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List of illustrations

  • Moltke's Binoculars
  • A New Man—Master of a New World
  • Italian Woman
  • Complex Presentiment (Half-Figure in Yellow Shirt)
  • Men Reading "El Machete"
  • Death of Marat
  • Portrait of Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, led to execution
  • Robespierre Entering Marat's Apartment
  • Obelisk with Cameos of Le Peletier and Marat
  • Marat
  • Plagues of Egypt
  • The Intervention of the Sabine Women
  • Death of Marat
  • Death of Marat, detail
  • Politics
  • Saint Matthew and the Angel
  • Grapes and Pomegranates
  • Family Portrait
  • Two Young Peasant Women
  • Banks of the Oise
  • The River Oise near Pontoise
  • Peasant Women Minding Cows
  • Peasant Woman Sitting; Sunset
  • Cowherd
  • Peasant Women Chatting, Sunset at Eragny
  • The Angelus
  • Peasant Woman Sitting and Peasant Woman Kneeling
  • Appletrees
  • Weeding the Vines, Pontoise
  • Two Young Peasant Women, detail
  • Summer
  • Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)
  • Catholic Mystery (Mystère Catholique)
  • The Cancan (Le Chahut)
  • Circus
  • Dish with Apples
  • Lady of Fashion
  • Dusk
  • Soyez amoureuses vous serez heureuses
  • Figure with a Crown
  • Capital and Charity
  • Sacred Wood
  • The Apple Eaters
  • June
  • Two Young Peasant Women, detail
  • The Shepherd's Song
  • Luxe, Calme et volupté
  • Eurydice
  • Easter Mystery
  • Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat)
  • Table of contents, "La Société nouvelle"
  • The Triumph of Labour
  • Climbing Path at the Hermitage
  • Woman with Monkey
  • Channel at Gravelines
  • Haystack
  • Grainstack (Snow Effect)
  • Flock of Sheep, Sunset
  • Man with a Hoe
  • Seated Shepherdess
  • Man Resting on a Spade
  • Village Facts VII: Girl Mending a Stocking
  • Project for Ornamental Embroidery
  • Apple Harvest
  • Sketch of Maeterlinck's "The Intruder"
  • Sketch of Maeterlinck's "The Intruder"
  • Countryside
  • Continental Havana Store, Berlin
  • Harvest
  • Peasant Women Picking Grass
  • Peasant Women Planting Peasticks
  • Portrait of Cézanne
  • La Mère Presle
  • Pissarro's studio at Eragny
  • The Large Bathers
  • Bather with Outstretched Arms
  • Bathers at Rest
  • Scene by the Seaside
  • Bathers
  • Tracings after Cézanne
  • Tracings after Cézanne
  • Cézanne in front of "The Large Bathers" in his studio at Les Lauves
  • Cézanne in front of "The Large Bathers" in his studio at Les Lauves
  • Diana and Callisto
  • Temptation of Saint Anthony
  • The Large Bathers
  • The Large Bathers, detail
  • Bacchanalian Revel before a Term of Pan
  • Horrors of War
  • Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses)
  • Paintings at Sourges
  • The Aficionado
  • The Poet
  • Man with a Guitar
  • Accordionist
  • Ma Jolie
  • The Architect's Table
  • Glass with Straws
  • Fruitbowl and Fruit
  • Marie Laurencin in Picasso's studio
  • Man with a Mandolin
  • (Wo)man with a Mandolin
  • Man's Head
  • Man's Head
  • Dryad
  • The Unpleasant Surprise
  • Bust of a Woman
  • Seated Woman
  • Woman with Pears (Fernande)
  • Harlequin
  • Two Nude Women
  • Seated Nude Woman
  • Temptation of Saint Anthony (?)
  • Landscape with Houses
  • Reservoir, Horta de Ebro
  • Fifer
  • Still Life with a Plaster Cupid
  • Bottle of Anis del Mono
  • Nude Woman
  • The Guitarist
  • Head of Girl
  • Woman Playing a Guitar
  • Soldier and Girl
  • Head
  • Apple
  • Nude Woman
  • Glass of Absinthe
  • Man with a Pipe
  • Olive Trees: Yellow Sky with Sun
  • Woman Reading
  • Propaganda board in street
  • Proun 2C
  • Town
  • Sketch for "Proun 1E: Town
  • Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge
  • Communication Workers, Remember the Year 1905
  • The Army of Jugs
  • Proun 19D
  • Ration Card
  • Cover for "Booklet of Vitebsk Committee for the Struggle against Unemployment"
  • Cover for "Portfolio of Congress of Committees on Peasant Poverty"
  • Backcloth for Vitebsk Committee for the Struggle against Unemployment, study
  • Soviet Pavilion of the International Press Exhibition, Cologne
  • Untitled (Rosa Luxemburg)
  • Proun
  • Black Square
  • The UNOVIS delagation to the First All-Russian Conference of Teachers and Students of Art
