AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States (review)

A new book of essays by Janet Wolff is always a welcome event. This one was written over a long time scale ("The 'Jewish Mark' in English Painting" is 1993-1994), and four of the six essays are published elsewhere; hence, AngloModern is less a unified argument than a collection of stimulating pieces. Wolff's focus is on the "social coordinates of the production of 'modernism,'" rather than on the dismantling of the canon (6). But her book does add additional and important arguments for re-envisioning constructions of modernism. Wolff's own lens is explicitly gendered as she explores constructions of masculinity and ethnicity, and engagingly clarifies her own class, gender and ethnic locations as a "resident alien" (the title of her 1995 book).

The first of the six slim chapters, "Women at the Whitney: 1910-30," describes an exhibition which Wolff was invited to propose to the Whitney (a proposal later abandoned). The invitation encouraged Wolff into detailed reflections about modernist aesthetics and the "complex social networks of friendships, patronage and personal relationships and exhibition histories" (17-8). Wolff's deft handling of a range of information is stimulating; my guess is that she is an inspiring teacher.

Chapter two is a case study of the American artist Kathleen McEnery, who exhibited at the key 1913 Armory Show in New York. She was later "rediscovered" and included in the 1987 inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC. Wolff situates McEnery in her historical context, interweaving issues of class, gender and geography to arrive at a nuanced conclusion that "the questioning of aesthetic evaluations is merely raised and not answered by the critical questioning of the canon and its exclusions" (67). I agree with Wolff that re-envisioning has to be a much more complex process than simply one of "rediscovery." During my own visit to the National Museum in Washington, the docent certainly chose to privilege "canoninic" women artists—such as Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun and Mary Cassatt—rather than rethink the terms by which women's art is defined.

In chapter three, Wolff revisits her oft-cited work on the invisible flâneuse, and addresses the recent work of Parsons, Nava and Wilson on women's use of public space (omitted in Wolff's earlier revisiting in Resident Alien).¹ Wolff proposes that rather than validating hitherto marginalized feminine practices (shopping) as flânerie, we acknowledge the city's more indeterminate discourses. Although this is a sophisticated approach, if Wolff had consulted working class women's autobiographies she might have favored a more positive feminine geography of modernism.²

Chapter four attempts the conceptually difficult task of producing a non-essentialist concept of the feminine through an examination of Simmel and Benjamin and an excellent reading of the work of Gwen John. Other fruitful dialogues could take place with feminist philosophers of "femininity"—see for example Sandra Bartky's attack on the centring of women's bodies in "normative" femininity (a key theme for art historians) and Biddy Martin's work on lesbian performativity, a discussion replete with possibilities for any rethinking of the gaze.³

The final chapters focus on the English artist Mark Gertler, Bloomsbury and discourses of the Jew as Other in modernity. Wolff claims that Bloomsbury's decorative art shows that the "influence of the avant-garde movements elsewhere in Europe was nonexistent here"; I find this comment odd, given that Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant worked with the most technically innovative textile designer, Allan Walton, in the 1930s, and that Bell's earlier (1913) Painted Omega Screen (Tents and Figures) reflects the work of several French artists including Derain. While it might be true, as Wolff claims, that Bloomsbury's "friendship networks worked on a system of patronage and brokerage" it is worth remembering that one obvious reason for Bloomsbury solidarities was to protect its many gay, bi-sexual and pacifist...