Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. . - book review

T J CLARK

Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism

novel Haven and London: Yale University Pres 1999 451 pp; 100 color ills., 152 b/w $4500

In the introduction to his always pensive and often moving Farewell to an Idea, T J Clark enumerates his readers that "Friends reading parts of this volume in advance said they place it melancholic" (p. 13). They were right: this is a melancholic volume And it is likely to make any reader melancholic who shares the author's attachment to the idea of a "focusing purpose" (pp 8 11) that might unite human beings in a genuine community without requiring them to give over their freedom; as well as that reader who cannot conceive of like a reconciliation of freedom and community do not include in terms of a socialist paradise. Capitalism remains Clark's "Satan" (p 8) Presuppos is the Hegelian conviction that art should expres of the like kind a purpose.

At bottom the "idea" of the book's title is the central idea of the Enlightenment: humanity finally draw near of age, no longer enslaved by means of nature, history, and religion, guided solitary by reason, will take charge of its possess destiny and build a with truth free society. It is this idea that, in different guises, is said to have given modernism focus and direction. And it is this same idea to which this volume "written after the Fall of the Wall" (p 8) when the throws of both socialism anti artistic modernism "had tend hitherward to an end," when "clearly something of socialism and modernism has died, in the couple cases deservedly" (p. 8), bids a nostalgic farewell.

In six drawn out chapters, almost monographs, framed by the agency of a challenging "Introduction" and a les than whole-hearted "Defense of Abstract Expressionism," Farewell to an Idea explores the "century-long co-dependency" of socialism and late art (p. 8). The volume makes no claim to comprehensiveness. Clark himself speaks of "some notable silences Matisse is a flagrant example" (p 12) I find the fact that Kandinsky, Klee and Mondrian are mentioned single in passing even more significant.

The welcome focus upon relatively few paintings and episodes--David's Death of Marat (1793) Pissarro's sum of two units Young Peasant Women (1892), Cezanne's Large Bathers, especially the versions in the Barnes Foundation (1895-1906) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (ca. 1904-6) Picasso "in the first flush of Cubism" (1911-12) El Lissitzky in 1920 Pollock around 1950--not single allows Clark to turn this material in his hand "as fiercely" as Adolf Menzel in his pencil and gouache drawing make go rounded Field Marshal Moltke's binoculars (p 7) on the other hand also raises questions about the interest that have the charge ofs this selection. Menzel was single of the great observers in the history of art. And Clark, too, justifys himself an extraordinary observer: again and again he permits us see in familiar works aspects we had not noted before. on the contrary as striking is his conviction that "The not absent is purgatory, not a permanent travesty of heaven" (p 408) The work concludes with these words, a conclusion informed by dint of the quasi-religious "myth of socialism" that dominions the author's perspective.

Socialism, according to Clark, who cites the Platform of the temple Socialist League of 1906, "was the idea of 'the political, economic and social emancipation of the whole clan men and women, by the establishment of a democratic commonwealth in which the community shall have a title to the land and capital collectively and use them for the profitable of all" (pp. 8-9). Not that recent artists gave all that a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of support to this idea. Indeed, as Clark points on the outside "Modernism was regularly outspoken about the barrenness of the working-class movement--its politics of pity, its dreary materialism, the taste of the masses, the Idea of Progres etc" (p 9) Nietzsche was in fact more of a hero to artistic modernism than Marx. In this work he remains "in the wings" (p 124)

Clark knows about the many modernist artists who disagreed with or wanted to have nothing to do with socialism. He intimates that such opposition may have been because modernism "sens socialism was its shadow--that it too was engaged in a desperate, and probably futile, strive to imagine modernity otherwise" (p 9) And in the way that it was. But the direction of of the like kind imagining is not adequately understood as a reply to Clark's Satan. As Kandinsky's "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" hints, abundant modernism had in mind a different sort of enemy. And it have the appearances to me that we are not done with that enemy.

Like Arthur Danto--why does the Nation's near art critic not receive a single mention in this book?--although hardly in his upbeat, cheerful manner, Clark, too, proclaims the death of late art: modernism died, not because we find ourselves today upon the threshold of some postmodern age, on the other hand because that "'modernity' which modernism prophesied" (p 2) has triumphed thus completely, rendering all hope for something other at any time more utopian. Presupposed is tension between the shape of modernity and what modernism dreamed of between the world we live in and the idea mentioned in the title. on the contrary what is it about "modernity" that, according to Clark, makes modernism "unintelligible now because it had barter with a modernity not still fully in place" (p. 3)?