibility due to the efficiency of modern methods of communication.”

Read’s words demonstrate a fairly typical imbalance that arises in modernist art writing, especially when the universal and primitive are invoked together.⁷ Cultural products from outside the West are appropriated by Western artists in pursuit of an especially direct, authentic or primitive means of expression. But while artists in the West can freely appropriate from others outside the West, those outside the West are in turn cast as “belated” or “inauthentic” as soon as they attempt the reverse.

Here I examine this issue alongside both formalist aesthetic education and the early history of modernism in Nigeria. Doing so shows first of all one basis for the high formalist claim that art really should be a certain way: concerned with authentic personal expression and to this end stressing form rather than mere reproduction of natural appearances. It also shows how toxic that apparently liberatory view can be. Looking back from the present, it is clear that there really is no single route to authenticity and certainly not one that could ever, on the back of form, float free of historical circumstance.

Postimpressionism, as theorized by Roger Fry, was really a general theory of modern art. Somewhat unusually, though, Fry did not see modern art as an avant-gardist enterprise of ever-new movements or isms. Instead, modern artists from Manet in the 1860s through to Matisse and Picasso ca. 1910 had a fundamentally similar aim, and this was an aim actually found in the art of many earlier times and cultures.⁸ In chapter 1, I noted that, in Fry’s narrative, while Western art up to and including impressionism pursued an ever-greater naturalism, the artists of what he called the “new movement” turned away from naturalism to focus instead on form. Fry drew on recent international art-historical work on the history of representation to explain this binary of naturalism versus a “Post-Impressionist” modern art based on form. Types of naturalism like impressionism involved the recording of purely perceptual sense data, while the postimpressionists instead drew on inner mental or “conceptual” imagery.⁹ Naturalism at its logical extreme operated like the “ideal” photograph, with sense data streaming from object to eye to canvas in a way so lacking in human intervention as to provide a pure and effectively formless reproduction of appearance. (This should recall Fry’s criticisms of popular art as that which lacks style, as discussed in chapter 3 above.) Postimpressionism instead involved direct links between individual, named objects represented conceptually in the mind. Representations of objects in modern art, that is, were separated out and individually flattened against the picture plane—like the concept of “coin” turned into a circle, “book” into a rectangle, or “eyes” given almond shapes with circular pupils within—as each element is shown in its broadest or most characteristic aspect (fig. 21). This notion is an early version of twentieth-century clichés about depicting what was “known” rather than what was “seen,” since according Fry such art consisted “not so much in an attempt to represent what the eye perceives, as to put a line round a mental conception of an object.”¹⁰

When in 1902 it was finally accepted that the art of Altamira was a genuine product of the Paleolithic era, the age of the paintings demonstrated to Fry and his contemporaries that naturalism was in no sense a natural and characteristically civilized element of human evolution away from “earlier” and “more primitive” cultures (as Victorian anthropology had previously argued).¹¹ The apparent discovery that child art and so-called primitive art both operated on the basis of conceptual rather than perceptual imagery opened up the possibility that naturalism had in fact been a historical error. For the Victorian anthropologists of a previous generation, naturalism was the mark of an evolved civilization, but now it seemed more like a turn away from a truly natural means of creation, expression, and communication that, anchored as it was in universally shared human capacities, reached across times and cultures. In this natural rather than naturalistic mode of creation, “the artist does not seek to transfer a visual sensation to paper, but to express a mental image which is coloured by his conceptual habits.”¹² Universal and particular came together, here. Through the particular style of representation that revealed the individual’s schematizing and synthesizing activity, an artwork could at once be a testament to the (general human) inner workings of the mind and a window onto the vision of the individual creator. Such an art would maximize not just aesthetic value but also the communicative potential held by art as form.

Figure 21. Henri Matisse, Marguerite, 1906–7. Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Succession H. Matisse / DACS, London. Photo Digital image: © RMN–Grand Palais (Museée national Picasso–Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau.

The assumed discovery of the true nature of art had strong consequences for artistic or aesthetic education, consequences explored by Fry and Marion Richardson throughout the 1910s that fed in to education policy in Britain and organizations such as the Society for Education through Art for decades after. This account of art implied that art teaching should focus on working from inner mental imagery and, above all, from memory. Anchored as it was in universal human nature, the method claimed to transcend local circumstances of time and place, as did its ultimate goal of developing creators able to express their particular vision through personal style. The alleged rightness of the account of creative activity, in other words, meant there was no contradiction in imposing it as a universal means through which individuality should be developed from within. Even for a socially oriented anarchist like Herbert Read, the method could at once teach the ethics of correct looking—distinguishing “the beautiful from the ugly, the good from the evil, the right pattern of behavior from the wrong pattern, the noble person from the ignoble”—and encourage individuals’ abilities to develop themselves as parts of, and contributors to, “the organic wholeness of the community.”¹³

At the same time as such art education began to gain governmental and official influence through the teaching of Richardson at the London Day Training College (LDTC) in the 1920s, psychology helped give formalist aesthetic education a measure of official, scientific weight. From 1920 Richardson’s colleagues Thomas Percy Nunn (the LDTC principal from 1922) and the psychologist Cyril Burt both published major works that drew together psychology, art, and education.¹⁴ According to the key tenets of their books and paralleling conclusions already drawn by Fry and Richardson, artistic creativity was universal in nature, and artistic production developed over time from the reliance on “inner” conceptual imagery to “outer” perceptual data. In the liberal view of Nunn, as well as Fry and Richardson and the many who followed, it seemed that this development from inner imagery to outer data might really be a corruption of a truer form of creative activity. The “new education” movement of which Nunn was an enthusiastic proponent had shown that education for personal autonomy meant teaching children to develop their own capacities rather than having external example imposed on them.¹⁵ Perhaps the artistic parallel of teaching people to be themselves, then, was to help them avoid the turn away from the true creativity of art making based on mental imagery rather than on the external world.

