Is This Modernism?

Raymond Williams

When Raymond Williams gave the lecture ‘When Was Modernism?’ in 1987 he suggested that the modern art canon, which has come to signify Modernism in its entirety, is based on principles of exclusion. He described how this selective honouring has fostered a very specific trajectory in art, stunting the development of any marginalized alternative. Not only did he call for the reworking of the boundaries delineating the ‘when’ of modernity, he also urged for a mining of the historical vaults to reexamine the ‘what’ of what exactly was left out. [1] So in the spirit of taking up Williams’s provocative question, and at the risk of sounding eccentric—or even worse indignant—I would like to propose that Modernism has not ended. And to answer the title question of this essay: yes, this, here and now, is Modernism. What we have lived is not postmodern, and it actually never was. Instead it is late, like the late of late capitalism (which I’ll touch on briefly in this essay and at greater lengths in upcoming blog posts). Perhaps it is slowly dying, but Modernism is not dead. And just as eccentric, indignant, far-fetched, or whatever you want to call it, I would like to extend Modernism’s inauguration, beyond the action works of Jackson Pollock, past Picasso’s Demoiselles, more remote than the Salon des Refuses of 1863 and further still to the late 1700s, situating its beginning, as T.J. Clark does in Farewell to an Idea, to the throes of the French Revolution. [2]

History is slow and expansive and intrinsically tied to the reigning power structures of the time. In the 1700s this leviathan was the King, and the God that he represented. Before the birth of liberty, freedom—and capital exchange, it was God’s sublime power that secured the natural order. Since the beheading of the King, it follows that it is democracy, the will of “the people,” that has taken that place. Art, as an inherently transcendental force, is political by nature; it either it stands to reify power, or it stands in opposition. Williams cites 1848 as a dividing point for modern art, [3] while David Harvey calls this year its beginning. [4]* After 1848, the reality and interdependency between capitalism and democracy could no longer be ignored; they were exposed in the streets through the daily grind of industry workers who lived against the backdrop of opulent shopping arcades and they were expounded in plain terms by Marx and Engels. Yet the unraveling of this system of power had begun long before this decisive year. In “Painting in the Year 2” Clark meticulously recounts the political moods and events surrounding the unveiling and parading of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat in 1793. He demonstrates how this painting sought to capture the complicated political situation of the French Revolution in its entirety, yet with no God to secure transcendence, David felt compelled to leave the upper portion of the canvas as an abstraction. Clark makes a convincing case for David’s nonrepresentational searching as a way around the impossibility of depicting the masses. Instead the blank upper canvas calls fourth “the people,” a concept that reigned in the messy (and often brutally violent) mob of the masses. “The people” became the skeleton key for a maze of ideas, viewpoints and vying groups who all wanted a stake in the still undecided power of this entirely new order. [5]

David’s empty upper corner is conceived as a fertile plot, tilled, but unplanted; it is a dedicated place for an unknown future power to lay down its roots. Ultimately, this painting is the very fancy footwork of a court painter with no king left to paint for and a multitude whose direction still lay in-waiting. It is with the French Revolution and the magical concept of  “the people” and democracy, that The Death of Marat rings in a wholly new world order—one which we have not yet left.

Not that much has changed in the realm of power’s transcendental contract with “the people” in the 200-plus year leap, from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 21st. Modernism in art has developed from its newborn-self, as Marat, to the rebellious stages of Olympia’s implicating gaze, Boccioni’s The City Rises and the collages of the German dadaists. The arrogant heyday of its middle age manifested in New York in the 1950s through the abstract expressionists. And, like any good mid-life crisis, it has suffered from an identity confusion ever since, mis-recognizing its own fading self for a new youth. Instead of ‘late,’ it has been called ‘post.’ The mid-century impulse to declare the end of Modernism—as something that has come and gone—has everything to do with the Kantian categorial separation of art from life. With Clement Greenberg as its canonical advocate, Modernism became a misrepresented monument to itself. It was toted as unwavering in its self awareness, exclusive, and most detrimental, it was marked as apolitical. Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” is in no small part responsible for the greatly exaggerated reports of modernism’s death. [6]

 Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of the many merits of Greenberg (which will likely come up in future blog posts). However, what was missing in “Modernist Painting,” with its narrow blinders, was a more Hegelian dynamic between embodiment and idealism. And this, especially, is why we need to look back to the era of the first modern revolution: it was also the era of Hegel. 

We need search no further than to our own universities and their assumption of an over arching logic to see evidence of modernism’s vitality. Art theorist Craig Owens, identified what he calls “the allegorical impulse” as a unifying tendency in postmodern art, yet he traces its lineage back to the modernist, rectifying its neglected past. [7] Therefore, not a break, but a development, like the switching of ‘king’ for ‘democracy.’ Modernism will die when the rights of man die, when capitalism and rationality meet their fatal end, when the entire system of order is restructured. It is on its way down, but it is not dead. The ‘what’ that the popular narrative of modernism left out is the political. This is the salient force that art cannot go on without. In order to make any political or artistic progress in the face of globalization and our present state of ideological impasse, we need to take a cue from Raymond Williams and look backwards. However seemingly counter intuitive, we need to reexamine history and contextualize the many trajectories that have been left behind in order to find the political roots that we might move forward by. 

¹ Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. by Charles Harrison and Paul Woods. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 1085-8.

² T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 15.

³ Williams, “When Was Modernism,” 1087.

⁴ David Harvey, “Modernity and Modernism,” in The Condition of Postmodernity. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1990) 20.10-38.

• Also of note, or rather, meant by Harvey’s note, 1848 is also the year that The Communist Manifesto was published.

⁵ T.J. Clark, “Painting in the Year 2,” in Farewell to an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 15-53.

⁶ Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. by Charles Harrison and Paul Woods. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 773-9.

⁷ Craig Owens, “ The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. by Charles Harrison and Paul Woods. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 1025-32.