This is not a state of the field article for it cannot be claimed with any assurance that there is such a field as modern global art history. ‘World art’ is certainly encroaching gradually on the Western grand narrative of Greeks to Renaissance to Modernism that has dominated art history until very recently. The work of the School of World Art Studies at East Anglia University should be mentioned,Footnote ¹ and recognition given to the growing number of pages on other cultures in standard art history surveys. Nevertheless, much of the non-Western coverage deals with the ‘great traditions’ of major civilizations and there is relatively little on the unprecedentedly close interactions that mark the modern world and modern art.Footnote ² This review article focuses on five recent works that contribute significantly to the study of modern art on a global basis. In particular, all pose – explicitly or implicitly – the question of the extent to which modern art in Asian societies is related to or derived from modern Euro-American art and in particular ‘modernism’.

But why should this be of interest to global or world historians (here the terms are interchangeable)? Art is part of all history, of course, but for our purposes the key word is ‘modern’, as in ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’. The former is a term usually associated with major trends in Western – but also beyond just Western – art and literature for an indeterminate period, but certainly one that covered the time of maximum Western domination over the greater part of the globe from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth. The latter resonates more soundly with historians who may not care much for art history but find the idea of modernity, and recent challenges to its singular Western paradigm, unavoidable as they try to understand what has happened to the world in the last century or centuries.Footnote ³

This review article is based on the premise that understanding something of modern global art history can help in understanding modern global history. In contrast to the situation just a few years ago, there is now considerable publishing activity on the modern art of non-Western countries and cultures, both surveys and more tightly focused monographs. Here I discuss five recent books: two that could be considered surveys – Andrews and Carroll – and three that are more monographic and strongly focused on what modernism means in various Asian cultures. The selection process has also been based on how accessible these books would be for non-art specialists – art history for ordinary historians – in the hope that the disciplines might benefit from talking to each other with a common global vision. The geographical range is not quite global, but the arc of Asia from Japan to Pakistan incorporates a broad spectrum of countries and cultures.Footnote ⁴ In recent history what they all have in common is dealing with the West, with modernity, and with modern art.

I start with the most specifically focused book in our survey, from the country that was first to embark on the conscious pursuit of modernity, Alicia Volk's study of the Japanese oil painter Yorozu Tetsugoru (1885–1927). His self-portrait of 1912 (see Figure 1) poses the question of modernism's Western origins and non-Western adaptations most directly and most forcefully. Black and white does not convey the full power to shock of this painting. Titled ‘Self-portrait with red eyes’, the palette is overwhelmingly red in various shades, with slashes of green, yellow, blue, and black. It seems likely that it was inspired by the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group of artists working in Munich around that time, but it is not certain that Yorozu could have seen those works in reproduction before completing his self-portrait. Volk demonstrates the influence of contemporary French cubism, particularly Picasso and Bracque, on the Japanese artist as he struggled to find the artistic forms to express his search for a universal art with spiritual meaning. She acknowledges that both his Zen practice and the ‘Eastern’ spirituality of European modernists such as Kandinsky played a role.

Figure 1 Yorozu Tetsugoru, Self-portrait with red eyes, c.1912, oil on canvas. Iwate Museum of Art.

This particular painting also raises another issue that runs through modern art in all the separate nations covered in this review – subjectivity, the artist's expression of an individual personality, the exaltation of the self. Western modernism's penchant for the self-portrait emerged most forcefully in Japan but can be found throughout Asia in the twentieth century. It appears to be an essential and universal element of modernism in art. Where psychologically probing self-portraiture was most notably absent, in Maoist China from 1949 to the late 1970s, modern art was also absent. The connection between modernist subjectivity and emerging capitalist economies and art markets is an area that deserves further exploration.

This first clear-cut instance of modernist style and content in Asia looks very Western, but Tetsugoru's subsequent development qualifies such a simple interpretation. Before his early death in 1927 he tried his hand at the medium and subject of traditional Japanese painting, landscapes done with ink on paper. The brush work – rough and expressionistic – certainly shows modernist influence but it is impossible to see these works as transplanted Western art. Volk calls it Tetsugoro's ‘pursuit of universalism’, an art with strong expression of the artist's individuality that transcended boundaries of East and West. Apparently, he never reached this goal, but by its very nature modern art, with its unceasing emphasis on creativity and innovation, would never be stable or fully realized, like modernity itself. One artist, analysed in one monograph, cannot tell the story of modern art and modernity in the first Asian country to modernize, but the book opens a window into similar efforts elsewhere in Asia and beyond, where the common denominator was and is how to become modern without becoming Western.

