The construction of Modernist canon in the history of art

Abstract

A transnational, social and long-term perspective offers a very different idea of the history of the avant-gardes from our museums' narrative canon. This canon speaks exclusively to an élite struggling to abandon all categories and "isms", and primarily interested in certain artists (men, white, European or from the US), whose works have gained the highest quotations at auction sales. Although different theoretical perspectives have been trying to fight this canon since the Seventies, nothing has really changed: the complete absence of women and foreign cultures, unless idealized or decontextualized, the focus on Paris and New York, the linear perspective of history as succession of victorious denials of a constantly devalued past, the consecration of four or five artists per generation, and the negation of socio-economic and colonial mechanisms, still characterize the methodologies of the history of art. This essay aims at highlighting how such categories and models have contributed to the construction of specific moments in the history of XX century art by identifying authors, phases and above all salient hypothesis of a recent historiography that has begun to trace different critical perspectives.