Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism manages to be simultaneously comprehensive yet skewed, innovative yet inert, and pluralistic yet doctrinaire. As a theoretically sophisticated rewriting of modern art from 1900 to 2003, it is a major achievement and will surely be of central importance in the field for years to come. Its authors are among the leading art historians of their generation and have often worked together. They are perhaps best known for their ground-breaking work in the pages of October, the US journal of art and theory, which was founded by Rosalind Krauss, among others. They have also often collaborated on other projects such as Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), by Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois. It is probably not overstating the case to say that together Hal Foster, Krauss, Bois and Benjamin Buchloh have had as significant an impact on the discipline of art history as Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich had earlier in the century.

That said, Art Since 1900 reads like an epitaph. In April, the Observer newspaper reported Foster’s revealing comment that the group’s current students ‘want to do dissertations on moments in which we were participants’, a point that Bois endorses: ‘For our students, we are part of the historical record.’ There is some irony in this. All four, but particularly Buchloh, are staunch advocates of the idea of the avant-garde as resistance and critique. Today, however, the authors of Art Since 1900 have long since established themselves as eminent members of the (academic) establishment. Perhaps this accounts for the book’s occasional tone of professorial hauteur. The brief suggestions for further reading that appear at the end of each chapter, for instance, are dominated by their own works, especially in the earlier chapters, and by the writings of their students, collaborators and friends. Foster et al. do not even pretend to be objective or inclusive, which of course may not necessarily be a bad thing.