Already by the end of the 1910s, art produced in Africa had been recognized in Britain as a determinate influence on modern art, and such art was even directly acknowledged by Fry to have inspired the new educational view of the aesthetic education of the child.¹⁶ It was clear for advocates of the universal account of art and creativity that the tenets of aesthetic education they had learned from abroad would in turn apply across the globe. If the creations of “primitive” artists had pointed towards something universal about the nature of art, then, to be sure, their work might offer hope to a corrupted West. But the West might also, in turn, be able to help other regions to avoid their own artistic degradations that the spread of Western modernization now threatened to globalize. Nonetheless, it was not until aesthetic education had been institutionalized in Britain in the way just described that the attempt was made to draw consequences for Africa, with the Colonial Office in the mid-1920s appointing its Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies.¹⁷ As a member of the Advisory Committee, Nunn was to become instrumental in the movement for colonial aesthetic education, advocating for the values of the “new education” to be spread abroad via individuals trained in an “Educational Institute for Empire.”¹⁸ From the late 1920s, with Nunn’s support, first the London Day Training College and then the Institute of Education (created out of the LDTC in 1932) had subdepartments devoted to the “training of Colonial Office probationers for educational work in the colonies,” which actively promoted the methods of art education developed by Richardson and Fry.¹⁹ Fry himself was reportedly enthusiastic about the attempt to bring aesthetic education to the continent, though skeptical about the potential for success.²⁰

This promotion of art education faced a basic difficulty. The official stance of the Advisory Committee was that respect of local traditions and circumstances would go hand in hand with the teaching of citizenship and self-development.²¹ Yet in ignoring the widespread desire amongst the populations under British control to gain new training and experiences denied to them by previous generations of officials, the overriding ethos of British policy was very much governed by what has been described as a “salvage paradigm.”²² Nervous about the potential destruction of traditional ways of life, officials set out to establish an education that would revitalize local and national tradition so that its subjects might become “themselves” once again. The problem here is indicated by the vexed question of trusteeship at the time: should the Empire serve as a tool of moral reform, or were questions of constitutional reform and self-government in fact prior to any such ends? Was it right to teach self-government in an aesthetic and metaphoric sense, in other words, when the chance for self-government of a literal political kind was being refused?²³

This problem as it manifested itself in contemporary discussions of art and design education can be gauged from a book of 1934 entitled Suggested Methods for the African School, with a foreword by Nunn.²⁴ Nunn wrote that he had been struck by the fact that “the teacher of African children has to deal with no ‘African mentality’ differing in kind from the mentality of European children,” and despite “the special experience and special needs of African pupils,” the “basic principles of method which are sound in Europe must be sound in intertropical Africa.”²⁵ Paralleling advice given in Britain, the book stressed the need for the self-development of children according to their own individual needs and capacities, though at the same time with attention to the specific community life into which the individuals needed to integrated.²⁶ The past art of Africa was cited as evidence of the natural artistic ability still present there, with such art at its best a natural part of everyday life and therefore pervasive throughout the life of the community.²⁷ A direct echo of the doctrines of Fry and Richardson, naturalism and Western techniques were to be avoided. Instead, emphasis would be placed on fostering original expression through training in memory drawing, which would develop in the student a stock of “mental pictures.”²⁸ So far, so universalist and familiar. Recalling the advocated need for individuality to be fostered within a specific community, however, the book suggested that individualism was tempered by the reminder of a need for the use of local traditions, styles, and interests. These, it claimed in a crucial diversion from orthodox new education views, might express a collective sensibility rather than a purely personal one.²⁹ The preservation of local tradition and national or racial sensibility was repeated often over the subsequent years and enshrined in the 1935 handbook for teachers edited by the chair of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies’ subcommittee on aesthetic education, The Arts of West Africa, Excluding Music: the “machinery of educational freedom” would save indigenous art, with the particular “artistic genius of a people” rekindled by careful control of their exposure only to examples of art from selected local tradition.³⁰ Where the mask of universalism revealed itself to be no such thing, schemes of individual self-development threatened to slip into essentialist forms of national or even racial determinism.

The values of formalist aesthetic education were increasingly explicit in the three most significant art education projects carried out in British Africa over these years, all of which relied on memory drawing and the rejection of academic realism and acknowledged, to a greater or lesser extent, the importance of Fry and Richardson’s views: G. A. Stevens in Achimota, Gold Coast (now Ghana) from 1924; K. C. Murray in Nigeria from 1927; and in East Africa, Margaret Trowell at Makarere College, Uganda from 1937.³¹ The artistic values espoused by these educators stand in stark contrast to the early modernism in Nigeria of Aina Onabolu, who took up elements of Western academic technique to develop a realism in direct opposition to the colonial construction that “native” populations were capable only of craft or other forms of nonnaturalistic artistic production (fig. 22).³² Onabolu’s aim was not an art of pure optical naturalism; he noted the value of the “character” of the production and that the qualities of a “good” painting are not simply those of a color photograph.³³ Yet his artistic exemplars were not European modernists but G. F. Watts, Matthew Boulton, and the artists of the early Royal Academy in England, and his ideal was painting that used perspective, focus, and geometry “to denote the representation of objects as they would appear from an assumed point of sight.”³⁴ Here was an undoubted modernism—an artistic response to the conditions of the present (in this case, colonial and oppressive)—that flatly refused the universalist account of artistic production seen in Fry’s view of what modern art should be.³⁵ Ironically, it was in part Onabolu’s campaign for proper art education in the country that led to the arrival of the British art teacher K. C. Murray and with him a program of formalist aesthetic education that absolutely refused Onabolu’s self-conscious engagement with sophisticated realist technique. Having naturalized the ideas of creativity and inner expression, British teachers like Murray were blind to the possibility that the use of academic technique or, in fact, any other tradition could be more meaningful than the authentic expression of the self that their methods claimed to promote.

Opinion on Murray and schemes of his kind has since been mixed. Ola Oloidi has called his efforts “admirable,” Sylvester Ogbechie has shown how the pioneer Nigerian modernist Ben Enwonwu made creative use of his early training with Murray, while most recently Chika Okeke-Agulu has flatly refused the idea that Murray could be credited with progressive views or a contribution to the post-independence development of a postcolonial modernism in Nigeria around the Zaria Art Society.³⁶ Leaving these debates to one side, my point here concerns the structure of what Olu Oguibe has called “reverse appropriation as nationalism in modern African Art.”³⁷ As Oguibe makes clear, being modern and nationalist did not have to mean faith in one single universalist ideal. While Fry was theorizing a universal kind of artistic creativity that would reject naturalism, for an artist like Onabolu, artistic power lay in a highly self-conscious reaction to a situation: here, namely, the use of the techniques of Western academic art as a means to challenge colonial constructions according to which he would not be capable of naturalistic painting.³⁸ In a sense both Fry and Onabolu made claims to the universal, in as much as form and realist technique were in their different contexts posited as the paradigm modes of human creative practice.³⁹ What Onabolu’s example shows, however, and what the proponents of aesthetic education failed to realize is how claims to the universal themselves take local and highly specific forms. Attention to contingency rather than total faith in universality is here where typically modernist forms of self-consciousness and self-determining authenticity lie.

Figure 22. Aina Onabolu, Sisi Nurse, 1922. Oil on canvas, 64 × 41 cm. © Estate of Aina Onabolu.

