Allan Antliff’s study of the relations between American art and what he identifies as anarchist beliefs and political activity between 1908 and the end of World War I is a fascinating and important contribution to a knowledge of the wider circumstances of artistic production in the United States during this period. In a historical narrative connected solidly to thematic analyses, Antliff deals alternatively with organizations of varying kinds as well as with individual artists that, together, constituted a thriving anarchist political “micro-culture” of conjoined artistic production and critical discourse. Despite some of the weaknesses in Antliff’s account (elements of which I suggest below), his book significantly extends and deepens an understanding of this phase of teeming politico-aesthetic activity—mainly in New York, it has to be said—and deserves to be added to the core curriculum for undergraduate study of the first half-century of American modernism.

In a series of well-illustrated chapters, Antliff begins by charting the emergence of politicized avant-garde opposition to conservative pseudo-official institutions such as the National Academy of Art and Design. He moves on to assess the anarchist context and impact of the 1913 Armory Show, detailing the artistic and political interests of scores of influential figures including Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Hippolyte Havel, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Rockwell Kent. Finally, Antliff anatomizes the quite rapid decline of this “anarchist modernism” within the traumatic conjuncture that saw America’s entry into World War I, the Bolshevik uprising in Russia in 1917, and the draconian crackdown on civil and political liberties in the United States after 1918.

But what significance do the artworks and critical discourse generated by those who thought of themselves as anarchists and anti-capitalists at this time in the United States now hold in 2008? It is clear that Antliff is not merely aiming to contribute to a better (that is, more historically informed) history of American modernism—as if that could be detached from the pressures of his own time and conditions of production. Perhaps, as the book was derived from his PhD dissertation, he felt obliged to underplay the related urgent contemporary political issues. These questions strike me as centrally linked to his important discussion of postcolonialism and his related critique of Marxism that occurs in an interesting account of Coomaraswamy’s 1914 writings on “postindustrialism” (132–33). These particular texts represented an explicit attack on Western imperialism and the attempt by Europeans and Americans to impose an industrial-capitalist system on the world, forcibly integrating Asian and African colonized peoples into that economic mode’s ever-extending appetite for raw materials and cheap labor. In opposition to this hostile hegemonic process, Coomaraswamy—championed at the time by the pro-anarchist journal The New Age—proposed a “counter-modernity” for non-Western peoples based on ideals derived from his understanding of medieval societies.

Antliff explains that, for Coomaraswamy, “the most important feature of medieval society was the integration of spiritual idealism with the day-to-day activities of the population, primarily through art. Indeed, Coomarawamy bluntly stated that the ‘permanent revolution’ that postindustrialism represented could ‘only [be realized] by means of art’” (132). This passage sums up, I think, both the idealistic strengths and analytic weaknesses of Antliff’s book as a whole. Subsisting throughout the study is a, by turns, implicit or explicit attack on Marxism (and the history of organized socialist political institutions) set against Antliff’s own generally uncritical definitions and defences of anarchism as philosophical and social doctrine. Antliff’s position is that, historically, Marxism, via Stalinism, merely implemented a parallel form of demeaning industrial capitalism within the USSR and its empire, while, philosophically, Marxism could offer only what he deems is an equally impoverished and dehumanizing form of materialism, locked as its origins were in nineteenth-century capitalist modernity, in contrast to what he calls without clarification “the nonimmanent ‘utopianism’ of industrialism’s radical critics, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon” (133).

