ABSTRACT

In 2012–13, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York staged Inventing Abstraction: 1910–1925, a revisionist history of European modernism. Visitors to the exhibition encountered at its entryway a mural-size diagram that served as an informational tool and abstract work in its own right. 1 This image mapped connective ligaments among artists that the curator, Leah Dickerman, considered to have ‘played a significant role in the development of a new modern language for the arts’ (Dickerman 2012: front endpapers). Dickerman signalled her intention to revisit abstraction's role in modernism through the diagram's reference to an earlier precedent: a chart drawn up by MoMA's founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. to accompany the landmark 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. Now rather infamous, Barr's diagram is narrowly exclusive and neatly teleological. Premised upon the work of a small group of male painters based in Western Europe, the chart ‘normalizes, as the only modernism, a particular and gendered set of practices,’ as Griselda Pollock trenchantly observed in her essay ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ (Pollock 1988: 50). More broadly, Cubism and Abstract Art stands for an outmoded art history, one premised on autonomous formal developments within a hermetically conceived art world.