Letter - Brief Article - Letter to the Editor

A Closer Look at Eastern European Modernism

James Elkins's review (Art Bulletin 82 [2000]:781-85) of Steven Mansbach's Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890-1939 raises some broad issues about the methodologies of evaluating innovative studies of little-known and neglected artistic production. Elkins's approach was to assume that the questions he raises are of "interest to the study of European modernism as a whole." If they are of such pressing interest to European modernism, should these questions not be of broad interest to all art historiography, or do special categories apply to European modernism that don't apply elsewhere? Elkins also chose "for coherence" to focus on Hungarian modernism (with a few non-Hungarian references) in a book with subjects that extend from the Baltic to the Balkans, so that his discussion does not coherently explore Mansbach's study.

Elkins's proposition of his own methods may merit discussion, but he elaborated on them at such length that he did not adequately explore the scope of Mansbach's book, engage the publication on its own terms, or grasp its central issues and accomplishments. Mansbach's book transcends conventional surveys by providing discussions that adjust to differences within the vast and complex political, cultural, and historical contexts of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Balkan states of the former Yugoslavia, Romania, and Hungary. Not only is there no such comparable comprehensive study in English, there is none in any language. In taking the scope of an entire region, Mansbach introduced figures, movements, and contexts that add significantly to our understanding of the history of modernism. The way in which he shifts foci among cultural, political, and artistic phenomena as a function of specific national conditions raises interesting and debatable methodological issues, but Elk ins neglects to evaluate this innovative approach.

Even within the framework of his own critical terminology, Elkins relies on some questionable assumptions. He claims that readers need to know "exactly" how artists transfigured a modernist vocabulary into their own work, but such knowledge is impossible to know 'exactly." His use of the terms "strong" and "weak" to describe paintings is subjective, vague, and redolent of an old-fashioned formalism that most art historians have long hoped to have transcended. Elkins's definition of regionalism as a condition applying to an artist who "knows what is happening in some other region, but decides to continue making art that is particular to her own culture" has limited application. An artist can be regional without any knowledge of "some other region"--the history of art is loaded with such examples.

Far more important in the context of Mansbach's book are Elkins's views of nationalism. First, Elkins writes that historians cannot discuss national style or mood without them beginning "to guide one's thoughts." What is the mechanism that exerts such mind control over independent and critical scholars? Perhaps the point is moot to Elkins since he claims that "debates about nationalist styles were dropped from scholarly discourse." Outside the rare ideologue, historians no longer promote national styles, but they do remain obligated to put those debates into critical contexts. To suggest that the art (and architecture) of east Central Europe can be understood without exploring nationalist discourse is to create an artificial construction that has no historical validity. Providing this context is one of the signal accomplishments of Mansbach's study, and by establishing differences between nationalist agendas, he has created critical frameworks that have not effectively existed.

Most problematic is Elkins's conclusion that Modern Art in Eastern Europe is "nothing less than a kind of Orientalism." The claim is erroneous and unfounded. Not only does Elkins's own review fail to support this conclusion, but Mansbach's book shows just the opposite: that by sifting influences and clarifying distinctions in cultural and political contexts he allows what is distinctive to emerge from what is imitative. Mansbach's book does raise questions about the viability and limitations of stylistic terms for parsing the history of modernism, but rather than looking at the limits of stylistic categorization by repeatable visual elements as applied broadly to the discipline of art history, Elkins turns the review into a demonstration of a personal approach that sidesteps these fundamental issues.

ANTHONY ALOFSIN

Roland Roessner Centennial Professor

Department of Art and Art History

University of Texas at Austin

Austin, Tex. 78712

Response

I agree with Anthony Alofsin and Steven Mansbach that the discussion of national characteristics is extremely important, perhaps now more than ever, given the ongoing Eurocentrism of the discipline, the widespread acceptance of undertheorized notions of globalism and world art, and the worldwide dissemination of American and European models of the discipline of art history. All the more reason to pay the closest possible attention to books like Mansbach's and John Clark's Modern Asian Art (which covers an equal number of countries).