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The growing disjuncture between the diversity of art practices and the narrow focus of canonical art histories has prompted art historians to pronounce the death of art history. And yet very little has changed because the modernist canon still dominates global art. The western avant-garde continues to be a closed discourse, writing the art of Asia, Africa and Latin America out of art history. Marginalization of non-western art is explained in terms of its ‘derivativeness’. And yet there have been significant developments in non-western art since the 20th century, many of its artists engaged in creating vital modernist expressions of cultural resistance to colonialism. We need to probe more closely the epistemological framework that fuels the ‘universalist’ claims of the western canon. Even though western avant-garde has inspired the rest of the world, it is still dominated by the universalism that creates asymmetrical relations between the centre and the peripheries, which is not one of geography but of power and authority, with modernism creating its own tacit exclusions and inclusions. Hence borrowings of primitive art by western artists such as Picasso are judged as mere affinities, unlike the use of the syntax of cubism by non-western artists, which is seen as the influence of the West. This paper proposes certain strategies for ‘decentring’ the dominant canon. An inflected narrative of global modernity offers us a possible way of restoring the artist’s agency in the context of colonial empires, by analysing art practices and reception as a cultural document that is historically situated.
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