Modernism in the Visual Arts

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by James F. Cooper

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.