We move now to the other end of ‘Asia’, the Indian subcontinent where the politics of cultural difference and modern nationalism split an empire and created new nations with different patterns of coping with the challenge of modern art. Our first port of call is India, where Partha Mitter's latest book deals with the rise of modern art on the subcontinent in the period before partition.Footnote ⁵ He begins The triumph of modernism in 1922, with India's first exhibition of twentieth-century European modernism (in Calcutta), and ends with Independence in 1947.

Compared with Japan, there was a belated start in the search for modernity in art and a different kind of introduction: not artists returning from study in Paris or photographic reproductions of Picasso's latest, but rather an exhibition of modernist originals, including works by such European luminaries as Kandinsky, Klee, and Feiniger. Held at the Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art in Calcutta, its genesis came from the Nobel prize-winning poet Rabindrinath Tagore's interwar visit to Europe, which included a visit to the Bauhaus. Impressed by the collegial teaching methods and innovative approach to art and architecture, he arranged for this show to travel to India. It had an immediate impact on the Indian art world and on some of its public, both Indian and British. But it is worth noting that only one work actually sold, and they were not asking the prices that modernist art would soon fetch in the West. This would also be a problem elsewhere in Asia for artists trying to find a market for their modernist-inspired works, particularly in China, where government patronage went to more academic and realistic Western-style art or architecture, while private buyers still preferred traditional-style ink paintings.

Nevertheless, Mitter is right in seeing this ‘Bauhaus exhibition’ as marking a turning point for or even the beginning of the development of modern Indian art. The Bengal School (which, not by coincidence, was led by Abanindranath Tagore, the poet's nephew) had tried to use late nineteenth-century art nouveau and Japanese colour techniques to produce an art expressing Eastern spirituality in contrast to the realistic academic styles taught at the British-founded art schools in colonial India. Closely tied to an awakening Indian national consciousness, it had mostly run its course by the post-war period and some younger artists, especially those in Bengal, were ready to absorb the latest from the West, if it could be blended into an Indian identity.

Another Tagore, Gagandrenath, brother to Abanindranath, was the most successful proponent of a ‘poetic cubism’ that softened the harsh structural planes of European cubism into softer, dissolving shapes, in watercolours not oil, allegedly showing that Indian spirituality could borrow the latest modern painterly styles from Europe but still maintain its own character. Mitter uses this as an example to support the claims of postcolonial scholarship that Western stylistic inspiration – borrowing, one might say – did not create a copying of the West (what Mitter calls ‘Picasso manqué’). Rather it was a different form of modern art, admittedly inspired by Europe but different in meaning and even form. In Mitter's accessible and intelligible prose it is a convincing argument, one that runs through most of recent scholarship on non-Western modern art. We shall have to return to it.

Probably the other most salient point Mitter makes, one with relevance not only for modern art in India, is that leading modernists showed a primitivist bent and allied it with the nationalism of Gandhi's Independence Movement. The foremost example was Jamini Roy (1887–1972), who designed posters for Congress Party rallies in the 1930s but also produced brightly coloured, simplified, folk-art-style paintings of the Indian common man – or, more often, woman. Similarly, the sculptor Raminkar Raji chose the ‘tribal’ Santals of his native Bengal as the subject for his explosively vigorous group statues of India's common people.

This is another point of comparative contact with modern art and nationalism in other parts of Asia, but first it should be noted that ‘the triumph of modernism’ was not complete or uncontested. There was also the pull of realism, which for political reasons interested the Indian left, and for professional reasons attracted the academically trained artists from the art schools established by the British; Mitter devotes over a quarter of his book to ‘Naturalists in a modernist age’. Again, this tension between modernism and realism is a pan-Asian, even worldwide, phenomenon, as we shall see when looking at twentieth-century China.

Before that we turn our attention to the other subcontinental trajectory of modern art, that in Muslim India before partition and Pakistan thereafter. Like Mitter, Ifitkhar Dadi is a ‘third space’ art historian living and working in the West (Cornell University) but raised in Asia. He appears to have had intimate working connections with modernist or what might be called postmodernist art circles, especially in Karachi, but the chronological scope of his book goes back to Muslim artists who were influenced by Western and modern Western art in the early twentieth century. His approach and his prose is somewhat more theoretically informed than Mitter's, meaning that the book is also rather less approachable for those not acquainted with contemporary art history and criticism. Nevertheless, it provides an interesting counterpoint to Mitter's work by showing the distinctively Muslim elements that went into producing a rather different kind of modernism that drew heavily on an Islamic cultural heritage and also the distinctively Persian-flavoured art of Mughal India.

