ABSTRACT
To my mind the four models of modernism, postmodernism, politics, and skill are the cleanest arrangement of the existing approaches to twentieth-century painting. I could have added or substituted many others. Peter Bürger's sense of modernism, for example, encompasses Dada and surrealism; its dynamic opposition between autonomy and politics is in places significantly different from any of the theories I have picked. 1 I have omitted some politically engaged theories such as Karl Werckmeister's, because it is not clear enough to me how they impinge on the canons of twentieth-century painting. Donald Kuspit's psychoanalytic criticism also implies a different shape to the twentieth century, one that privileges journeys of self-critique and renewal and cuts across movements and decades to assemble an idiosyncratic canon. 2 Jay Bernstein proposed an alternative to Clark's account in which the materiality of the sign is “soldered repeatedly to the social” rather than set against it as a “contradiction.” 3 Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, preeminent among the theories I have not discussed, begins by naming 1910 as the pivot of modernism after which “nothing concerning art is self-evident any more.” His evaluation of avantgarde art is implicit in several of the accounts I have mentioned, but I did not include him because the extension of his ideas beyond music, and beyond midcentury, is unclear. 4 Thomas McEvilley proposed a cyclic theory, in which skeptical periods related to postmodernism have supplanted rationalistic periods such as modernism several times since the Greeks. (Duchamp is McEvilley's candidate for the first appearance of the current postmodernism.) 5
