Alternative history

The first part of the title of the Whitechapel’s latest portmanteau show is taken from Ezra Pound’s masterpiece of compression, the two-line poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’ — ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/ Petals on a wet, black bough.’ The poem is a triumph of Imagism, the short-lived movement (c.1910–17) Pound helped to launch, which was in favour of brief, musical phrases and clarity of image, and in revolt against the woolliness of Romanticism. The second part of the title reveals the outward thrust or purpose of the exhibition: to present an alternative history of modernism as seen through the evolution of realism. So, in this scheme of things, abstraction, long f