Will Gompertz has produced a beautiful book about Modern Art. The book fairly romps along through art fashions from Impressionism to PostModernism and all stations in between. The book is published by Penguin Viking and is available everywhere. Here it is at Amazon UK.
What Gompertz has done is admirable. He combines a distilled view of each "ism" with a cameo of each of the principal artists now categorised as a member of that particular club. For me, the highlight was this take on how artists were influenced by each other and by the Zeitgeist of their day.
These mutual inflences among artists is summarised in an entertaining map, based on the London Underground map, where the relationships between the artists and their schools are clearly shown. Some connections may be debatable, but isn't that what we buy a book like this for, to debate the author's position.
For example, he focuses on Duchamp as a central figure in the move to abstraction and beyond. In particular, he focuses on the amusing incident of Duchamp's entry of the ready-made urinal into an exhibition of contemporary art in New York in 1917, noting the influence that this act had on many of Duchamp's contemporaries and the generations that followed. You may not agree that Duchamp was as central as Gompertz claims, but you will enjoy reading his argument.
Another example of a viewpoint that Gompertz presents, with which we may or may not agree, is the sequence of four Mondrians dated 1908, 1912, 1912 and 1914 [Red Tree, Grey Tree, Flowering Apple Tree, Composition VII resp.] which show the artist's transition from "wannabe old master to pioneering modernist".
Twenty years ago, in Shock of the New, Robert Hughes used a similar device to illustrate Mondrian's journey. He chose four paintings, this time dated 1908, 1912, 1915 and 1942 [Red Tree, Grey Tree, Pier and Ocean, Broadway Boogie Woogie] spanning a greater part of Mondrian's life, but illustrating very neatly a journey typical of a 20th century artist in Europe and then America. Gompertz helps focus this transition considerably.
[Who knew, by the way, that Mondrain was an accomplished Jazz Dancer? http://londonjazz.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/mondrian-and-jazz.html]
Gompertz brings us right back down to earth again in his respectful summary of contemporary art at the end of the 20th century. Lots to think about. Lots to agree with. Lots to disagree with. Exactly what a critic's summary should be.
A brilliant read.