  • The UNOVIS exhibit at "Work by Petrograd Artists Belonging to All Tendencies
  • Set design for the opera, "Victory over the Sun"
  • UNOVIS classroom
  • The UNOVIS exhibit at Moscow VKhUTEMAS, including works by Kudriashev, Klutsis, and El Lissitzky
  • Suprematist Painting
  • Supremus no. 56
  • Suprematism: Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions
  • Suprematist Painting
  • Supremus no. 50
  • Suprematist Painting
  • Suprematist Painting
  • Design for a speaker's rostrum
  • House under Construction
  • Supremus no. 58
  • The Malevich exhibit at "0,10" exhibition
  • The Malevich retrospective in Moscow
  • The banquet at the Malevich exhibition in Warsaw
  • Photo-frieze for the Soviet Pavilion of the International Press Exhibition, Cologne
  • Untitled
  • "Peace to the Huts, War on the Stately Homes," design for street decoration
  • Lenin Tribune
  • Zeta, partial reconstruction
  • Raising Your Output, That is the Best Guarantee of Success at the Front!
  • Sea Change
  • Full Fathom Five
  • Alchemy
  • Model in front of "Number 1, 1950"
  • Model in front of Autumn Rhythm
  • Gros Orteil
  • Number 1A, 1948
  • One: Number 31, 1950
  • Lavender Mist
  • Number 1, 1949
  • Number 1, 1948, detail
  • Gothic
  • Cathedral
  • Galaxy
  • Two
  • Eyes in the Heat
  • Something of the Past
  • Pollock in his studio
  • Jackson Pollock painting in his studio
  • Installation of Janis Gallery Show
  • Pollock's studio
  • Pollock's studio
  • Number 9, 1950
  • Phosphorescence
  • Number 32, 1950
  • Hand stencil, from the upper section of the Spotted Horse Panel
  • Announcement card for Parsons show
  • Lucifer
  • Jackson Pollock painting in his studio
  • Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
  • Pollock's studio
  • Number 14, 1951
  • Shadows: Number 2, 1948
  • Untitled (Rhythmical Dance)
  • Untitled (JP-CR 4:1033)
  • Cut Out
  • Jackson Pollock painting in his studio
  • Cut-Out Figure
  • Triad
  • Out of the Web: Number 7, 1949
  • Jackson Pollock's studio
  • Black and White Painting
  • Jackson Pollock's studio
  • Number 10, 1950
  • The Wooden Horse: Number 10A, 1948
  • Male and Female
  • Untitled
  • The Moon Woman
  • Male and Female in Search of a Symbol
  • Guardians of the Secret
  • Schröder House
  • Mondrian's Paris studio
  • Malevich in his coffin
  • Marcia Simon Weisman residence
  • Vortex
  • Lent
  • Woman, Wind, and Window II
  • All Souls' Night, No. 2
  • The Oracle
  • Woman
  • The Garden
  • Black, Blue, Red
  • Decorative Figure on Ornamental Ground
  • Requiem
  • Number 9, 1949
  • White Center
  • No. 12
  • Paris by Night
  • To Become, That is the Question. To Have Been, That is the Answer
  • Under and Over
  • Jagged
  • Merritt Parkway
  • Suburb in Havana
  • … And Thunderclouds Pass
  • And, Out of the Caves, The Night Threw a Handful of Pale Tumbling Pigeons into the Light
  • Coalescence
  • Memoria in Aeternum
  • Rocco and his Brothers, still
  • Dusk (Outskirts of the City)
Free
Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
Table of Contents
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.001
Free
Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
In the course of writing this book, I was lucky enough to receive a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, and a University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities. I am grateful for all three. Above all I want to thank the University of California, Berkeley for its generous support, in the form of two Humanities Research Fellowships, and currently a Chancellor’s Professorship. The book could not have been …
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.002
Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
For a long time, writing this book, I had a way of beginning it in mind. I wanted to imagine modernism unearthed by some future archaeologist, in the form of a handful of disconnected pieces left over from a holocaust that had utterly wiped out the pieces’ context – their history, the family of languages they belonged to, all traces of a built environment. I wanted Adolph Menzel’s Moltke’s Binoculars (fig. 2) to have survived; and John Heartfield’s A New Man – Master of a New World
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.1-13
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.003

