Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Gard
ALLAN ANTLIFF, The University of Chicago Press, 2001 289 pages, 4 colour and 84 b&w illustrations; £31.50, cloth ISBN 0 226 02103 3.
In Anarchist Modernism Allan Antliff tells a tale which at first sight seems to be no more than an interesting gloss on the early twentieth-century avant-garde in America. On further reading one begins to note that this is no gloss, it seems to be the main text, or at least a key part of it. Fascinating light is shed on figures such as Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz and Rockwell Kent, all in the context of the small magazine, bookshop and gallery culture of New York. Camera Work was, of course, one of these small magazines, another which is given considerable attention by Antliff was The Modern School, edited by a number of anarchist thinkers including Carl Zigrosser. Rockwell Kent was the cover designer, and contributors included the artist Walter Pach.
The contrast between Kent, inspired by Blake, Nietzsche and the Alaskan wilderness, and Pach the cubist-urbanist, gives a sense of the breadth of debate in this radical and creative culture. But this current of activity to all intents and purposes ceased to exist in the aftermath of the USA entering the First World War. The pressures on this cultural anarchism were twofold. On the one hand, there was an active 'patriotic', government-sponsored, anti-anarchist drive. This campaign employed a use of language we are more likely to associate with Germany in the 1930s, for example in 1917 Man Ray's Invention-Dance was described as a 'degenerate work of art' an example of 'the spirit of anarchistic monstrosity'. The other threat came, paradoxically, from the left, namely the success of a Bolshevic model of communism as the main representative of the radical left, throughout the West. The former demanded the self-censorship of the radical artist within a conservative state, the latter demanded the self-denial of the artist in the interests of crudely-construed radical politics. What Antliff does in this study is to bring alive the period immediately before this cultural loss in the USA, years which had at their heart the epoch-marking Armory show in New York in 1913.
Allan Antliff's work might at first sight seem to have little link with Volker Welter's book except in so far as it is another exploration of still unexplored aspects of modernism. Yet in fact one of its key figures is Patrick Geddes's good friend, the Indian art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy. Just as Welter's work has limited direct interest to art historians but great indirect interest, one can say of Antliff's book that it has no direct relevance to Scottish art, but is of major indirect relevance. This can be encapsulated, for example, in the fact that Antliff points out that Coomaraswamy's favourite haunt in New York was a bookshop with the enchanting name of Sunwise Turn. This bookshop published one of Coomaraswamy's most important collections of essays, The Dance of Shiva, but the name of the shop is redolent not of India but of the rituals of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. On consultation of Antliff's bibliography and a little further digging, so it transpires, for the name has its origin in the visit of the American Amy Murray to Father Allan Macdonald of Eriskay in 1905 (incidentally, at a time when Geddes's colleague, the artist John Duncan, was also on the island).
Later, when Geddes set up his new department of Civics and Sociology at the University of Bombay, Sunwise Turn provided the American books needed for the library. Antliff doesn't mention these links and there is, of course, no reason why he should. What is significant here is that these are the kind of intriguing trails that this excellent book impels you to start following. Antliff gives Anarchist Modernism an overall context by quoting an interview with Peter Blume in which he recalls his early career as an artist in Greenwich Village in 1920: 'the residue of radicalism in the Village was anarchism' says Blume. Alan Antliff has successfully performed the task of discovering what and who left that radical residue behind. His book is an outstanding contribution to the history of early twentieth-century ideas.
Reviewed by Murdo MacDonald, this article first published in the Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History, volume 7, 2002.
