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

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