Thames and Hudson £45 pp704

Ernst Gombrich begins The Story of Art with the observation that “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” But should mere artists be taken so seriously? This book, written by four professors of art history, seems to think that art historians are even more important — although theoreticians may be more significant still. Why else would the American critic Clement Greenberg be mentioned more often than Henri Matisse? Why else would the philosopher Jean Baudrillard be given more space than the painter Francis Bacon?

Typically, a section largely devoted to Kandinsky and Franz Marc is concerned less with paintings than with Wilhelm Worringer’s theoretical treatise Abstraction and Empathy. Marc’s The Fate of the Animals (1913) is reproduced, and the text refers to the “pantheistic penetration” it supposedly achieves. Nowhere, though, does it explain why the right side of the canvas looks so strange. So let me tell you. A quarter of the painting was destroyed by fire in 1917, and restored, virtually in monochrome, by Paul Klee a year later. Yes, we need to know about Marc’s metaphysical ideas; but shouldn’t we also be told the reason for the picture’s curious appearance?

The authors (who, according to the blurb, are “arguably the four most important and influential art historians of our time”) clearly read more than they look. So they feel the need to explain, at length, the particular theoretical approach to the subject that each adopts. Their presences obtrude at every point. They repeatedly cite their own publications in the bibliographies. They all appear in two self-regarding “round table” talks about the way art was by the middle of the century and about the predicament in which contemporary art finds itself.

Of course, art history is in as much of a pickle. The problem is exemplified by the kind of nonsensical jargon invoked here. The authors “foreground” issues, and “critique” ideas. They talk of “hierarchical canonicity”, “hegemonic media apparatus”, and of “terms like parergon, supplement, difference, and re-mark” that “grounded new artistic practice in the wake of modernism”. (Don’t bother to reread it: it still won’t make sense.) These distinguished professors are in urgent need of a specific for verbal diarrhoea.

The book looked so promising. True, it’s about the size and weight of a doorstep, but it is handsomely designed and clearly organised. It doesn’t set out to provide an exhaustive account of 20th-century art, and the text is not a continuous narrative. But the book’s more selective approach is, at first sight, admirably fresh. The result is a series of separate essays covering 100 or so chronologically arranged topics, linked by cross-referencing.

There is one more positive point. Boxes of text are sometimes included. Each contains a short and usually informative article — about the collectors Gertrude Stein and Peggy Guggenheim, for instance. Other mini-essays, reflecting the authors’ preoccupation with theory, discuss, among others, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau- Ponty and Michel Foucault.

The preoccupation with theory is at the expense of an engagement with works of art themselves, and a too frequent reluctance to say sensible things about them. Above all, however, the book lacks a wider historical perspective. How does modern art differ from the art of previous periods, and what does it share with it? Art since 1900 (beginning, by the way, at least half a century later than modernism itself did) does not address this question. Nor does it ask when modernism might finally come to an end. Many of us feel that we are simply twiddling our thumbs, hopefully waiting for someone to put it out of its misery. The essence of modernism, the avant-garde, has long since lost its power to shock and move. It has become the Academy that it once despised and thought to have destroyed, declaring itself unorthodox while slavishly following fashion. With the aid of its countless apologists it has attracted a large following. However, the kind of work preferred by an even bigger public is ignored by the cultural bureaucrats. Why is it impossible to imagine a painting by Jack Vettriano or Beryl Cook hanging in the Tate? Don’t expect an answer here to this disturbing conundrum.

Of course, the celebrity of these two painters cannot be compared with that of the modernists Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst. Their predecessors once saw themselves as outsiders because what they were creating was years ahead of its time. They worked to please themselves, and if their achievements went unrecognised, this provided paradoxical proof of their success. Nowadays, some artists are seldom out of the gossip columns. Many of them make art that is more or less exclusively about themselves. Think of Gilbert & George or Cindy Sherman, who takes photographs of herself, in which she pretends to be the glamorous star of some untitled film.

Artists clamour for attention. So do some art historians. If the four who wrote this book were to spend more time looking than reading, their work might have been of more use. As it is, I fear that it will be read only by other teachers of art history and their hapless undergraduates.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £36 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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