Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (review)

Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde. Allan Antliff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 289. $45.00.

Anarchist Modernism transforms understanding of early twentieth-century American art. Far from being a "quietist and apolitical" exercise in formalist abstraction, avant-garde art and art theory in the New York art world were directed towards radical social and political ends (2). Indeed, Antliff persuasively argues that anarchism lent "coherence and direction to modernism in the United States between 1908 and 1920" (ibid.). His book represents an alternative, therefore, not only to the depoliticized formalism that emerged with Clive Bell and culminated with Clement Greenberg, but also to Marxist-Leninist social history in the tradition of Meyer Schapiro and T. J. Clark. In his last chapter, "The Denouement of Anarchist Modernism," Antliff chronicles the rise of formalist critics, the ascendancy of the Bolshevik party, and the crackdown on World War I dissidents. More broadly, he restores the relevance of anarchism, and its impact on the theory and practice of art, to the history of "the First American Avant-Garde."

In doing this, he creates a fascinating intellectual history of the anarchist movement that deserves to be read outside of the discipline of art history. Thanks to Paul Avrich's publications, from Anarchist Portraits (1978) to Anarchist Voices (1995), some of this history will be familiar to political historians. That may not be the case with historians of modernist art and literature, but Antliff effectively summarizes the variations of American anarchism, from communism to individualism, and traces them to models formulated by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, Max Stirner, and other European philosophers. He shows how anarchism was introduced to the United States by diverse activists whose common denominator was a revolt against "cultural beliefs and practices that oppressed the individual" (3). Focal points include Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, the International Workers of the World, the Ferrer Center, Mary Mowbray-Clark's Sunwise Turn bookstore, and the Ridgefield, N.J. Colony. The range and specificity of his study is, indeed, impressive.

His major contribution goes beyond a suggested affinity between anarchism and modernism. That, after all, was the sensational claim made by the press at the time of the 1913 Armory Show. Instead (and this emphasis is unusual today) he argues for the direct influence of anarchism on modernists and modernism in the World War I era. He bases this argument on painstaking documentary research and on close readings of published criticism. Given these methodological strengths, it is not surprising that the publication of Anarchist Modernism coincides with his "Only a Beginning": An Anthology of Anarchist Culture (2001). Robert Henri and "The Eight," Alfred Stieglitz and 291, Man Ray and the Arensberg Circle--Antliff convincingly argues that these and other less well-known groups exemplify "anarchist modernism." In making his case he refers to familiar critics, such as Hutchins Hapgood and Walter Pach, and also introduces less familiar ones, like Carl Zigrosser.

Antliff contends that anarchist modernism should not be associated with a specific "subject" or "style." He cites Henri's "realist" working-class portraits and Man Ray's "stylized" War (AD MCMXIV), as well as Adolph Wolff's "abstract" sculptures, a welcome disruption of standard art historical distinctions. In his view, anarchist modernism fulfilled "the original meaning of 'avant-garde'--the conjunction of revolutionary social and political tendencies with artistic goals" (2-3). His reaffirmation of the mythology of the avant-garde, whose history was traced by Donald Drew Egbert in Social Radicalism and the Arts (1970), will be one of the most controversial aspects of his study. Richard Murphy's Theorizing the Avant-Garde (1998), for example, indicates the problems with this approach from the point of view of postmodernist theory. And David Kadlec's Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture (2000), although it covers different disciplinary, geographic, and chronological terrain, is both instructive and insightful in regard to alternative approaches to the...