We can see the exact same point apply even where a masterful “Post-Impressionist” style did develop in Africa, as in the work of the South African artist Gerard Sekoto (fig. 23). Similar ideas about aesthetic education that naturalized postimpressionism as universally human were at precisely this time spreading throughout Britain.⁴⁰ Where the use of oil paint and the example of postimpressionist style had been necessary for Fry and others to develop their ideas about authentic expression, however, the threat of stylistic borrowing foreign to the development of a native mode meant that these supposedly universal means were denied to many students around Africa. In the case of Sekoto, initially working in South Africa while the country was a dominion of the British Empire and experiencing dramatic forms of racial discrimination, the language of modernist expression he developed in self-conscious relation to the example of the French postimpressionists now stands (as Oguibe has suggested) with that of Onabolu as one more form of “reverse appropriation as nationalism.”⁴¹ That is, not only was Onabolu’s appropriation of Western academic realism a political act in its adoption of something he was otherwise denied, but even Fry’s allegedly universal art of postimpressionism, in its own way and in another place, could also be a style of creation denied to indigenous populations. Sekoto’s use of postimpressionism in this context thus reads as one more politically significant act of appropriation. There could be no stronger indication of how arbitrary and culturally restrictive the allegedly liberatory aims of formalist aesthetic education—telling artists what they should do in order to become themselves—turned out to be.⁴²

Figure 23. Gerard Sekoto, Girl with Orange, ca. 1942–43. Oil on canvas, 47 × 39.5 cm. Johannesburg Art Gallery. Photo © Gerard Sekoto Foundation.

What the Spectator Should See: Authenticity and Early Modernism in India

In the early 1920s, Gaganendranath Tagore, an artist best known at the time for his satirical lithographs, turned his attention to cubism. “I have been experimenting with cubism, and this is the result,” he wrote to a friend on the back of one such postcard painting (fig. 24).⁴³ Tagore’s works found supporters in India at the time, but in the book India and Modern Art of 1959, the British art historian W. G. Archer wrote of Tagore’s failure both to understand cubism and to make the style authentically his own. Taken up in recent years by Partha Mitter, this assessment has become a classic example of the problem of belatedness seen already in Herbert Read’s words on twentieth-century Chinese art. Mitter has coined the term “Picasso-manqué syndrome” for such judgments: the familiar pattern where those who look to Western modernism from the “outside” are again and again judged by Western critics to have failed in their attempt to understand and make creative use of that example.⁴⁴

We can see the echoes of the modernism of Onabolu and Sekoto in Mitter’s words. But important as Mitter’s counter is, it could easily be misconstrued. Mitter’s positive judgment of Tagore, taken casually, might seem precisely to repeat the structure of Archer’s negative one—a case of no more than one critic proclaiming a greater capacity for aesthetic sensitivity to the authentic than another.⁴⁵ In practice Mitter’s work is based on a more careful history, not just an intuitive judgment; it is deeper and more sympathetic because it entails a more knowledgeable engagement. But the point here, explored below through examination of the history of early modernism in India that leads up to Tagore’s work as well as Mitter’s own, is how deceptive form can be. Form seems to promise not just expression but a safe route to understanding what is expressed. Yet local circumstance always seems to militate not only against there being one way that authentic and truly expressive form should look (as above) but also, in turn, to dictate what exactly it is that viewers are able to see as actually being expressed.

Figure 24. Gaganendranath Tagore, Untitled (Calcutta), ca. 1920–25. Watercolor on card, 9.5 × 14.3 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Indian art has long had to struggle with its constructions in British art writing. Mitter has suggested that up until the 1970s at least, ways of interpreting Indian art were still structured around the views of two sets of writers who published the first major histories of the subject between the 1870s and the 1920s.⁴⁶ According to the first view, developed in the nineteenth century and typically colonialist, the applied arts of India should be celebrated even though the country was not capable of producing fine art proper.⁴⁷ A second view was proposed by early modernist writers led by Ernest Binfield Havell, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, and the artist Abanindranath Tagore, and was promoted in Britain by the trio alongside Fry and other members of the India Society after its founding in 1910.⁴⁸ According to these writers, the notion of Western artistic superiority was not only wrong but was based on a false distinction between fine and applied arts.⁴⁹ Ultimately fine and applied arts were one because all artistic production relied on form for its significance.

The books produced by the early modernist writers and those under their influence over the subsequent years were shot through with the language of formalism and aesthetic education. The texts took up by now familiar tenets: creativity was universal with the true and universal “intention” of artistic production to create formally and aesthetically; art proper was based on inner imagery rather than the external world, and as such realism should be rejected as irrelevant.⁵⁰ Havell, typically, argued that previous writing on Indian art had neglected the intentions behind the works of art in favor of an archaeological approach.⁵¹ But in a classic formalist and modernist critical move that recalls my discussion of connoisseurship in chapter 1, he attempted to divine true artistic intention solely through attention to the internal aesthetic qualities of the work. Havell suggested that he aimed to get to the artist’s real intention, but he also universalized this “actual” intention to reject straightforward naturalism (in his words, the “common philosophic basis of art in all countries assumes that art is not merely an imitation . . . of . . . phenomena in Nature”).⁵² And form, not history was the means by which this intention could be known: “Convinced as I am that the learning of the orientalist, however profound and scientific it may be, is often most misleading in æsthetic criticism, it has been my first endeavor, in the interpretation of Indian ideals, to obtain a direct insight into the artist’s meaning without relying on modern archæological conclusions and without searching for the clue which may be found in Indian literature.”⁵³ Ananda Coomaraswamy likewise argued that “for the plastic artist, painting and sculpture are languages by which he expresses and understands thoughts which are not in any sense vague, but which cannot be equally well, at least by him, expressed by means of words.”⁵⁴ This language of art through which the artist could express and understand thoughts not able to be verbalized meant, of course, the “language of form and colour.”⁵⁵

Though the contrast of conceptual inner visualization with the perceptual copying of external reality is familiar from the discussion of aesthetic education above, often its advocates appealed to non-Western tradition or example. In this way theories at once partook of and helped to confirm notions about the transcultural efficacy of memory drawing and attention to conceptual images. According to the doctrine of the “inner eye” as discussed by Abanindranath Tagore, artists should train their own powers of internal, mental visualization so as better to express the workings of their imagination through their art.⁵⁶ Set in place in the preceding years, the use of these basic formulae only increased after 1920 amongst these writers and those under their influence.⁵⁷ A book such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Hindu View of Art of 1933 (read in manuscript by Read) provides a telling example. The book at once echoed Coomaraswamy; cited Gill as a formational influence; recalled Bell’s 1914 Art with a chapter titled “The Aesthetic Hypothesis”; espoused the doctrine of memory drawing and conceptual images; and both stated that art should be understood as the way in which an artist communicates emotion to the viewer and carried an introduction by Gill suggesting that the universal nature of all art lay in its search for “reality.”⁵⁸ (Gill himself, in a 1934 letter to Read, described Fry’s own shorthand for conceptual imaging of “the child who draws a line around his think” as “the cornerstone of my aesthetic” and noted that the importance of making lay ultimately in the conceptual ability “to think in plastic images,” “to imagine the thing to be made.”⁵⁹) Anand acknowledged the point, suggesting that the doctrine on which the particular form of art was based was also that underlying modern Western art: “Most contemporary artists would if interrogated about their methods of work disclose that they unconsciously employ the method of Yoga contemplation themselves. The testimony that such a modern artist as Rodin used to hold séances to realize his work mentally before he began to mold his statues is significant. And the general modern European aesthetics represented by Croce points to the same truth: “The true artist never makes a stroke with his brush without having previously seen it with his imagination.”⁶⁰ The language of inner and external here brought so-called Eastern methods in line with allegedly universal modernist aesthetics.

