Decolonizing modern art cannot be limited to the progressive inclusion of hitherto marginalized regions outside the West. A critique of modernism’s colonial dimensions must also examine the colonial divide within the societies, cultures and art worlds of the West. We must ask what Abstract Expressionism has to do with the Civil Rights movement and how postcolonial migration has changed the artistic landscape in England or France in the 1950s and 60s. During World War II and in the years that followed, white and Black artists, critics, and institutions worked on different concepts of modernism. As this lesson demonstrates with a focus on Western Europe and North America, questions of form and expression, abstraction or realism, were not the only issues at the center of this debate. In the US, critics such as Clement Greenberg, museums such as MoMA, and artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Hale Woodruff, and Loïs Mailou Jones were also concerned with creating specific genealogies of modern art to legitimize their concepts of the advanced art of the present. We follow the artistic work and cultural engagement of painter Norman Lewis, who navigates between “universalist” abstraction and anti-racism, and we take a look at the aesthetic politics and institutional struggles of Afro-Asian artists like Rasheed Araeen, Frank Bowling, and David Medalla and in the UK in the postwar decades.

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