From Abdur Rahman Chughtai, who joined the Hindu-led Bengal School in the 1920s and therefore contested its appropriation of Mughal imagery, to the British-educated female artist Naiza Khan's street art and female steel undergarments in the 1990s, there has been an effort to establish a modern Muslim identity. This identity may share features with the rest of the Muslim world, such as the influence of Arabic calligraphy with its potential affinity with modern abstract art, but it is distinctively marked by the unique history of Pakistan.Footnote ⁶

That is a truism for modern art in all parts of Asia and elsewhere. In history – global, comparative, or national – the general should never obliterate the particular. And when our focus again shifts eastward to Andrews and Shen's The art of modern China, certain features look familiar, others quite different. There was no outright colonization by a European power, no colonizer's schools of Western art. Nor was there, as in Japan, a native government hiring Western art teachers, setting up a school for ‘foreign painting’, and sending artists to Paris well before the end of the nineteenth century. Western art was on the agenda of Chinese modernizers by the early twentieth century, but Japan had a head start of several decades. It also had a much more stable government for the first half of the century. Apart from this late start, if by ‘modern art’ we mean modernism, it had a much more difficult struggle to survive in China. In truth, it has only ‘triumphed’ in the last twenty years with the ‘open country policy’ and market-based economic reforms that have marked the global ‘rise of China’. Before that it was smothered by state-imposed socialist realism under the Communists and starved for state support under the Nationalists, who generally preferred more conventional Western realism for its supposed connection to science and national self-strengthening.Footnote ⁷

Unlike the previous three authors, Andrews and Shen have not focused on modern art per se. Rather, they have written a much needed up-to-date survey of Chinese art from the beginning of serious Western impact (in the mid to late nineteenth century) to the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. There have been other publications in English that more specifically focus on modernism, but again accessibility for non-art specialists has argued for including this book in this review.Footnote ⁸ The authorial ‘voice’ is mainly but not entirely Western and that is an advantage, particularly for the art and political history of the last few decades. Andrews spent the crucial early years of post-Mao liberalization in the 1980s as a graduate student researcher at the centre of the Chinese art world, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in Beijing. Shen was at an art publishing house in Shanghai.Footnote ⁹ Both now teach in the United States, but their contacts with both the official Communist Party art world and the new circles of unofficial art are unusually close. Their book has the advantage of insider information combined with outsider perspective, not entirely dissimilar to those of Mitter and Dadi for South Asia but still rare for China.

One important difference between traditional China and both India and Japan is that ink and brush, the instruments of cultural prestige and bureaucratic power, made ink painting so much more important, both as a target for twentieth-century modernizers and as a symbol of national identity. Andrews and Shen devote considerable attention to ink painting, less to what is usually considered modernism in Western art. They also explain why modernism – ‘bourgeois decadence’ in the socialist realist parlance that the People's Republic took from Stalinist Russia – was suppressed for so long and resurfaced as rebellion against the socialist art system in the post-Mao era. High modernism may have died in the West, but the fascination with the very latest, with catching up, or with being up to date has never been stronger as China enters the age of globalization. What this means for China and the world is perhaps a question that both historian and art historian may well ask but probably cannot answer.

The last book, Alison Carroll's The revolutionary century: art in Asia, 1900–2000, differs not only in its geographical scope – all of Asia – but also in format and approach. It is larger in size (12 by 16 inches), more lavishly illustrated (almost all in colour), and written by a practising art curator on the edge of Asia but neither in nor of it, Carroll being based in Australia. Does the view of Asian art and modernity differ from Euro-American-based authors? Perhaps, but I believe that the main difference is that the book is written for a more general audience. The prose is less academic, the scope larger, the historical interpretations to my mind at times a bit shaky or superficial. Of course, that was most noticeable to me when the book dealt with my home turf (China), a hazard that all generalists and most world historians must face.

Carroll's volume is not just a coffee-table book, but the artistically curious world historian may find more value in the well-selected illustrations than in any particular interpretation. To me the book reinforces the point made earlier that there are significant differences stemming not only from various cultural and social backgrounds but also from different historical experiences in the last century or so. To take two important countries not covered in the previous nationally based studies, Thailand and Indonesia, the colonial or non-colonial experience in their encounters with the West and Western art had a great deal to do with how they reacted to the challenge of creating art forms that preserved (or invented?) a national cultural tradition while joining global modernity.

Another interesting angle raised by Carroll that is not present in the other studies is the question of how ‘modern art’ created elsewhere in the developing world might influence the development of modern art in a colonized Asian country. She shows how the modernist styled ‘indigenismo’ of the Mexican muralists inspired a similar development in the Philippines. That particular point calls attention to the limited vista of Carroll's book, not to mention the nationally based studies of modernism or modern art in Asia. Asia is a European construct. It is only the impact of a modernity initially gestated in Europe, though not solely European in its origins, that creates a common denominator for the recent history and art history of Asia. So even Carroll's broad canvas or the scope of this review essay is not large enough for the task of showing what modern art can contribute to understanding the patterns and variations of global modernity. Just possibly, however, it might suggest some new approaches that could transcend geographic and disciplinary boundaries.