Alsdorf reviews The Liberation of Painting by Patricia Leighten

Modernism’s relation to politics is uncontested. The debate that endures surrounds the nature of the relationship (direct, indirect, or inverse?) and the artist’s role in shaping it, as a deliberate political actor or a medium of socialhistorical forces. Patricia Leighten’s new book, The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris, is an absorbing and scholarly study that shows all of these possibilities in play, sometimes in the case of one artist’s oeuvre. Leighten zealously argues for a more politicized, historicized account of modernist painting by focusing on a group of artists with documented ties to the anarchist movement. Pitched as a corrective to the “resolutely apolitical formalist art criticism” that still serves as the foundation of histories of abstraction in both the academy and the museum, Leighten’s book demands that we attend more closely to the political passions of key modernists on a case-by-case basis, not only (or even especially) as manifest in painting, but also as conveyed in the less hallowed production of satirical prints, as well as in these artists’ personal relationships, statements, and writings (2). The result is a rich and multifaceted argument for a “politics of form” as a driving force behind the pre-war production of Kees Van Dongen, Maurice de Vlaminck, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and František Kupka.