Rethinking History in Modernism

It is a cliché within the field of modernist studies that modernism marked the end of history painting. Theatrical gesture, heroism, and the rendering of the past as legible spectacle were, to quote one authority, ‘displaced, if not deconstructed, by modernism in the hands of painters like Manet after the 1860s’. The hardening of modernist orthodoxy in the period after the Second World War seemed to confirm this trend: history still had its purchase on art, but as form – not content.

This was a powerful view, but it was also selective, and recent advances have drawn attention to its limitations. The place of history – as both content and mode of thinking –within the development of modernism across the twentieth century has yet to be fully understood. Often this place was fragmentary, non-linear and even dreamlike – as in the works of Dadaists such as Hannah Höch and Surrealist Max Ernst, the British war artist Paul Nash and Latin American muralists like Diego Rivera. The scholarly rehabilitation of socialist realism has further shown the place of historical narrative amid innovations in public art, as the international spread of the muralist movement attests. As the twentieth century progressed, modernists across the decolonising world – from Demas Nwoko in Nigeria to F.N. Souza in India – turned their attention to unearthing and reframing historical accounts to generate art forms that looked across the caesura of colonialism. Today, as reconstructed pasts and ideological rewritings once again gain political currency, revisiting modernism’s complex engagement with history becomes more than an academic exercise: it affirms the urgency of historical thinking in art.

How might political and aesthetic questions that are galvanising contemporary scholarship – questions about origins and belonging, about neo- and de-colonisation – be reframed and expanded by studying their roots in modernist attitudes to history? What becomes of distinctions between forms – painting and photography, easel and mural painting – when anti-historical conventions are removed? How might this process alter and open up the geography of modernism, still too often framed by linear temporality and singular notions of innovation?

We encourage contributions that explore the role of historical thinking, temporality, and narrative in modernism; examine how different frameworks – Marxist, decolonial, feminist – have shaped the conceptualisation of modernist history; and consider how such approaches might reconfigure the periodisation, geographies, and forms of modernist art.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Saul Nelson, University of Cambridge, sfn23@cam.ac.uk   

Mary-Ann Middelkoop, University of Cambridge, maem2@cam.ac.uk