Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism

Rating:
Summary: Yes, but. . .
Review: . . . who is David B. Stewart, and couldn't he get his review published in a real journal? Just a bit of advice for the fatally credulous: when one academic treats the work of another academic as though it were handed down like the Ten Commandments to Moses, beware. If he is not a close friend or former student of the author, he is surely someone who seeks the latter's favor. Yes, Clark is a smart fellow, and this is a good book. If the topic interests you, then you should certainly buy it. I agree with folks such as Clark and Thomas Crow (Clark's former student and a subtler thinker than his mentor), as well as with Albrecht Wellmer, Axel Honneth, et. al., that modernism must be understood as a response to modernity, a moment of negation within the logic of capitalism and affirmative culture. And Clark does a good job of showing the dynamics of resistance and recuperation at work within an object. But he is by no means the second coming of Aby Warburg (or Walter Benjamin, for that matter). Then again, who is?

Rating:
Summary: Modernism and its Followers
Review: Clark opened me to Courbet (and later Michael Fried} for which I am grateful. Here, his sleuthing unearths fresh and welcome insights into another brace of 'old' subjects. His intimate relationships to key works makes for a rivetting and informative read. The spell of his writing issuch that, though I'm not attracted to any of the artists whose work goes under his scope, I found, in each instance, my sympathies were ellicited. If the questions asked of the art are, whose mentality is recorded by these paintings; what action or situation yields the views which painters perceive and represent as an aspect of reality; and who are the protagonists and atagonists reflected within the painting's points of view(as Clark has) then you have an enticing context in which to frame old fuddy, duddy David, the cumbersome peasant women of Pissaro, Cezanne's androgynous 'Bathers',the congested spatial tricks of Picasso's cubism, the nihilistic utopia of Suprematism, and the vulgarity of Abstract Expressionism/ The New York School(my abbreviations, not Clark's). The close raking over the painting's content, context & textures is first rate, and convincing. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Bad Ends
Review: David's Marat to Marcia Simon Weisman's art-adorned townhouse. Painting's path of commitment and complicity. It would be too much to expect pictures to do other than re-arrange, parse, and inflect select portions of the social whole...or would it? What would that other practice look like, embedded within the norms of its particular medium? Clark's book examines five episodes "from a history of modernism," with an eye toward painting's other agenda, intermittently visible to politico-formalistic analysis. His method is hesitant and personalized. Some object. That's fine; let them string together an account from Pissarro's failed peasant conversations through overlooked Cubist decision-procedures to undated photographs of constructivist agitprop. Clark doesn't furnish us with any dialectical models to redeem modernism's truth-content in political terms. The bad end is its premise. This book is less the end of a conversation than the beginning of one. Enclosed within Lavender Mist, threaded with iconic plates, and opened by Steven's farewell, how could it be anything less?

Rating:
Summary: reference to published review
Review: See excellent review in First Things, October 1999, pp. 59-6

Rating:
Summary: a LONG book
Review: Some great essays (Malevich!!) yet the overall tone is SO nostalgic. Yes, the world is f***ed up, but it's hard to take this kind of solipsism from all the straight male marxists of academia. May the revolution(s) have just gone elsewhere for now.