On Mon, 10 Sep 2001, T W Moran wrote:

+++++ [CLIP] +++++

>  Good Morning,
>         I'm probably going to get flamed good for this but you've stepped on a
> pet peeve.
>         Modern and contemporary were not classifications until we had to many
> Ph.D.s' with the need to have something to say.

========================

On the contrary, "Modern Art" as a "school" or style was coined decades
before the first PhDs in art history or arts criticism!

Both "Modern" and "Contemporary" seem to be (or at least to have
originated as) primarily art dealers' and critics' terms, and if you look
at the contents of the catalogues of the major international art auction
houses you will see that they still tend to use "Modern" for anything
later in style than the Post-Impressionists of the end of the 19th
century, and "Contemporary" for work that is stylistically later than
around 1950 - beginning with what the late Peter Fuller used to call "the
official State Art of the NATO Capitalist powers" - i.e. American Abstract
Expressionism of the late 1940s to early 1950s onwards.

A more detailed examination of auction and dealers' gallery catalogues
shows that most long-lived artists who were in the avant garde of
"Modern" at the beginning of the 20th century, such as Picasso, stayed in
that classification  throughout their lives, so that new works created
perhaps decades into the "Contemporary" art era remained firmly in their
original trade/critical classification.


Patrick Boylan

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