SOURCE: Wollheim, Richard. Review of Art and Act, by Peter Gay. History and Theory 16 (October 1977): 354–60.

In the following review of Art and Act, Wollheim comments that Gay provides a forceful contribution to the debates surrounding the modernist movement.

In Art and Act Professor Gay has provided us with an extremely interesting, stimulating, and puzzling book. What is puzzling about the book, as well as, for that matter, what is interesting and stimulating about it, is fully foreshadowed in the subtitle, “On Causes in History: Manet, Gropius, Mondrian”; and a proper reading of that subtitle is a necessary preliminary to understanding and assessing the central project of the book.

Elsewhere,¹ and in the Preface to Art and Act, Gay has written with great directness about the problem that confronts any historian of nerve and integrity when he pauses to consider the nature of his subject or craft. Naturally and...