The Americanisation of Modernism:Influence,Transformati9n and Identity

Abstract

Most Features of modenist art practice had their origins in France in the ninetcenth century and achieved their paradigmatic form in the United States in the mid-twentieth century before being whittled away by postmodernist critique since the 1960s The accuracy of this plot as descriptive art history is aubious, scripted as it was in an ideological project by Clement Greenberg and other American formalist critics. Yet the Franco-American bias of modernism is so intrinsic to the tissue of its discourse that even revisionist and anti-Western critiques of modernism are often obliged to train their sights on the powered centers of modernism in Paris and New York. In ordeer to engage one aspect of this bias, we might ask how, in its late phase, was modernism so persuasively linked to American cultural identity?