Modernism in the Visual Arts.

Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, by T.J. Clark, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, 2001. 451 pp.

THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BOOK, for two reasons. The first is its comprehensive overview of the two-hundred-year history of modernism in the visual arts, beginning with, as Professor T.J. Clark posits, Jacques-Louis David's painting Death of Marat (1793), and ending in the postmodern era of gargantuan museums and banal biennials. The second is the author's fundamental thesis that the evolution of socialism--with its origins in the French Revolution and concluding with the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall--is inseparably linked to modernism. Clark's contention is that both failed, and for similar reasons. At a time when the arts and arts scholarship are still often perceived through the prism of postmodern semiotics and Marxist ideology, Clark's verdict is comparable to a bombshell thrown into the midst of smug political conventioneers accustomed to forging national agendas and anointing cultural elites.

Clark is a respected scholar of post-modern theory, Chancellor's Professor of Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of several books on early modernism, including The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-51; Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1999); and The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Monet and His Followers (1984). Farewell to an Idea reads like a novel by Umberto Eco, with the enthralled reader turning pages to find out who or what killed modernism and socialism. Clark claims that modernism and communism shared the same objective--to create a civilization devoid of hierarchy, greed, and oppression, and united by universal signage and language. They failed, he demonstrates, because they were unable to overcome the human lust for power and profit.

According to Clark, true modernism and true socialism came closest to fruition in the art of Suprematism, and with UNOVIS, the cultural arm of radical Bolshevik intellectuals and artists led by Kasimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. Their paintings, posters, and theatrical presentations, justifiably admired today for their abstract purity, are actually political, philosophical, architectural, and industrial systems reduced to universal signage and symbols. The objective of UNOVIS, an acronym for "Affirmers of New Forms in Art," was collectivism. "If we want to attain perfection," declared Malevich in 1920, "the self must be annihilated." With the dazzling talent, passion, and intelligence of its dedicated membership, UNOVIS for one brief moment during the Russian Revolution threatened to under-mine and even supersede the authority of Lenin and Trotsky. Artists and poets would lead where politicians and soldiers lacked the imagination. Like Marat, the Jacobin martyr of the French Revolution, their fate was quickly sealed, first by Lenin's cultural police and then by Stalin's.

As one might gather from my brief introduction, Clark's sympathies lean strongly Left, which is precisely why this work is so fascinating. This perverse, Alice-in-Wonderland world is described by someone who knows it well. It is a land-scape seen through the reverse end of the telescope. Postmodern theory is not formally based, focusing on art-as-object, but rather on the socio-political-economic order that produces the object. Aesthetics is regarded as packaging for the client, whether patron or commissar. What elevates this book above others that embrace a postmodern cosmology is the author's humility and scholarship. Clark makes a genuine attempt to understand why modernism and socialism failed, even as he expresses regret for that failure: "If I can't have the proletariat as my chosen people any longer at least capitalism remains my Satan."

Clark picks up the trail of modernism and Jacobin socialism where they first converge. David's Death of Marat "marks the People's [first] entry onto the stage of power." Because this painting of the assassinated people's hero was so extraordinary and novel, he writes, "it changed the circumstances of picturing for good. It is in my view, the deepest cause of Modernism." (Clark makes no reference to Robert Rosenblum's claim, in Transformations in Eighteenth-Century Art (1967), that an earlier neo-classical work by David, The Oath of the Horatii (1784), marks the beginning of fascism.)

Clark applies his political yardstick--"politics ... is the form par excellence that makes modernism what it is"--to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Suprematism and Abstract Expressionism (the last serious attempt to create a universal "proletariat" signage). Each lengthy chapter represents an "episode" in the history of modernism by analyzing a single work by an artist such as Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Kasimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, or Jackson Pollock.

Two Young Peasant Women (1892) by Pissarro, a painting so uncharacteristically mired in socialist sentimentality that his dealer Durand-Ruel refused to hang it in his gallery, receives lengthy scrutiny from Clark because this Impressionist artist, near the end of his life, turned to anarchism for inspiration. "Anarchism was that part of socialism with the deepest feeling for the vileness of our epoch," suggests Clark. Seurat--"the Nietzsche of modernism"--is coupled with Pissarro because Seurat's pointillism "planted a bomb in the middle of the bourgeois idea of freedom--and order and individuality." The ubiquitous "dot" would eliminate all the aesthetic categories of nineteenth-century culture.

The Large Bathers (1895-1906) by Cezanne is singled out because one of the female figures is "insecurely sexed," raising issues of transgenderism, castration, and homoeroticism. Clark cites several influences on Cezanne, including Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900.

