Writing to Barnett Newman: F. N. Souza and the End of Modernism

Abstract

Beginning with an unsolicited letter to Barnett Newman written by the Indian modernist F. N. Souza, this essay seeks to reframe our understanding of the decline of modernism. Art‐historical consensus holds that, as the 1960s progressed, modernist art was swept aside by demands for political engagement to which it could not adapt. Souza's letter complicates this. On one hand, it criticizes Newman's latest paintings for expressing modernist values such as autonomy, transcendence, and universality, for amounting to the claim that ‘colour is ethics’. But on the other, rather than abandoning such concepts, as did most advanced art in the 1960s, Souza demands another, political modernism, one capable of grounding itself in reflection on the movement's historical complicity with colonialism and racism. This was a difficult project, and I reject the view that it was inherently progressive; indeed, I draw out the reactionary attitudes to which it could all‐too‐easily lead. Souza's desire, by 1969, to move beyond these without abandoning the historicity of modernism positions him closer to Newman than his letter suggests. Both proceeded, in ways that refuse the schematic alternatives of traditional art history, by making work that addressed political reality through the reflexive critique of modernism itself.