AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States

Janet Wolff, Cornell University Press, Ithica and London, 2003
www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
ISBN 0-8014-8742-0 paperback, 172 pp.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
mosher@svsu.edu,
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA.

In this collection Janet Wolff of the School of the Arts, Columbia University, considers some neglected American and British painters of the early 20th century, the canonical post-WW II period, and the recent "postmodern" era which revalued the painterly canon of the previous generation. She does this within three sets of neatly paired essays.

Her essay "Women at the Whitney, 1910-30: Feminism, Sociology, Aesthetics" notes that the group of men and women artists associated with the early days of an important art museum have been largely forgotten. The following essay "Questions of Discovery: The Art of Kathleen McEnery" examines a painter from Buffalo, New York who studied in Manhattan and participated actively in its art scene before returning to Buffalo to marry and concentrate on portraits of local notables.

Two essays in ‘AngloModern’ are based upon the work of Walter Benjamin, – a seemingly inexhaustible inspiration for intellectual inquiry. The first discusses his aesthetic debt to his teacher George Simmel. In the second Wolff questions the romantic mid-nineteenth century idea of the urban ’flâneur’ when examined against the reality of urban women's lives and choices.

A pair of essays on British Jewish artists investigate their subject matter, and the public reception that they encountered. In the first essay, she examines the work of Mark Gertler, most remembered for his stylized "Merry Go Round" of 1917. Today this painting appears a fairly bold antiwar statement, where Gertler depicts soldiers and sailors as straight-backed toys rotating in an an aimless circle, in a work painted and exhibited during World War One. Wolff's second essay in this section discusses a variety of Jewish artists including sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose risen Christ sculpted for a war memorial elicited antisemitic comments in the press.

Regarding the Whitney artists, Wolff makes a comment that is worthy of further development. She notes the mythical masculine heroes of Abstract Expressionism – drinking and painting and loving and fighting and Drinking – as embodied in Ed Harris' 2000 movie Pollock. She contrasts them with the figurative painters of the Whitney circle like Guy Pene du Bois and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, seemingly forgotten and not the subject of Hollywood movies. As examples of their work, Wolff chooses a du Bois painting of a man dining with his wife who is quietly instructing the waiter, and a Kuniyoshi stil-life of objects arranged upon a Victorian parlor chair. She suggests that these artists and similar have been effectively "feminized" in the way they've been left out of nineteenth-century art histories. This is a novel argument with rich and provocative possibilities for deconstructing institutional sexism in the writing of art history. Perhaps this will be the topic of Janet Wolff's next book, anticipated warmly by those of us who have enjoyed her ‘AngloModern’.