These ideas came together in an early stage of Indian modernism around Abanindranath Tagore (fig. 25). Coomaraswamy had in the first decade of the twentieth century advocated against the adoption of the more naturalistic styles found in Indian painting after the end of the Rajput “school” of painting in the eighteenth century. His history cast naturalism as an imperial stylistic trait imported into the country under first the Mughal Empire and then the British Empire, with the latter ultimately responsible for the contemporary decline of Indian art.⁶¹ As principal of the Government School of Art in Calcutta, Havell had rejected overt Western influences in order to encourage national traditions of art making.⁶² Coomaraswamy and Havell together supported Tagore, also drawing on Okakura Kakuzō’s advocacy for a unity of thought and art across a generalized “Asia” in his attempt to create a new and truly Indian art through a blend of past Mughal and Japanese artistic forms with Indian national mythology.⁶³ The Bengal school of Tagore and his followers, as it came to be known, survived well into the twenties. It has since been both championed as an active and conscious rallying point for revolutionary nationalist sentiment and criticized as a “safe” outlet for nationalistic feeling with its parameters entirely predefined by the Orientalizing bounds of Western colonialist and aesthetic discourse.⁶⁴ In either case the question turned on the communicative power of form: what would it mean to communicate a truly national or collective, rather than individual, worldview via style, and to what extent would naturalism have to be rejected in order for style to be truly expressive?

By the 1920s and 1930s, everyone wanted to claim their own favored mode of artistic production as properly expressive. But how to judge whether authentic modes of creation should lean towards the perceptual, as the academics and traditionalists tended to assert, or the conceptual, as the modernists more often suggested? At the perceptual end of the spectrum, favoring straightforward optical naturalism, conservative teachers and administrators associated with the Bombay School of Art argued that even the preservation of an academic realism originally introduced through Western example posed no problems for authenticity. According to these supporters, art was indeed a creative expression of personal vision, but naturalism was the proper means to this route. There was no danger that academic training would be a “Westernizing” or “de-Orientalizing” of Indian art as their critics tended to suppose: in painting naturalistically, students were not being taught to work in a particular style derived from Europe but instead in a universal manner derived directly from the example of “Nature.”⁶⁵

Figure 25. Abanindranath Tagore, Tissarakshita, Queen of Asoka, dated December 29, 1911. Watercolor and body color, 25 × 18.9 cm. Photo Royal Collection Trust, UK. / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018.

The Bengal school and supporters like Havell were caught in the middle of the perceptual/conceptual poles, advocating inner vision over straightforward naturalism and reacting with horror to those who claimed that Western naturalism could provide an adequate basis for Indian artistic expression.⁶⁶ The Bengal school, all the same, produced works of art in partially naturalistic styles that modernist critics like Fry saw as capitulations to everything that art should now reject. Writing in 1910 on a work by Abanindranath Tagore that he took to be still overly close to Western naturalism, Fry could only lament the “well-intentioned but regrettable” examples of “the profound corruption which contact with European ideas has created in Oriental taste.”⁶⁷ We might on the face of it here seem to be confronted with another “Picasso-manqué” judgment like that of Archer on Gaganendranath Tagore or Read on Chinese modernism. Yet knowing the history recounted above shows there is a deeper kind of confusion—or an even greater irony—in play. For Abanindranath Tagore, his own work was a studied rejection of Western art, including its naturalism, while for Fry, Tagore’s work showed a capitulation to precisely the Western artistic tendencies which Tagore understood himself to have rejected. Tagore saw Indian style and history while Fry, confidently making his judgment based on form and on the degree of stylistic deviation from fully perceptual naturalism, saw Western style and history. The failure shifts from artist to critic or perhaps to both as we begin to see a contingency to their own seeing to which their deep faith in form left them blind.

Even at the more straightforwardly formalist pole ordinarily associated with modernism and based on the idea that artistic vision must prioritize the conceptual over the perceptual for true expression to take place, things were no simpler. The shift in this direction became strikingly visible in the work of a new generation of modernists of the twenties and thirties who turned against the now seemingly institutionalized and historicist nationalism of the Bengal school.⁶⁸ Due to new aesthetic strategies alongside their appeal to the “village,” Mitter has grouped Rabindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, and Jamini Roy together as representatives of a new “primitivist” stage of Indian modernism at this moment.⁶⁹ The conceptual look of many of their works is seen nowhere more clearly than in Roy’s emphasis on large areas of bright and unmodulated color, heavy contour lines around figures, and pictorial details such as bodies extended and eyes flattened against the picture plane (fig. 26). Yet once again, to rely on form alone as a way into history and intention here would be deceptive. Rabindranath Tagore developed a technique of automatic drawing parallel to surrealism, emerging from “erasures” in his literary manuscripts that linked the turn from naturalism to form with a claim to the universality of human psychology and creativity. Roy developed an art of radical simplification that rejected Western example right down to manufactured pigment and the individualism of authorship, taking up the specificity of particular rural areas and scroll painting traditions rather than more recent generalized ideal of the village and in doing so linking the turn to form with a claim to the local as set against the universal and the Western alike. In Sher-Gil’s hands, meanwhile, the mixture of partially postimpressionist style with the subject matter of rural India, following training in Paris with travel around India and an engagement with art from Ajanta to the villages, linked the turn to form at some times with a claim to the universal appeal of artistic form and at others with a seeming knowingness about her dual engagement with styles from modernism and from the Indian past.⁷⁰

Figure 26. Jamini Roy (and workshop), Painting, Seated Brahmin, ca. 1935. Opaque watercolor on card, 41.4 × 26.2 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London / Photo © Estate of Jamini Roy.

