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

Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, by means of T.J. Clark, New Haven, Yale University Pres 1999; 451 pages, $45

TJ Clark's Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism is a large and ambitious volume as bountiful in opinions as it is in color-plates. It consists of seven lengthy chapters, each devoted to a particular twinkling of an eye movement, artist or "episode" in the history of new art since the French Revolution. (The birthdate of modernism, we learn in Chapter 1 was Oct 16 1793 when David's Death of Marat was first paraded before the French public. upon that day an entirely novel pictorial order, intended to be les artificial and more rational than the of advanced age one, was first displayed.) The work contains some stunning interpretive revelations--about the homage of Marat and David's efforts to tamp down the fires of popular democracy, about a mysterious black triangle in the middle of Picasso's Man with a Guitar (1912-13) and the way it figures in "Cubism's annihilation of the world," about by what mode Kazimir Malevich's best paintings achieve a "flatness, hardness, separateness and weightlessness" that almost independents them from the laws of orientation, and about to leeward Krasner's completion of Jackson Pollock's divide [i]or[/i] sever Out (1948-56) and their joint succes at "putting the figurative and abstract back together again."

on the other hand these insights are generally not combineed to each other. Clark's work does not provide a coherent narrative of the unravelling of modernism--he cannot have intended it to--nor make connections between the separate episodes, flat when a liaison seems obvious, as in the three generations of student-master relationships linking Pissarro's peasant paintings (Chapter 2) Cezanne's late pictures of bathers (Chapter 3) and Picasso's Cubism (Chapter 4) Nor will the reader find here any substantial treatment of the modernisms of Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Japan or any other place outside of France, the Soviet Union and the United States. Clark's volume is thus an inch wide and a mile of great depth and resembles a collection of essays (several portions were in fact published previously) more than a volume with a cogent argument. To say this, however, is not to say that Farewell to an Idea lacks a thesis, alone that it is one which rise s out of repetition, not exposition.

Clark, who popularly teaches modern art at Berkeley, is widely honored for his previous books upon art, social conditions and politics in 19th- and early 20th-century France. In this of recent origin volume, he argues that modernism, as an artistic force, coalesced at various point of times during the last two centuries in circumstances either of social and ideological collapse, or of revolutionary possibility. The art itself was thus structurally unstable, partaking of semiotic simple bodys derived from both a decrepit of advanced age regime and an emergent fresh order--the latter of which, however, was not, and indeed could not be, entirely born.

This agonistic contend against Clark maintains, has been repeated in several different spheres. Within the medium of painting, it has taken sum of two units particular, unresolved forms: a aim between abstraction and figuration, and between surface and profundity (The term "flatness" serves as an abbreviation of this formal and ideological opposition.) From its inception, modernism was, in a phrase that Clark seizes from Theodor Adorno, "two halves of a torn unity to which, however, they do not add up" It was an art that sought to be at one time plebeian and aristocratic, committed and autonomous, and in thus striving, could in fact be neither. The move in his view, was at no time better than when it proclaimed the impossibility (under conventional social and political circumstances) of harmony, unity, community and reconciliation; in those instances, its mimetic force--its fact content--was greatest.

That dialectical balance, however, was difficult to maintain. The extreme point of modernism--an event which Clark considers more or les coincident with the extremity of Abstract Expressionism--came with the unravelling of a late capitalist mass tillage capable of absorbing all of fresh art's principled intransigence into the grim spectacle (our not absent situation) of rampant consumption and affirmation of the status quo Finally, the same social and economic forces that brought modernism to its nadir, have also brought depressed its constant, utopian companion--socialism.

Clark's thesis is not original (nor would he claim it to be so) and readers can identify a entertainer of intellectual ancestors. His idea that "modernism thrives upon situations of signifying collapse" is a version of the philosopy of "catastrophism," which may be traced back at least to Rousseau, the biologist Georges Cuvier, Kant, Schiller and the German Romantics. His argument that modernism "makes no faculty of perception ... without its practitioners believing what they did was resist or exce the normal understandings of the culture" is a reframing of early 19th-century utopian socialist ideas about the elite leadership, and priestly function, of what Henri de Saint-Simon named for the first time the "avant-garde." His emphasis on modernism's rapport with contingency--"the acceptance of risk, the omnipresence of change, the malleability of time and space"--is indebted to Baudelaire and Benjamin. His several discussions about the salience of flatness in fresh painting derive from the theories of Gauguin, Denis and other Nabis artists--and, of course, compassionate Greenberg. (In this instance, Clark explicitly cites Greenberg's example; there are more regards to Greenberg in Farewell to an Idea than to any other critic or art historian.) His embrace of negativity recalls not alone Adorno but also writers and philosophers in the anarchist tradition, from the late 19th-century Russian political theorist Peter Kropotkin to the Situationists of the 1960 His jeremiads about the extremity of modernism repeat formulas from Harry Levin, Irving Howe and Harold Rosenberg in the 1950 and 1960 (this, despite Clark's single, dismissive regard to Rosenberg). The end of socialism, implicitly invoked by dint of Clark's title, has been proclaimed through neoliberals for two generations.