Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism [Hardcover]

Timothy J. Clark (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 11, 1999

In this intense and far-reaching book, acclaimed art historian T. J. Clark offers a new vision of the art of the past two centuries, focusing on moments when art responded directly, in extreme terms, to the ongoing disaster called "modernity".

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

No two social or aesthetic movements have been as agonizingly debated and lamented as Modernism and Socialism. Both arose in the wake of the French Revolution, and both were deemed untenable by the late 1980s. In this career-defining work, a collection of seven ruminative essays on the "co-dependency" of these concepts, eminent art historian Clark offers not so much a summation as an archeology, working through "limit cases" in the long and tortured relationship of art and politics, from David's shrewd positioning of his portrait of Citizen Marat within the fervor of the French Revolution to the perceived "anarchism" of Pissarro's laboring field women and the social meanings of Jackson Pollock's post-War drip paintings (Clark reads them in two intriguing contexts: first, as an expression of "lordly," aristocratic attitude, dismissing content in favor of form; and secondly, in terms of their use as backdrops for a 1950 Vogue magazine photo shoot). He writes about politics and art without cynicism, speaking often in the direct, if melancholy, voice of one who wants something to have been, so that it might still be. Clark's is a reclamation project: he seeks to return agency to the artists and paintings that gave face to modernity, and to steer us, as readers and interpreters, away from facile historicism on the one hand, and formalism on the other. The essays in this volume are always historically nuanced, aglow with Clark's deep learning and masterful prose; they will doubtlessly elicit much praise and be the subject of much debate.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This synthesis of three decades of Clark's (modern art, Univ. of California, Berkeley) thinking and writing about modern art is not a simple book. It raises basic questions on the vitality and viability of modernism and its relation to other intellectual, political, and social developments of the 20th century. Modernism's duality, its inward reflecting and outward reaching, is echoed in Clark's approach, which treats both a broad historic view and specific works of art in relation to the material world. The reader is exposed to philosophical rumination, critical detail, and historic perspective: from David at work during the Terror of the late 18th century to C?zanne painting at the time Freudian theory was evolving to Pollock's view of an abstract form reaching outward limits. A difficult, thought-provoking work that requires almost as much effort on the part of the reader as that of the author but is well worth the effort. For all academic art collections.APaula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (March 11, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300075324
• ISBN-13: 978-0300075328
• Product Dimensions: 11.8 x 7.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #569,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Publishing event of note in modern criticism, June 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Hardcover)

I have known for many years that this book would one day be written, and its publication thus offers a moment of high excitement--- and somewhat less bafflement, although more surprises, and occasional astonishment, than I had expected in the actual reading.

Farewell to an Idea by T.J. Clark is an extraordinarily personalized text--- also long, dense, and carefully written, as any reader of Clark has come to expect. His new book is necessarily idiosyncratic, often brilliant--- with illustrations (many in color) of a quality of reproduction overarchingly essential to the book's aims.

Modern art criticism (and the criticism of modern art) will not easily be the same after this book, and a good thing is that Farewell to an Idea will not provide easy fodder to the multitude of its author's exegetes and followers--- for it is the "full monty" this time. And one does not imagine imitators.

For what it is worth, the book comprises a vast erudition and experience in the matter and materials of mass culture in the twentieth century, but claims little familiarity with mass society. For it was indeed thought out and written in the "wilds" of Northern California, as Tim Clark is, and for some years has been, Chancellor's Professor of Modern Art at the University of California at Berkeley--- conceived not in the "flats", then, but on high ground.

It's hallmark and strength lie in Clark's approach to art--- and to Modernism--- sketched out as early as the author's heroic, short manifesto "The conditions of artistic creation" published twenty-five years ago in the TLS (May 24, l974), to which in a number of ways Farewell to an Idea is the self-spoken answer--- not a bad shot for a quarter century's worth of work and of scrupulous looking in inordinate detail at pictures from Paris to New York's MoMA and the Barnes Collection outside Philadelphia, and, indeed, wherever the masterpieces, or the detritus, of Modernism is to be found. Incidentally, a significant number of the works illustrated here are from private collections--- and will be, to that extent, unfamiliar and "fresh" to the eye.

