Rupert Richard Arrowsmith's Modernism and the Museum argues that art from Asia, Africa, and, to a lesser extent, the South Pacific significantly influenced and affected the early development of modernism in Western European art before the First World War. This is not a new claim; the influence of Eastern and African art on the development of modernism has stood since the unveiling, in 1908, of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and has continued notwithstanding subsequent denials, Picasso's included. There is good scholarship on exactly this point, including, for example, Zhaoming Qian's Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (1995). But Arrowsmith, a research associate in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College, London, maintains that previous studies have underestimated the extent and the importance of the impact Asian and African art had on modernism's earliest years. It is Arrowsmith's contention, focusing on London in the first decade of the twentieth century, that artists found fresh new vitality in art from the East: Assyrian and Babylonian friezes, Egyptian paintings and carvings, the colors of Japanese woodblock prints, the textures of Korean and Chinese fabrics, bronzes and wood carvings from Benin. All these new ways of seeing the world, according to Arrowsmith, stood in contrast to the dominant, somewhat stale, ubiquity of Greek symmetry as interpreted and imposed by a Victorian academy. Moreover, Arrowsmith maintains, most studies of modernist artists are vague in their references to Eastern “influence” and are unhelpfully fuzzy in drawing connections between non-Western artists and modernism. Arrowsmith seeks to rectify these gaps by identifying “the direct, demonstrable and enormous impact” of Asian and African artworks “on particular artists at crucial cultural turning points” (2).

To make his case, Arrowsmith has combed through the diaries and correspondence (some previously unpublished) of artists, curators, and contemporaries; examined the dates of signatures in museums’ visitors books; and resurrected the catalogs of exhibitions of Eastern and African art that were held in London between 1900 and the outbreak of the First World War, looking for evidence of exactly when and how this direct influence actually struck. The resulting collection of case studies paints, with great precision, a landscape of the evolution of modernism both visual and literary.

For example, in chapter 2, “An Indian Temple on the Strand,” Arrowsmith shows the direct visual similarities between the postures and twists of Indian temple carvings and the figures carved by Jacob Epstein between 1906 and 1908 for the British Medical Association's (BMA) headquarters then being built in central Westminster. But Arrowsmith goes beyond simply pointing out the visual correlation between the two sets of carvings and assembles a very convincing array of evidence for Epstein's increasing interest in Indian carvings in the years immediately preceding the BMA commission. Observations, taken from the unpublished diary of Epstein's friend and fellow sculptor, Eric Gill, that Epstein's purpose in visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum was specifically to see the collections’ Indian carvings; Epstein's visits to the Musée Guimet in Paris, an institution that held a rich abundance of Indian and Southeast Asian sculptures; and the fact that the preparatory drawing for one the BMA figures was entitled not Maternity (as it was finally to be named) but Parvati, after the Hindu goddess, all provide concrete evidence that adds weight to Arrowsmith's argument.

Two major figures dominate Arrowsmith's book, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose shift in interest from Hindu temple carvings through Egyptian and Babylonian friezes to African wood carvings Arrowsmith assiduously chronicles, and the poet Ezra Pound, who was increasingly interested in the British Museum's collection of Japanese nishiki-e (“brocade prints”) as a source of inspiration for his poems. Part of Arrowsmith's argument is how the museums of London and principally the British Museum acted as the chief arteries by which Eastern and African art was conveyed to artists working in London. In making his points, Arrowsmith displays an interesting selection of secondary characters, showing, in addition to Pound's visits to the British Museum's print room, Ford Madox Ford's and the poet Richard Aldington's visits to the Japanese-British Exhibition of 1910 and their and W. B. Yeats's awareness of important exhibitions of Chinese and Japanese ceramics, textiles, and bronzes at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Arrowsmith points out how the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska often visited the exhibitions of Oceanic and African art at the British Museum, finding them “masterpieces … of all sorts … more wonderful than the daughters of Pheidias downstairs in the Elgin room” (193).

Modernism and the Museum thus provides interesting and exacting substantiation for the role of Eastern and African art in forming the early underpinnings of modernism. But Arrowsmith pounds on a somewhat open door. Epstein's interest in and, indeed, collection of Assyrian, Egyptian, and African artifacts and Indian temple carvings is well known. Pound openly acknowledged the influence of Japanese and Chinese visual art on his poetic imagination. What Arrowsmith makes a good case for, in Modernism and the Museum, is a shifting of the point of Pound and Epstein's first engagement with Eastern art to a somewhat earlier date than has been previously argued. Thus, although Modernism and the Museum is not quite the radical exposé it claims to be, it certainly adds substantial new evidence to our understanding of modernist artists’ first engagement with Asian, Pacific, and African art in the early years of a new century.