I remember the fights about modernism when I was at university in the early 1960s. As a TS Eliot reader, I could barely speak to the AE Housman "poetry must rhyme" faction. In the visual arts, the Jackson Pollock versus Constable battle became so bitter that we suspected the Constablists of smashing up a studio we had in a derelict house, where we pretentiously daubed and splattered.
Do these fires still burn among students? I doubt it. TS Eliot (perhaps along with Yeats) is established as the great poet in English of this century. This spring Jackson Pollock's beautiful, over-reaching paintings hang comfortably on the walls of the Tate Gallery, looking as confident and obviously art as-oh dear-a Constable exhibition. Modernism wanted to detonate the notion of tradition and to start anew; it was born of a disenchantment with the world-as-it-is. Now that world which it sought to disrupt has turned round and made it... well, enchanting.
So, the nightmare of the modernist artist is to end up canonised, a victim of "bourgeois hegemony." This is a tired old catch-phrase but not, the American art critic TJ Clark insists, an empty one: it describes the west's great cultural effort which began in about ad 1500 to map and extend experience, and to establish an all-embracing agreement about society and its values. All that was left outside the hegemony was "the dislocated, the inarticulate, the outdated... the solipsistic, the chaotic," unable to threaten the bourgeois world. Clark's subtle, meditative book has at times an anguished tone; he is writing about the failure of an idea which he loves.
He begins with the observation that there is an agreement, on the part of the common people as well as the intellectuals, that the project called socialism came to an end at about the same time as the demise of the modernist project in art. Whether both are truly done for, only time will tell; but Clark asks whether apparently dying together means that, in some sense, they lived together, too?
This is not another version of the argument that the great art of our era came out of great suffering and turbulence. There is, of course, a terrible truth in that: think of Anna Akhmatova's Elegy, Olivier Messiaen's Quartet For The End of Time or Primo Levi's If This Is A Man and The Truce-the Iliad and the Odyssey of survival in the camps. But Clark's argument is more complex and difficult to grasp. Remember, he seems to be saying, that modernism often hovered on the edge of lunacy. The simultaneously ludicrous and splendid modernist dream of inventing a new pictorial language, which could only be understood in various utopian futures, none of which ever arrived, is hard to analyse rationally. But Clark is up to the task. His account of Pissarro's technique, the beautiful patterning of the jagged surface, the light in a painting, the gestures of peasant figures, is masterly; so is his tussle with the strangeness of space and light in Picasso's cubist paintings, and his attempt to reconstruct Pollock's painstaking process.
He begins with a chapter on Jacques-Louis David's "Death of Marat," painted in 1793, "Year Two" of the French Revolution. But in what way is this famous painting, so solidly figurative, so unlike a Picasso cubist mandolin player or a C?zanne bather, a modernist painting?
When an argument broke out in the Cordeliers Club, at a ceremony to honour the recently assassinated Marat, one speaker compared Marat to Christ: "O thou Jesus, oh thou Marat! Like Jesus, Marat loves the people and no one but them..." But this was countered by one Brochet, who shouted: "Marat is not to be compared with Jesus; that man... sowed the seeds of superstition on earth, he defended Kings!" If David had heard this altercation, Clark asks, which side would he have been on? Marat dead was a troublesome legacy to the leadership of the various factions of the revolution. Both left and right claimed him as their own: Robespierre made Marat's sister publicly denounce the leftist Jacques Roux. It was in this frightening situation that David, himself a Jacobin politician, painted his picture. On the day of Marie Antoinette's execution, it was paraded in public.
Which side had David come down on: Marat as quasi-religious icon or revolutionary, atheistic role model? On neither and on both, says Clark. David breaks with the tradition of the heroic picture painted for political ends. He had to, because no one could agree about the revolution's path, so no one could agree about the meaning of its great martyr's death. David's solution is modernist in its ruthlessness: he insists on the present moment without gloss from the past. There were other "Death of Marat" paintings, and Clark shows one, by Joseph Roques: it is a shock to see it, when you are so familiar with David's version. Roques's painting, although expert, is sentimental and hollow: there is a heroic grimace on the face of the corpse, there are clothes of office in the background and the past is heavily present. But in David's painting the sense of the frozen present moment is all. "A Marat. David. L'an deux" reads the inscription. It is the here and now which matters, the death of the revolutionary leader, ruthlessly depicted and paraded on the day of a fateful execution in the Year Two, when no one knew whether there would even be a Year Three. David, Clark claims, is the first modernist painter.
We then leap 100 years to Pissarro, painting a canvas he titled "Two Young Peasant Women." At first glance it is a typically impressionist piece of work. The women are resting beside an orchard and a vineyard; one sits, with her chin on her closed hand, the other is kneeling, rather awkwardly, looking down on her. The gorgeous colour of Pissarro's rural France sweeps away behind them to a line of trees in the distance. Clark is fascinated by this picture and thinks it has something of the spirit of "Death of Marat."
