Concentrating on canonical critical texts and images, the book examines modern art through a rhetoric of representation rather than through formalist criticism or the history of the avant-garde.

Theorizing Modernism is a re-reading of the modernist tradition in the visual arts that provides a unique view of the history of modern art and art criticism. Concentrating on canonical critical texts and images, the book examines modern art through a rhetoric of representation rather than through formalist criticism or the history of the avant-garde.