The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1987–2005

by Hilton Kramer

Widely acknowledged as the most authoritative art critic of his generation, Hilton Kramer advanced his comments and judgments largely in the form of essays and short pieces. Thus this first collection of his work to appear in twenty years is a signal event for the art world and for criticism generally.

The Triumph of Modernism not only traces the vicissitudes of the art scene but diagnoses the state of modernism and its vital legacy in the postmodern world. Mr. Kramer bracingly updates his incisive critique of the artists, critics, institutions, and movements that have formed the basis for modern art. Appearing for the first time in greatly expanded form is his consideration of the foundations of modern abstract painting and the future of abstraction.

The aesthetic intelligence that Mr. Kramer brings to bear on certain tired assumptions about modernism—many of them derived from methodologies and politics that have little to do with art—helps rescue the artwork itself and its appreciation from the very institutions, such as the art museum and the academy, that purport to foster it.

Always clear-eyed and vastly illuminating, Hilton Kramer’s art criticism remains among the very finest written in the past hundred years. Readers of The Triumph of Modernism will be treated to an exhilarating experience.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

384 pages, Hardcover

First published October 26, 2006

Reviews

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a previous art critic for the New York Times, Hilton Kramer has dedicated his life to the highest forms of intellectual and artistic criticism, analyzing works by Clement Greenberg, Wassily Kandinsky, and even Andy Warhol. These analyses constitute the entirety of Kramer’s most recent work The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005. These essays are reprinted not with the intention of transforming or reformatting his previous responses, but to more boldly restate his claims. Kramer has long felt that modernism, particularly in art—which he feels to be an essential aspect of bourgeois culture—has been dead since the the emergency of Lichtenstein's Pop Art.

Kramer’s supporting argument is that art criticism is now dominated, and wrongly so, by three genres of thought: academia, commercialism, and left-wing liberalist politics. Rather than judge art through means of aestheticism, critics now approach each exhibit with one thing in mind: whether the art fits into intellectual fads and trends of the time, and whether or not it helps to advance a political viewpoint. Rather than art being an aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural achievement of the highest honor, its value has now been reduced to simple “ooohs” and “aaahs” coupled with the level of its shock value. Art is now temporary rather than timeless, as shown by Kramer when he discusses a gallery in Los Angeles named the Temporary Museum of Contemporary Art.

Modernism, for Kramer, is a way of thinking about art; a way of perception, not a style. In a modernist era, one values aesthetics and the creative process, a journey in which the artist must struggle to realize his vision, and the critic to hone his aesthetic senses to discern what is truly rare and amazing. The last true form of art for Hilton Kramer was that of abstraction, which triumphed during the first two decades of the 20th century. Abstraction is a break from materialism, and as Kramer says about Wassily Kandinsky’s painting: “it embraces the sensuality of the mind’s impressions to look beyond the boundaries of naturalism and materialism for the foundations of his art.” Such is the reason the author digs into the past to celebrate art—for instance, Henri Matisse and his arduous life dedicated to art and art alone, never halting to push past the boundaries of the art scene with explosions of color and beauty. There are no longer any Henri Matisses, and the line between the genuine and the fraudulent has been blurred. Art has degenerated in the modern day, now being critiqued solely based on its social and material circumstances.

Kramer’s boldest argument against new forms of art comes from his essay on Andy Warhol, whom he attributes to the trivialization of art, by which it became more superficial and people became “less willing or able to distinguish between achievement and its trashy simulacrum.” Andy Warhol became an artist only as a result of his social status and connections with celebrities, as he never produced any kind of art born from pure, aesthetic influence. His colorful copies of soup cans and a photo of Marilyn Monroe are, in one sense, fun to look at, but to Kramer, they do not constitute true forms of art. The emergence of Warhol was the pinnacle of the death of modernism, a time when there were no longer any distinctions between high and low culture. As Kramer states, “Warhol’s “genius” (if it can be called that) consisted of his shrewdness in parlaying this essentially commercial talent into a career in an art world that no longer had the moral stamina to resist it: a career that would have been unthinkable, for example, ten years earlier.” Does this mean that it is only a matter of time before modernism, in all its cultural manifestations, is entirely dead?

On April 8, 2009, I had the pleasure of visiting the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas. Upon arriving in the city, I noticed an advertisement for an exhibit titled “Classic Contemporary: Warhol, Lichtenstein & Friends.” Being that Roy Lichtenstein is my favorite artist, I felt none other than extreme compulsion to attend. Oddly enough, I had been reading Kramer’s The Triumph of Modernism on the plane. My experience at the exhibit only reaffirmed Kramer’s central thesis. The exhibit included seventeen pieces from artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and Sol LeWitt, but was ultimately dominated by the Andy Warhol pieces. I was sad to see that Lichtenstein was only given a tiny portion of the exhibit, a lone corner in which a 1971 piece titled “Mirror,” one of the least significant (at least in terms of Pop Art, although perfect for a minimalist piece) and least popular pieces hung, not so far away from but completely overburdened by Andy Warhol’s pink and black squares that make up what is titled “Flowers.” Even an article in the Las Vegas Sun states that Andy Warhol’s “Flowers” painting is “so large that it required cutting an 11-foot-by-11 ½ inch-wide hole in the wall of the gift shop and removing its glass doors just to get the painting into the gallery.” It was obvious that the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art had a shtick: to lure people in with well-known, popular artists like Andy Warhol in an attempt to get them to stay and enjoy works by other lesser known artists. That same article in the Las Vegas Sun calls the exhibit “risky,” and also notes that the curatorial advisor “curated the exhibit using the influential Warhol as a launching point.” My visit to the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art reaffirms Kramer’s point because it proves that the art world is no longer concerned with masterpieces that stand the test of time, but with attracting more visitors using artists who emerged as a result of superficial social perceptions and materialistic values. It seems that is a lack of intellectual, aesthetic achievements in the art world, and today’s gallery exhibits only aid in reinforcing that this is perfectly appropriate. Sadly enough, I am kind of glad to say I was at least able to purchase a Roy Lichtenstein shirt.

[The American Conservative]

'Hilton Kramer begins this splendid collection of his essays on modern art with a consideration of Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian entitled “Kandinsky and the Birth of Abstraction.” He gives a useful account of the spiritual impulses and marginal esoteric thinkers that proved catalysts for Kandinsky, Mondrian, and other modernists—abstraction evolved its own logic—but he does not offer a definition of what abstraction in painting actually is, even though abstract painting still baffles a great many people.'

Read the full review, "Abstract Thinkers," on our website:
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