Pissarro was an anarchist, with a decent and somewhat na?ve faith in that creed. In 1891 France seemed far from politically stable: there was industrial unrest, there were anarchist bombings. And for an artist-and Pissarro believed above all in Art, always capitalised in his letters-it was a tormenting time. It is difficult to understand the perplexing impact of Seurat's "pointillism" in the early 1890s. It went with the Symbolist manifestos, which may seem daft now but which sounded unanswerable then, as they denounced everything done over the last 30 years as "positivist," "materialist" and, for that reason, "deeply bourgeois" (they were gunning for Manet and Monet). The Modernism of our century was born out of this fracas. "Remember," screamed a manifesto the modernists came to swear by, "...that a painting-before being a warhorse, a nude woman or some anecdote or other-is essentially a flat surface covered with colours in a certain order."
Pissarro, Clark believes, had a great fear of a future cultural barbarism. He knew that painting was a fragile flower. One half of him sought the high elevation of absolute Art, but the other was open to the welter of revolutionary political and artistic ideas. In "Two Young Peasant Women," Pissarro agonised over the imagery, the impasto of colour. C?zanne said of the painting: "Little by little we modify the way we see, and finally comprehension comes to us... study modifies our vision to such an extent that the humble and colossal Pissarro finds his anarchist theories substantiated." The picture is an attempt to turn on the past and portray, through the intensity of the paint itself as much as the imagery, an anarchist utopia. We are looking at two citizens of a dream of the future. You flick back through the pages to look again at the reproduction at the beginning of the chapter and think "well, yes, perhaps..."
What Pissarro was trying to do was probably impossible. But when it comes to "the impossible" C?zanne's four huge pictures of women bathing must take first prize. Showing his American training, Clark offers a Freudian interpretation of one of these troubling, almost repellent pictures, "The Large Bathers" in the Barnes collection. This is fun, but makes the paintings forbidding in a way I've never seen them. They are "bodies deformed and reconstructed by the power of the mind." Modernists wanted to free painting from the past, but they also wanted to free it from storytelling, or "narration." What are these women doing? This is not about bathing. And the figure on the right-is it a woman? Has the deeply repressed C?zanne given her/him a penis? And one of the women to the left-is her head a penis? Clark's explanation is that this is a dreaming picture. The figures are double. They represent peace and erotic fulfilment but, at the same time, they represent nightmares and hidden savagery. The picture is a mixture of grand Guignol and utopia, of absurdity and perfection. And C?zanne is trying to make it impersonal: the figures are stiff, continually repainted and revised over ten years. It is as if they were puppets of his vision, as if he wanted to cut himself out of the painting, to make desire mechanical.
Clark observes that this is what has so enraged modernism's opponents over the years. It asserts as its aim the expression of the beautiful, then discovers that the beautiful is nothing but mechanism, matter dictating dead form. Great beauty is present in, say, a Kandinsky painting, but at the same time it is only marks upon a flat surface. Modernism has a ruthlessly materialist view of art and there is something horrible in that.
Finally, we come to the heights of modernism: Picasso's cubist paintings of 1910-12; Malevich's "suprematism" in the Russia of 1920; and Jackson Pollock's great webs of 1950. All three, Clark argues, pushed the modernist project to its limits. Picasso wanted to invent a new pictorial language. But cubism is, Clark says, a counterfeit language. It cannot escape pipes, chairs, bottles in its still lifes, or hands and eyes in its portraits, for all its dazzling modernist reworkings of surface and space. It is painting at the end of its tether.
Malevich's project-the pure abstraction Picasso could never embrace-was in the service of the Bolshevik revolution. Clark approaches Malevich through the photograph of a propaganda board by his fellow suprematist, El Lissitzky. The board stands in a street in Vitsebek, a small provincial Russian town, in 1920. It is wholly abstract except for a slogan, exhorting workers to "move production forward." The more Clark stares at this photograph, the weirder and madder the project seems. "Do not map the world, transfigure it," was the suprematist's creed. But the moment when abstract art and revolutionary politics went hand in hand did not last long. When Malevich's plan for a monument to Lenin was presented, he was asked: "But where's Lenin?" Malevich pointed to a pure white cube at the top. The judges turned the project down.
Jackson Pollock, Clark writes, wanted to "annihilate the very ground of misreading, shrug off past and future alike, and have the work turn on some impossible present." He meditates on 20 or so of Pollock's paintings and argues that Pollock attempted everything modernism wanted. But his drip paintings were, literally, modernism's last great throw.
And Clark's conclusion? There were many modernisms, he writes-personally, he values the Italian modernists of the 1950s, novelists such as Calvino and Pavese and film-makers such as Antonioni, as much as he values Pollock. But the answer is yes: modernism was linked with the stress, the impossibility, the horror and the dream of socialism in our century. He concludes cryptically-but, after 400 pages of the greatest criticism of modern art I have ever read, he must be allowed a little poetry: "The myth will survive its historic defeat. The present is purgatory, not a permanent travesty of heaven." I take that to mean that it may all come back again.
Farewell to an idea
TJ Clark
Yale University Press 1999, ?30