The conceptual look, to repeat the point, means little here on its own. While Tagore appealed to the universal and Roy to the local, Sher-Gil’s art might be seen to appeal to the contingencies of negotiating between such totalities, not an outright universalism but what Sonal Khullar has called a “practice of worldly affiliations” that “questioned and complicated the boundaries of East and West.”⁷¹ If this artist making use of postimpressionism might now emerge as “a paradigmatic figure of the twentieth century,” as Saloni Mathur has recently put it, it is precisely not because such art offered a path to a singular “natural” human identity but instead because of her “enactment of identity as a dialogue across difference”—a practice that in its self-conscious games of reference and deference speaks to the “modern self shaped through the migratory historical conditions of our time.”⁷² In any case and in all these cases, what we see here—or what we can see once we know enough to know what to look for—is not the turn to form as a return to the natural or universal. Instead, style, even a folk primitivism or a postimpressionism, turns out to be a carefully articulated choice that gains meaning precisely through the specificity of that articulation. Thinking that learning to look at form will be a sure way into that which is not otherwise accessible is a safe path only to misrecognition.

Form and Universality: Real Primitives, Real Authenticity

The disagreements over expression via style return us to the cultural authenticity of modern art and in particular the problem of how anyone can know that they are dealing with the authentic. The most direct response, suggested by formalism at its most antihistoricist, has been the attempt to find a set of criteria that will be valid in all cases for artists and viewers alike. This would be the counter to the problems of originality and authenticity that pits modernism as static, timeless, and universal.

Doing some injustice to the subtlety of his argument, Paul Smith’s recent discussion of “real primitives” can be taken as a present-day best possible formulation of the potential universality of form and modern art, at once revealing the value and the limits of such an idea.⁷³ Smith develops his account of “the germ of truth hidden inside the primitivist aesthetic” in relation to two major uses: first, the middle to late nineteenth-century use of “primitive” as a stylistic label primarily attached to painters before the Renaissance and the widespread adoption of linear perspective, and second, its more general affirmative usage in order to mean the lack of corruption or over-sophistication that accompanies personal and collective innocence (94–95). The “nub of this conception,” for Smith, “is that art is most exemplary when it issues from ‘primitive’ capacities within the artist’s self” (94). For Wittgenstein, in Smith’s reading, “primitive,” instinctual, behaviors are those that are part of our “animal” nature (99). These “transparently meaningful, pre-reflective behaviours” are shared by other members of the species (94), and it is this shared feature that provides the ground on which the conventions that structure our more “complicated forms of life” can build (102).

The equivalent in painting is, Smith notes, the embodiment of what Merleau-Ponty describes as “primordial” perceptions, with the novel look of paintings here a reflection of unhabitual ways of seeing the world.⁷⁴ A painting is at heart the “outward” expression of “inner” visual experience, with the caveat that this experience is in part only articulated and made known through its expression (102). As such, though the paintings of an artist like Cézanne may at times have been forced and are “always inflected by culture,” “paintings can only express what they do because they use signs that are not wholly conventional” (106). “Pictures like Corot’s or Cézanne’s are transparently expressive because they arise from ‘primitive’ behaviors to which we are attuned to respond intuitively, without having to draw inferences from them, much as we react to signs of other people’s pain without having to draw analogies with our own pain” (106). The consequences for authenticity are clear. We “justifiably denigrate” paintings when they do not “exemplify the reactions they purport to” because this is to say that they have failed to be true expressions of the inward visual experience, primordial perceptions, or primitive form of life belonging to the artist (106). Painting that loses touch with its primitive grounding is sterile or meaningless; it fails to be authentic and thus expressive (113–14). And the sterility of the work, based as it is in the lack of true aesthetic expression and intuitively driven viewer response, is a sterility that observers will be able to “see” directly.

All of this goes some way towards salvaging the ideal of universality in Fry’s account of a generally valid method by which artists might find a style that is authentically their own. Style of this kind, as Wollheim also theorized it, is unique to the artists themselves as it is anchored in their particular psychomotor capacities (while nonetheless understandable by others on the basis of our shared human nature).⁷⁵ Understanding style this way also pits modernism itself as a kind of end-of-history moment in which development has given way to a universal present. The fact of art making as individualized expression and communication has been “worlded” in as much as it is now thought to hold for human beings (with their shared human nature) across the globe.

A crucial aspect of the universalist account presented here is its attention to “intention in action”: it accounts for the meaningful activity that artistic practice involves rather than just appealing to preformulated intentions based on texts available at the time.⁷⁶ The ideal of a painting grounded in a return to naïve vision does also have a clear possible basis in late nineteenth-century theory, being related to “ideologies of seeing propounded by [Hippolyte] Taine and other empiricists,” who conceive of vision as “both child-like and invested with tactility.”⁷⁷ As seen throughout the present book, similar ideas were popularized in striking ways in the decades that followed. Not only could the idea of an artistic practice “grounded in primitive instincts” be “exemplary for successive generations,” but the theoretical ideas surrounding it could also gain increasing authority.⁷⁸ This combination of theory and practice did in fact come to ground a certain type of painting, as evident in the early years of the twentieth century in France and after 1910 in Britain, when a generalized postimpressionist style became widely accepted and lived on as one of the most common forms of artistic practice ever since, despite its rejection by the avant-garde. Later noted even by Clement Greenberg as of generally high quality since the late nineteenth century (though not of the highest quality) and as a representational mode of painting that derived stylistically “from nothing later than fauvism,” this type of painting could be thought of as the global postimpressionism that would be the correct path for modernist painting according to formalism at its most universal.⁷⁹ Greenberg himself noted late in life not only that “the Fauve way of painting—alla prima, no underpainting, no glazing, and so forth—became the lingua franca by 1910,” but that artists around the world—he mentioned Japan, South America, and Canada—were still producing significant work in exactly this manner.⁸⁰

As the pervasive nature of the ideals of liberal and aesthetic education would suggest, precisely these views were found not only in the interwar British art writing concerned with the British Empire but also in the prescriptions by British art writers for artistic practice in Britain itself. Critics could regularly be found making approving judgments along the lines of: “Each artist has seen and felt for himself, and the bond between him and his fellows is simply that of strongly gripped method and power of expression”;⁸¹ or “The temper of the Society is essentially catholic. If an artist is sincerely interested in the advancement of water-colour painting as a mode of expression it matters little whether he be of a radical or conservative persuasion.”⁸² In his review of the 1935 Empire Art Exhibition organized by the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists, “Artists of the Empire,” W. G. Constable was especially forthright in criticism of those artists who had allowed a national or given style to inhibit the true, universally applicable goal of turning local circumstances towards the development of an individual artistic “vision” (69). His prescription for the future of art was typical of the dream of a universally natural (“primitive” or “Post-Impressionist”) style. Constable wrote that “race, climate, geographical structure, and the materials available” were factors that might shape the work of an artist but that these factors should be put to use to “create in him a new kind of vision, a new way of looking at the world” (65–66). He noted critically that impressionist technique had now supposedly become standard and thus academic but suggested hopefully that impressionism “is being succeeded by [a style] in which the dominant aim is interpretation and expression, based on the emotions experienced by the artist in front of nature” (66–67). These criticisms, Constable added, were intended to emphasize “the fact that art is nether imitation of nature nor of another art, and that vigour and originality depend ultimately on cultivating one’s own garden” (72). The same values were evident when in a British Institute of Adult Education initiative in the middle to late 1930s—with a report reprinted in the same Listener volume as Constable’s article—a number of men in Britain outside of normal systems of art education were taught to paint and create “art by the people.”⁸³ The enforced development of individual, nonderivative (historically or otherwise), and thus authentically expressive personal style was predictably put to the fore.⁸⁴ With this came a familiar look for the favored art (fig. 27). The participants were taught to use a simple wet-in-wet technique in order to paint what was in front of them, strictly eyeballed rather than measured. The approach often yielded a loosely postimpressionist, representational style of strong color and free distortion.⁸⁵

