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Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism

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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

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

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

. . . who is David B. Stewart, and couldn't he get his review published in a real journal? Just a bit of advice for the fatally credulous: when one academic treats the work of another academic as though it were handed down like the Ten Commandments to Moses, beware. If he is not a close friend or former student of the author, he is surely someone who seeks the latter's favor. Yes, Clark is a smart fellow, and this is a good book. If the topic interests you, then you should certainly buy it. I agree with folks such as Clark and Thomas Crow (Clark's former student and a subtler thinker than his mentor), as well as with Albrecht Wellmer, Axel Honneth, et. al., that modernism must be understood as a response to modernity, a moment of negation within the logic of capitalism and affirmative culture. And Clark does a good job of showing the dynamics of resistance and recuperation at work within an object. But he is by no means the second coming of Aby Warburg (or Walter Benjamin, for that matter). Then again, who is?

Some great essays (Malevich!!) yet the overall tone is SO nostalgic. Yes, the world is f***ed up, but it's hard to take this kind of solipsism from all the straight male marxists of academia. May the revolution(s) have just gone elsewhere for now.