Three Books Reassess Postcolonial Modernism in Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey

Three recent academic publications critically examine modernist art in Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey, challenging established narratives. Anneka Lenssen's 'Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria' (2020), Zeina Maasri's 'Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties' (2020), and Sarah-Neel Smith's 'Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey' (2022) are reviewed together in ARTMargins. These works leverage a decade of disciplinary acceptance for postcolonial modernisms to explore previously obscured aspects. They offer candid appraisals of how colonial and nationalist institutions, Cold War cultural networks, and canonical modernism's hierarchies shaped artistic production. Through formalist methods and refractive readings of artworks, the authors invert anxieties about political subjection, arguing for postcolonial art's perceptiveness to institutional instability and abstraction. The review, published in ARTMargins Volume 13, Issue 1 (pp. 106-118) on February 1, 2024, highlights the methodological value of these approaches in asserting artistic agency. The article is available via MIT Press under subscription-only access.