Clark devotes an entire chapter to analyzing a 1912 photograph, taken by Picasso at his summer villa in Sorgues, of several Cubist paintings executed during the previous two months, setting the stage by explaining that Cubism promised to create a universal, generic visual language. Picasso had taken the next step beyond Cezanne's nascent Cubism, abandoning direct observation for increasing abstraction. By 1912 Picasso and Braque had formed a small collective generating works so similar they are hard to tell apart. "We were trying to set up a new order," explained Braque; they didn't even sign their paintings. Their collaboration was so close that Picasso half-joked that Braque was his wife.

Picasso betrayed their union. The 1912 photograph reveals that the paintings, which are well-known Cubist works, were subsequently changed or modified by Picasso after the photograph was taken, for reasons Clark claims have little to do with the true spirit of Cubism or of collectivism. This is the beginning of "counterfeit Cubism," signaling Picasso's return to individual expression and his break with Braque. Clark is quick to point out that many supporters of modernism cannot tell the difference between the true Cubism and ersatz, created for money.

The collective symbiosis Clark envisions was achieved briefly in the work of the Suprematists. The "Factory" of Malevich and El Lissitzky and others of UNOVIS created a common visual language of energy, force fields and ideas for the Revolution. "Unison," "truth to materials," "plasticity," "zero," were sacred concepts for a band of adepts committed to the idea of "war communism." The Black Square, the symbol of cultural revolution, was sewn on the sleeves of UNOVIS members, like a soldier's insignia. Submission of the ego to "zero," the universal, was also the goal sought by the Abstract Expressionists forty years later. Both movements were destroyed by their "friends," motivated by greed, lust for power, and fear. The author's real fear is that modernism's "false friends" have failed to see that Pollock and Hans Hofmann are "the last flowering of modernism." Although Clark says he will "not name names," those of us in the arts are familiar with artists, dealers, critics, and curators who created the billion-dollar art market of the postmodern era, stretching roughly from 1960 to 2000.

The question we have to ask is whether good art was produced because of these political, altruisitic, dreamy goals Clark writes so passionately about. Or were there other--aesthetic and spiritual--explanations? Some of the paintings Clark cites are clearly inferior, such as Pissarro's Two Young Peasant Women. It can also be argued that David is the father of the neoclassicism which inspired a century of Beaux-Arts architecture, sculpture, urbanism, and painting, which is hardly socialist.

If the basis of modernism is its political content, what could be more political than David's Oath of the Horatii, a painting more famous and influential than Death of Marat? The formal qualities, the Spartan sense of aesthetics and classical beauty, of the Oath revolutionized the culture of Western civilization for the next hundred years, and its Roman militancy helped initiate the Revolution of 1789. Clark completely ignores that twentieth-century radical political movement which also made a claim on modernism: fascism.

Most significantly, in a study closely paralleling art and the intellectual milieu, Clark ignores existentialism, which some of us believe lies at the core of modernism. What Max Weber called the "disenchantment of the world," existentialism has a far greater claim to modernism's credo of "art for art's sake" than socialism or fascism. Suprematism certainly generated great art, created by true believers during a time of crisis and war. But Malevich and the others were quickly rounded up and dragged off to gulags for reprogramming by the same people for whom they had fought.

Given these caveats, why do I believe Clark's book so important? Because it is the most objective book about modernism I have read from a postmodern viewpoint. It is important because it underscores the special talents artists possess to create a language that transcends nationalism and ideology, even when they act politically. Clark downplays aesthetics and beauty because he knows that artists are inspired by higher ideals. Aesthetics and beauty are tools, not goals. I would argue, however, that he should be open to a suggestion that postmodern culture, whatever its political orientation, has given birth to some of the ugliest and most brutal art in modern history in the name of the "collective."

Clark writes in a way that stimulates discussion, even when you vehemently disagree with him, particularly on politics and aesthetics. His socialism is subordinated to the utopian vision that we have all shared since the ancient Greeks: to be part of a civilized, spiritual, communal order that invites its members to participate fully in something greater than the individual. Ironically, modernism and socialism separated the artist from this communal process. Although Clark might not agree, the most successful scenario for twentieth-century modernism took place right under his nose in American popular culture. Film--recognized by the Russian revolutionaries as a potent vehicle of universal signage--became under Hollywood capitalism a model of collective experience, and the twentieth century's most original art form.

JAMES F. COOPER is Director of the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center, and Editor of American Arts Quarterly.