Figure 27. George Blessed, Whippets, ca. 1939. Oil on cotton on hardboard, 37.2 × 52.4 cm. Woodhorn Museum & Northumberland Archives. Photo courtesy the Ashington Group Trustees.

Belonging to modernism on the terms of high formalist universality does not mean belonging to the particular historical narrative of art at its most significant—that is, belonging to an avant-garde—but rather participating in a global community able to share a singular modernity that exists as an endless present. The political potential of such universalism has been exploited by many, including in the turn of the twentieth-century pan-Asianist ideals of the Bengal school and the later modernists in Africa, India, and many other places who cast aside fears of belatedness to work in styles influenced by Western modernism that they felt to be validly (as well as intrinsically and universally) expressive. Just as clear is the potential of this ideal of a singular modernity to degenerate into governmental techniques of the management of the soul, regulating life and liberty through the control of ways in which people would learn to “become themselves” through forms of ethical and aesthetic self-government. Leaving aside the politics, though, my main point here concerns the strange consequences the universalist account has, if taken at face value, for the making and viewing of art. High formalist universality seems unable finally to say how any style, however abstract or naturalistic, could be more or less authentically expressive than any other. This is because all potential signifiers of authenticity—such as free and visible brushwork or deliberate rejection of linear perspective—are absorbed into a generalized postimpressionist style.

At this point particular visual criteria might be called upon as a way out. Around the turn of the century, this might involve elements of what Richard Shiff has called the “technique of originality”: artists’ manipulation of the look of their pictures in particular ways cleverly breaks with what they know to be current convention and gives viewers the sense that the artists have relied on their unique vision and mode of setting it down.⁸⁶ Techniques that come to mind here in relation to modernism include ever more visible brushwork and expressive deviation from naturalistic representation. The technique of originality, as we have seen, can also mean embrace of the conceptual rather than the perceptual: objects presented in near two-dimensional manner with one or more of their most characteristic outline shapes parallel to the picture plane and objects given their individual sizes according to the artist’s intuition rather than perspectival standards that make size relative to distance from the viewer. Once again, though, the look of a work alone is unable to provide a satisfactory answer no matter how closely the viewer looks.⁸⁷ Just how conceptual, how frontal, or how out of scale must a work be to be truly reflective of primordial perception? Even Roger Fry’s own painting, after its most experimental moments in the mid-1910s, tended towards a careful remaking of representation that amounted to a naturalism softly tempered by postimpressionist technique.⁸⁸ Fry continued to believe that such paintings had come as close to an authentically expressive manner as he could manage, but very few critics have since been able to share that judgment.

On the logic of high formalist universality, the judgment of authenticity ultimately has to be made ad hoc, intuitively, with the key notion not being belatedness (not being up to date with what really matters) but simply aesthetic failure (not being good enough to put to use what really matters). The logic in fact governs the most recent discussions of what Mitter calls “Picasso manqué” judgments—the judgment of derivativeness and aesthetic failure of modernism outside the West that comes after and seems to stylistic resemble Anglo-American high modernism. On the one hand Mitter simply denies that judgments of this kind could be valid, while on the other James Elkins writes that (for him) such judgments are impossible to avoid.⁸⁹ In these cases, decisions about the second rate nature of an artist’s work are not based on the artist’s belatedness to a way of making art but instead on judgments about the quality of their work. These, as such, are judgments on the artists’ successes or failures in internalizing and making their own whatever previous models they have drawn upon.

The answer for the present that follows from this logic would be the embrace of such intuition and its consequences. The same idea of divining “affinity” in intention through aesthetic appreciation that was so ridiculed in relation to projects predating postcolonialism’s influence on the art world, such as William Rubin’s Museum of Modern Art Primitivism exhibition of 1984, would now be recovered in order to save previously neglected modernist practices from obscurity. It should be remembered, in this regard, that the judgment of cubist or modernist manqué has been a major part of Western art history’s judgment of its own modern artists. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, painters were judged on their ability to make an “original” copy of a motif that used learnt style in order to express themselves sincerely.⁹⁰ In the first half of the twentieth century, those outside the mainstream of French modernism were regularly criticized for their merely superficial borrowing of stylistic elements, whether they were artists in France of allegedly secondary importance such as the “salon” cubists or those in Britain and other parts of Europe and North America.⁹¹ Even within the MoMA Primitivism catalogue itself one can find accusations of “inauthentic” Western borrowing of African motifs, as in Jack Flam’s assertion that in Maurice de Vlaminck’s 1908 Bathers “the faces of the two frontal figures appear to have a strong—in fact, embarrassingly literal and banal—resemblance to the Fang mask he had sold to Derain two years earlier. Compared to the contemporary work of Derain, Matisse, or Picasso . . . this painting is most noteworthy for the rather poor understanding it reflects of either Cézanne or Primitive art.”⁹²

Form and Contingency: The Shapes of Time and the Shapes of Modernism

Whatever its former appeal, the high formalist universality that envisions a modernism outside of time cannot be supported by the connections between form and history that I have presented throughout this book. And this conclusion fits with the widespread agreement that modernism cannot now be discussed in such a uniform and universalist manner. Amid the “definitional proliferation” (in Aarthi Vadde’s phrase) of terms for modernism after the global turn, the editors of a recent cluster of essays on the subject note that there are three principles about which all seem to agree: “(1) that ‘modernism,’ whatever it may be, is best understood as a maximal rather than restricted phenomenon; (2) that it uniquely addresses the conflicts of ‘modernity’ across space and time; (3) that it is hybrid and multivalent rather than monolithic or singular.”⁹³ On this basis one might wonder whether the still-common term “global modernism” retains any value whatsoever. Is it merely empty, designating no more than a concern to expand our view beyond previously narrow confines? Or is it actively misleading in implying a singular modernism, reinstating the homogenizing process in which a traditional (Western) view of modernist art is used as the model to explain (or denigrate) a vast range of practices across times and cultures?

