ANGLOMODERN: PAINTING AND MODERNITY IN BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES, by Janet Wolff. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, 172 pp.

AngloModern, Janet Wolff's scintillating attempt to limn the construction of modernity in the visual arts, is more than worth reading for a number of reasons. In this work, she details how modernity positioned itself against a number of strands of development, and then, by a process of exclusion, formulated its own stance. As poststructuralist theory has taught us, the procedures of building an excluded body against a center, when closely examined, frequently tell us more about a rubric or label than we could otherwise have imagined.

Jane Duran
Department of Philosophy
University of California at Santa Barbara