By specialists, it may be recalled that the TLS manifesto wished to express that art history was, then, in crisis--- Clark made reference to certain "fundamental questions", the conditions of consciousness, and the nature of representation. He called for "an archaeology of the subject" exercised via "dialectical thinking", that would enable certain "questions" to be asked by disinterring "the Hegelian legacy" of nineteenth-century historiography and pursuing a notion of "the history of art as work". One of these "questions" was the issue of ideology, which, now, at century's end is far less unfamiliar in the humanities than at the time of Clark's rebuke to the discipline. Yet what he sought for the future was a "point by point description" of the "contact of work [of art] and ideology"--- and this is now what Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism is made out of. Answers, or tentative answers, to Clark's other "questions" are here too: what were "the conditions and relations of artistic production in a specific case", what determined "the particular encounter of work [of art] and ideology", how did "the wordless appropriation of the work" take place?

Farewell to an Idea , then, consists of a rich tissue of ekphraseis , or descriptions of art--- mainly painting--- from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The "episodes" of the subtitle are six in number: David's "Death of Marat" (l793) and surrounding events, Pissarro's "Two Young Peasant Women" (l892) in the Met, the Barnes "Large Bathers" from the turn of the century by Cézanne with its avatars from London and Philadelphia, Picasso's Cubism of l911-12, the relationship of El Lissitsky and Malevitch in Vitebsk in the early 20s, and the work of Jackson Pollack in the late 40s to l950. Each of these is a separate tale, painstakingly documented to an extent that each manages to break new ground, "philologically"--- as Manfred Tafuri was fond of saying--- as well as contributing to Clark's ongoing "history of [Modernism] as work".

Clark was ever a prodigy kid, and his new book is a "prodigy" book--- like the Elizabethan "prodigy house" full of many rooms--- and, possibly for this reason, the most up front, and reader-friendly of his several works. Its scope, in the end, is less valedictory than novelistic; one enters each episode as if it were a web site, thinking to oneself, as the youngsters used to say a few years ago, that "I have never been here before". My own favorite chapters are the first, "Painting in the Year 2" and the fifth, "God is not Cast Down", because there is so much extrapolated material about self-consciously ideological art in a political situation (the French and Russian Revolutions), whereas the other chapters are more about the conjuncture of art and ideology in the referred to sense of "wordless appropriation".

In addition to its episodic (really "case study" would be more descriptive) body, there are an Introduction, an epilogue "In Defense of Abstract Expressionism", and a Conclusion. Some interesting theory-based definitions are advanced, notably that of "contingency", which will bear further work. On the other hand, Clark's discussion of the chain of terms "modernization-Modernism-modernity", while thought-provoking, is also, I believe, problematic. In this connection, he makes heavy work of the [Walter] Benjaminian horror inspired by our century, that is nowadays (wordlessly) propagated in so much discussion concerning art and the humanities. One of the few weaknesses of the book is the occasional discursive passage on "taste" (that is, its history as opposed to art's), a domain I feel Clark rushes upon too intently to preserve the virtues of his own self-declared approach. Nonetheless, I have read every word of this book. I think my favorite one-line quotation, to give a hint of its writer's genius is from p. l09: "Seurat was the Nietzsche of painting."

David B. Stewart, Tokyo Institute of Technology

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Modernism and its Followers, December 13, 2004

By 

R. J MOSS (Alice Springs, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Paperback)

Clark opened me to Courbet (and later Michael Fried} for which I am grateful. Here, his sleuthing unearths fresh and welcome insights into another brace of 'old' subjects. His intimate relationships to key works makes for a rivetting and informative read. The spell of his writing is such that, though I'm not attracted to any of the artists whose work goes under his scope, I found, in each instance, my sympathies were elicited. If the questions asked of the art are, whose mentality is recorded by these paintings; what action or situation yields the views which painters perceive and represent as an aspect of reality; and who are the protagonists and antagonists reflected within the painting's points of view(as Clark has) then you have an enticing context in which to frame old fuddy, duddy David, the cumbersome peasant women of Pissaro, Cezanne's androgynous 'Bathers',the congested spatial tricks of Picasso's cubism, the nihilistic utopia of Suprematism, and the vulgarity of Abstract Expressionism/ The New York School(my abbreviations, not Clark's). The close raking over the painting's content, context & textures is first rate, and convincing. Highly recommended.For more on art visit>rodmoss.com

12 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars reference to published review, October 7, 1999

By 

William Mahrt ([e-mail]) (Stanford, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Hardcover)

See excellent review in First Things, October 1999, pp. 59-6