Their Common Sense is a social history of early abstract art, but it has also become a history of the first steps taken toward mass culture, steps that were orchestrated by the development of a universal education in the public schools and marked by a quandary over language. The book is a study of both 'common sense' and modernism generally between 1880 and 1925. Their Common Sense, however, does not see its purpose as being that of simply resetting...