One justification for the appeal to the singular form of global modernism is the long-recognized danger that plural modernisms may be cast as mere alternatives, leaving the canonical Western construction in place as primary. But a more interesting answer is possible now that the imagined primacy of the Western canon, which had once seemed unassailable, is already beginning to fade away. Looking back in time, we know there is not a linear history of modernism’s “influence on” the global South but a story of the characteristics of modernity and artistic modernisms in some parts and in different ways originating from them, with lines of attachment drawing traditions back and forth at multiple points over time.⁹⁴ And in the present the imperatives of ecological crisis to which modernity has given rise mean that we are faced with a moment when to think of “our own collective action,” whether contemporary or historical, is also to imply the “planetary,” regardless of the geographical or cultural placement and awareness of any one actor.⁹⁵

With this in mind, in this final section I want to show how a modest formalism dovetails with a global modernism that can acknowledge both multiplicity and the possibility of a shared horizon.⁹⁶ My focus on temporality is not new and in part follows Keith Moxey’s suggestion that the time of modernism “flows at different speeds in different situations.”⁹⁷ But here I relate temporality to a major, though neglected, aspect of late modernist criticism itself, which following Stanley Cavell notably made contingency central to its self-understanding. Considering this line of thought and reconciling it with the discussion so far might lead back to the modest formalism I raised in the introduction: an acceptable kind that now acknowledges at once both the end of grand modernist self-confidence and universality and the fact that the desire to do anything historical with objects will always require some, albeit now so much more limited, appeal to form.

Reflecting on the fate of modernism in the historical present, Moxey suggests that modernism has “always been tied to the star of temporal progress,” with its time not only “teleological” but finding “its home in the West.”⁹⁸ As one classic account of modernism across the arts explains this situation, in modernity the artist is “cut off from the normative past with its fixed criteria,” such that “tradition has no legitimate claim to offer him examples to imitate or directions to follow.”⁹⁹ Strangely though, according to accounts of modernism that have become popular in art history, in this situation the rebellion against tradition (in the form of classicism or bourgeois norms) makes a new kind of tradition that constantly reforms as it grows even more important for art’s success. In order to secure its survival in the future, art has to address itself to what mattered most in the immediate past. The only valid test becomes something like the authentic effort during creation of the artist who has internalized, and now works according to, the standards provided by the art of that immediate past.¹⁰⁰ The true artist is thus the figure able to successfully internalize the significant art of the recent past in such a way as to be fully attuned to the state and direction of contemporary high culture.

Inauthenticity or belatedness here (what Thierry de Duve labels “avant-gardism” as opposed to the genuine avant-garde) is represented by work that addresses itself to (or “fakes” itself for) an imagined present and future without any concern that it feels “right” to the artist.¹⁰¹ Artists may well find themselves to be belated, but this is less about taking up past artistic forms per se; it is rather the problem of doing so in a way that fails to convince their viewers that this was a necessary (as timely) move.¹⁰² As the history of abstract art shows, styles could very easily find themselves an unexpected second life if the artist was sufficiently informed and sensitive to take them up in just the right way at just the right time. For Hubert Damisch, the endeavor of American abstraction at midcentury represents “less a new development in the history of abstraction than a new departure, a resumption—but at a deeper level and, theoretically as much as practically, with more powerful means—of the match begun under the title of abstraction thirty or forty years earlier.”¹⁰³ And this entirely satisfies his demand that at any one moment the painter “must succeed in demonstrating to us that painting is still something we positively cannot do without, that it is indispensible to us, and that it would be madness—worse still, a historical error—to let it lie fallow today.”¹⁰⁴

According to Mitter, one of the great advantages of primitivism is its potential to offer a way to escape the “teleological certainty of modernism.”¹⁰⁵ But it might instead be the temporal account of modernism that truly offers a way out of the contradictions and confusions produced by high formalist universality and “real” primitivism as well as the stress on intuitive judgment the two imply. For Greenberg, art’s ability to communicate the (aesthetic) experiences built into it is dependent on the connection between an artwork and its place in art history.¹⁰⁶ Modernism to him was to be regarded as a process whereby in order to stay vital each art form gradually sloughed off everything extraneous to it through a constant testing and rethinking of the conventions that were necessary to it. Modernism thus found an end point—in the case of painting—in flatness and its delimitation by the framing edge. The path to flatness, though, was merely a contingent example of Greenberg’s more general rule of constraints and conventions. Conventions for Greenberg “put resistances, obstacles, controls in the way of communication at the same time that they make it possible and guide it.”¹⁰⁷ Without the play of expectation and satisfaction that such constraints and conventions supply, the viewer would be unable to recognize the particular experiences the work was supposed to afford. Working relative to historically shifting conventions of the medium turns out to be what allows the artist to produce work that can be recognized and understood and what allows the artist to be sure that an ambiguous object will be seen in a particular way because it is understood by viewers relative to a particular set of other works of art.¹⁰⁸ In order to be more than merely ambiguous, art would thus have to be made as part of a tradition and the viewer’s imaginative recovery of that tradition would be crucial for proper appreciation of what the artist had achieved and potentially communicated in the work in question. In Rosalind Krauss’s elegant summary of her onetime allegiance to high modernist criticism:

The history we saw from Manet to the impressionists to Cézanne and then to Picasso was like a series of rooms en filade. Within each room the individual artist explored, to the limits of his experience and his formal intelligence, the separate constituents of his medium. The effect of his pictorial act was simultaneously to open the door to the next space and to close out access to the one behind him. The shape and dimensions of the new space were discovered by the next pictorial act; the only thing about that unstable position that was clearly determined beforehand was its point of entrance. In 1965, it followed logically that to work at the level of Velázquez, Frank Stella had to paint stripes, and that Noland’s choices about structure had narrowed to what Michael Fried termed “the deductive logic of the framing-edge.”