For Antliff, the book’s “anarchist modernist” paintings and sculptures manifest what might be called symbolic forms of humanist individualism intended as counters to the deadening massification of the US industrial-capitalist social order of the period. Leaving aside for a moment the questions of how good these artworks might be judged to be and why (issues Antliff never addresses directly), they clearly signify in a bewilderingly capacious variety of formal and modernist ways—from the “primitivistic” stone sculptures of women symbolizing atavistic “motherhood” and “creativity” by now largely forgotten artists such as Eli Nadelman and Adolf Wolff to the much more well-known “impressionist” paintings of modern life, such as the portrait of Celestina (1908) by Robert Henri and Man Ray’s “vorticist-cubist” canvas War (AD MCMXIV) of 1914. I do not mean to underplay the often engrossing accounts Antliff gives of many of these artworks and the range of ideas and events that informed them, but his definitions of their “anarchism”—as much as of their “modernism,” which I turn to below—routinely get expanded to banal and disablingly vague extents (e.g.: on Leo Tolstoy celebrating “individualism”; on Henri attacking art schools; on Bayard Boyesen extolling unbridled “self-expression”; on Hutchins Hapgood’s revelling in human “love of freedom” [pages 22, 23–5, 28, and 33, respectively]). This tendency—allied with a failure to subject the anarchist positions he is discussing to sustained and serious critique—works to undermine the quality of both his historical narrative and his correct though hardly original critique of Marxism, which has been subject to sophisticated analysis on questions of imperialism and ecology for many decades now, and from many who continued to see themselves as Marxists (see, for instance, Jonathan Hughes, Ecology and Historical Materialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: New Left Books, 1985; and Raymond Williams, The Year 2000, New York: Pantheon, 1984).

In short, Anarchist Modernism raises a lot more questions than it answers and fails to articulate fully its chief purpose and value now. This weakness applies to implicated art-historical questions as much as to definitions and defences of political ideologies and beliefs. The problems begin to emerge in Antliff’s surprisingly short introduction which fails to confront an ineluctable theoretical issue: the complex disputes over “modernism” understood as a historical and art-critical term, and its complex interactions with “avant-garde,” often used as its unproblematic synonym. Antliff’s very brief discussion attacking Barbara Haskell’s 1999 Whitney Museum catalogue, The American Century: Art and Culture, 1900–1950, dismisses definitions of modernism simplistically based on stylistic categories and notions of “formalist innovation” (2), but offers no complex substitute definition dealing with questions such as new notions and experiences of individuality, contemporary theories of change and progress, and the links between aesthetic and socio-political radicalism. To be sure, all these issues recur symptomatically in the pages that follow, but Antliff’s treatment of them lacks theoretically systematic, coherent, and satisfying formulations. Often this is manifest in the absence of critical commentary following his extensive quotations from ostensibly “anarchist” artists, critics, or philosophers. Problems caused by failing critically to assess these historical definitions of “anarchism” (in terms of written treatises, art criticism, and painted or sculptured artefacts) compound this inadequately theorized treatment of modernity and modernism.

The key issue centers on the consequences of not really understanding both ideas of the “individual” as well as actual individuals (as themselves modern social entities)—a situation leading to the unquestioned (and eventually unquestionable) assumption that “individuals” and “society” exist at loggerheads, and that industrial capitalism has merely exaggerated this ontological opposition. (I set aside Antliff’s valuable historical accounts of US working-class syndicalism; the myriad forms of social organisation that self-proclaimed anarchists actually had to create for themselves as part of their political struggles against government; and the statements from some anarchists, like Emma Goldman [see page 30]), that attempt to avoid the basic antinomy.) Antliff, however, remains categorical in his own general definition of anarchism in the period, which he asserts without historical or critical review: “[Anarchist] commentators concurred that the anarchist opposed any ensemble of cultural beliefs and practices that oppressed the individual. Anarchism, therefore, nurtured a revolt against the norms and institutions through which dominant forces in capitalist America sought to contain and channel social activity, including art” (2).

This weak definition—no matter how accurate, perhaps, as an account of what certain American anarchists believed, say, in 1910—allows the continual slippage of Antliff’s category of “anarchist modernism” into an alignment with what has usually been identified as art for art-sake “bourgeois individualism.” The latter form of institutionalising, corporatizing modernism—a very different, and in some cases extremely conservative, tradition of thought and action, to be sure, but one that emerged contemporaneously with anarchist modernist beliefs—went on to power the dominant art-school and art-historical (as well as broadly ideologically “humanist”) account of modernism in the visual arts throughout the twentieth century. And this modernism, despite its rhetorical blustering about freedom and individualism over many decades—dependent, in fact, on narratives of “loner” artists behaving anarchically—offered no significant challenge to capitalism, but rather required this mode of production as its precondition.