In focussing on just twenty years of American Indian painting Bill Anthes has chosen what seems at first to be quite a restricted field, but his nuanced and careful account succeeds in opening up almost all of the key issues which still dominate Native American art and its reception today. In its balanced account of a range of several lesser-known painters it adds real depth and texture to the standard narratives, and the well-documented account is supported by excellent colour reproductions of thirty-four relevant paintings. Anthes identifies several major themes, most importantly primitivism and abstraction, and shows how his chosen artists navigate in fascinating ways between these prevailing elements of modernism. His choice of artists is intriguing, including the use of two non-Native artists, and he manages some artful juxtapositions which allow him to present modernism itself in some revealing cross-cultural contexts.

He begins with the controversial decision of the Philbrook Art Center in 1958 to disallow an abstract painting by Yankton Sioux painter Oscar Howe on the grounds that it was “not Indian,” and he then goes on to show how attempts to define what constitutes distinctively Indian art by white patrons through exhibitions, art schools or studios have always reflected larger confusions about the role of tradition and change in Indian life as a whole, in which Indians have been apparently frozen in time in the eyes of the larger American community. This is a well-known complaint, but Anthes plays into it the larger historical narrative, which involved the well-meaning sponsorship of Indian arts in the New Deal period and the assimilationist policies of termination in the 1950s, and shows how developments in modernist art often operated in a sort of counterpoint to political developments. He begins with two Pueblo painters, Jose Lenté and Jimmy Byrnes, who controversially provided paintings designed to give ethnographic information to anthropologists (Elsie Clews Parsons and Byron Harvey respectively). The representation of secret ceremonies has been increasingly problematic, but Anthes is interesting on how the changes in Pueblo cultures at that time may have made it much harder to take any absolute positions about issues of cultural property.

Having set up this documentary role as one end of a spectrum, Anthes then goes on to look at a very different – and non-Native – painter, Barnett Newman, discussing his long-standing interest in Indian art and the primitive in his paintings and writings. While he is clear about the limitations of Newman's primitivism Anthes also shows how his concern for universal values in the primitive, and his concern for pre-Columbian art at a hemispheric level, entailed a much more critical view of national culture than is often allowed for in discussions of the ideological role of the American avant-garde of the period. Newman's work raises an issue that runs through much of the book, which is the relation of abstraction, as found in Western modernism, to the traditional forms of Indian art. The flat and simplified representational treatment of traditional life which has come to be seen as Indian art has not allowed for creative engagement with many other aspects of design and composition found in traditional arts, and Anthes shows how two Ojibwe painters each develops his own powerful style – Patrick DesJarlait through an engagement with the Mexican muralists and George Morrison through abstract expressionism. His next study is of Yeffe Kimball, a white artist who reinvented herself as an Indian artist, and became prominent and successful in doing so. Anthes is very perceptive in showing how the ambiguities in her case relate not only to racial imposture and the subsequent evaluation of her work, which is not now exhibited, but to the complex uses within modernism of what is seen as primitive primitivism, and he echoes Sieglinde Lemke's question of whether modernism itself was passing. The final chapter returns to Oscar Howe and other more recent painters to question the standard accounts of modernism by showing how Indian artists have used elements of abstraction and their own traditions to go beyond the limiting binaries of traditional and modern, or representational and abstract.

The book left me wanting more. The brief comparison with African American artists, for instance, is intriguing, and it would be interesting to see more on the differences in the use of primitivism, or the institutional role of the Harmon Foundation as opposed to the Philbrook Indian Annuals and the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Another area to be developed would be the strictures and commercial pressures of the market, which tended to be overlooked in the concentration on the institutional and critical debates, but it would be unfair to expect everything from what is already a rich and rewarding study.