We saw the aching beauty of those works in their constant invention of formats that collapsed into one instantly perceived chord the sounds of all those doors to the past closing at once, managing in the space that was left to lodge powerful evidence of the feelings of their makers. One part of what we were seeing was a kind of history, telescoped and assessed; and the other part was the registration of feelings generated by that historical condition. I never doubted the absoluteness of that history. It was out there, manifest in a whole progression of works of art, an objective fact to be analyzed.¹⁰⁹

While the many commentators who have followed and critiqued Greenberg have dispensed with the historical certainties of his account of painting’s teleology, the general structure of recursively given constraints has been retained. In the past to be outside “the narrative of progress ascribed to artistic production by influential critics such as Clement Greenberg”—outside the “triumphal progression towards ever greater abstraction” that is the narrative of the West—was automatically to fail to make interesting art.¹¹⁰ After Greenberg, with “essence” reconceived historically or dialectically, “the modernist project” becomes (in Michael Fried’s formulation) “not a matter of doing away with norms and conventions that had been revealed to be inessential—as if in pursuit of a timeless and unchanging core—but rather of discovering precisely which conventions, at a given moment, turned out to be crucial to the enterprise of painting (for example) at its most serious and exalted, which is to say at its most committed to providing instances of painting capable of standing comparison with the painting of the past whose quality is not in doubt.”¹¹¹

For the critical upholders of antiessentialist modernism who followed, then, to be outside of the communally produced norms for which modernism was responsible—outside of a different but very particular form of history—is still to be outside of what could conceivably matter. According to Cavell, “only masters of a game, perfect slaves to that project, are in a position to establish conventions which better serve its essence. This is why deep revolutionary changes can result from attempts to conserve a project, to take it back to its idea, keep it in touch with its history.”¹¹² When a movement like pop art is too clumsily direct in its attempt “to break with the tradition of painting and sculpture” it follows, “the result is not that the tradition is broken, but that these works are irrelevant to that tradition, i.e., they are not paintings, whatever their pleasures.”¹¹³ Similar judgments can be found in the present day in places ranging from Krauss’s worry that in the contemporary “post-medium” condition “the abandonment of the specific medium spells the death of serious art” to Robert Pippin’s view that “the heritage of art is as important to its nature as its projection into a future. It is by being true to the continuing, unique heritage of art that we come to a position in which we begin to understand ourselves as capable of directing the future in a way that is unique to the aesthetic mode of intelligibility.”¹¹⁴

Clearly to the extent that it excludes art outside of a single valid chain of creation, this approach is no longer satisfactory. The stresses throughout this book on a broadened formalism, communication, and the connection between form and an imaginative historical psychology, however, show the valuable element of, and grain of truth in, these accounts that needs to be preserved. This is not only the plausible nature of the story of art making finding its standards set by the immediate past, albeit in highly unexpected ways. It is also the importance of such accounts for the side of criticism, viewing, or art writing, in as much as such histories provide a structure for testing and potentially recovering what (if anything) was put into the work that remains ready to be experienced again in the future. Greenberg’s account lapses into essentialism, and antiessentialist modernist accounts still retain the idea that there is a single tradition or closely clustered set of traditions that are all there is of real significance. Can the insights these have provided be retained without repeating their exclusions?

The notion that important art finds its standards within a history of successful art making has an interesting parallel in historical conventionalist definitions of art, whereby art making is essentially a practice bound in tradition. In order to qualify as such, on these accounts, an artwork must stand in meaningful relation to a definite previous work of art.¹¹⁵ Similar problems arise here to those haunting narrative accounts of modernism. How is it that a relation to a definite previous work of art might be properly judged meaningful? How can one securely know who the experts are whose judgments of artwork past and present correctly identify the true tradition of what was and is now art? And what can one say about other creative traditions such as non-Western ones with no causal connection to the allegedly single true art tradition or chain?¹¹⁶

This might all, however, point to exactly what is required for an account of modernism broadened in the various ways this chapter has implied are needed. The necessary corrective can be found in the attempts at a “postformalist” history of world art that have followed George Kubler’s Shape of Time of 1962, taking up Kubler’s stress on the typological and seriated ordering of things or their compared and grouped physical characteristics and places in specific rule-bound series.¹¹⁷ Crucially, Kubler’s basic “rule of series”—in one abbreviated formulation that “in an irreversible finite series, taking one position defines and reduces the formal motions that are possible in succeeding positions”—in its similarity to an account of an unfolding sequence of moves in a rule-governed game, bears a fundamental relation to the antiessentialist modernisms charted above.¹¹⁸ While the progress towards a final end point in “painting as an art” found in Greenberg’s account is rejected, “if painting is an art,” as Whitney Davis has put it, “there cannot be mere regress either.”¹¹⁹ Like after each move in a game of chess, “one is constrained by what has been done before, even if [it] has been superseded—indeed precisely because it has been superseded.”¹²⁰

Supplemented by a postformalist and postcolonial take up of Kubler, the model of antiessentialist modernism can be suitably supplemented and salvaged. The first step is Kubler’s acknowledgement that there are in fact many “shapes” of time moving alongside and intersecting each other, even in apparently singular art making traditions.¹²¹ Modernisms, in other words, might be thought of as multiple chains of “essences” built on particular histories that come to restructure and even support one another rather than one central “tradition” and the barely relevant “periphery” or “alternatives” built around it.¹²² The second step is Davis’s suggestion that attention be paid not just to the developmental orders noted by Kubler—where the rule of series is followed like an unfolding game of chess—but also to “devolutionary” orders that are not governed by any such rules, even if “people in the series might well project emergent rules to apply to things they produce in it.”¹²³ Devolutionary orders are series in their maintenance of causal relation but emerge “when and where any rules of series (or the forms of likeness that they express and relay)” begin to break down and “are reworked or suspended.”¹²⁴ It follows that “we should probably not seek to map series of ‘formal motions’ into accepted topographies and chronologies of what we take to be the world, that is, the globe or the planet or regions thereof. Rather, tracking series, the projected rules that govern them, and their unavoidable devolutions and unintended consequences in differently governed series, in ungoverned series, and in new series, tells us what the worlds are.”¹²⁵

Worlds (aesthetic traditions) can consolidate or re-world, just as traditions can flow in and out of one another, with rules that hold to consolidate a tradition in developmental orders, or they can restructure to unmake and open up the possibility of new traditions in devolutionary orders. The task for art writers (or historians, or critics) is to track the rules and shapes as they make and re-create themselves and in doing so not just to rely on their own intuition—which will, as Greenberg and many others recognized, be a function of the shapes they have already familiarized themselves with—but suspend reliance upon aesthetic judgment until their acquaintance with new shapes and worlds can have reworked their capacity for judgment accordingly. This, in the end, may be a truer way to understand the quality of Mitter’s recoveries of Indian modernists that are in fact based not on aesthetic judgment but on careful charting of the histories on which each of them have drawn, alongside other major studies that are now demonstrating the deeply innovative making and remaking of traditions across nations and cultures since the dawn of modernity. The account of shapes that interweave without collapsing together may also help move us beyond the descriptions both of alternative modernisms relative to a European center or of a universal modernism to which all areas must conform. We are left, instead, with the mixture of variety and unity by which we find ourselves living at the intersection of multiple traditions, making our way in the world through our own attachments and forms of likeness, and bound together by the planetary-scale concerns that are modernity’s irradicable legacy.