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Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
Books about modernism tend to go in for inaugural dates. It all began in the 1820s, they say, or with Courbet setting up his booth outside the Exposition Universelle in 1855, or the year Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal were put on trial, or in room M of the Salon des Refusés. “An important component in historical sequences of artistic events,” writes George Kubler, “is an abrupt change of content and expression at intervals when an entire language of form suddenly falls into …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.15-53
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.004

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Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
Camille Pissarro’s Two Young Peasant Women (fig. 20) was first shown to the public in late January 1892. It was part of a wide-ranging exhibition of Pissarro’s past and recent work – the kind we would now call a retrospective – put on at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, in a fashionable shopping street just off the boulevard des Italiens. The catalogue for the show invited the visitor to look at Pissarro’s paintings chronologically, or with a sense of how paintings done in the previous few months …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.55-137
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.005

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Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
Modernism and materialism go together. This does not mean, any more than with modernism and socialism, that the fellowship was always recognized or welcomed at the time; or that, even when it was, artists agreed on which version of materialism to follow and exactly how. Cézanne, for instance, seems to have missed the point of Seurat’s atomism (possibly because he had too few opportunities to see Seurat’s paintings firsthand). Malevich thought the Constructivists were clanking along with …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.139-167
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.006

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Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
Some time in late summer 1912 Picasso took a photograph (fig. 94) at the front door of the villa he had rented for the season at Sorgues. We know that Braque had brought down the “machine à photographie” specially from Paris a week or so before. The picture records the main paintings Picasso had done over the previous two months. On the doorstep, from left to right, are perched the imposing Portrait of a Man, which in time got called the Aficionado (fig. 95), the equally grand …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.169-223
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.007

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Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
I begin again with an old photograph (fig. 134), which I invite the reader first of all to compare with that taken at Sorgues. The two photographs sum up modernism for me. This book’s argument turns on the contrast between them, and also their deep interconnectedness. These are the opposite moments of modernism as I understand it. Sorgues stands for modernism’s privacy, obscurity, and autonomy, and the dream of history inhabiting that condition. The other photograph is the dream made real. …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.225-297
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.008

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Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
Once Upon a Time. When I first came across the lines by the duke of Aquitaine some years ago, naturally I imagined them in Jackson Pollock’s mouth. They put me in mind of modernism; or of one moment of modernism, which I realized I had been trying (and failing) to get in focus ever since I had read Harmonium or looked at Le Bonheur de vivre. Two things were clarified. Not just that modern artists often turned away from the detail of the world in order to revel in the work of …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.299-369
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.009

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Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
We are forty years away from Abstract Expressionism, and the question of how we should understand our relationship to the movement starts to be interesting again. Awe at its triumphs is long gone; but so is laughter at its cheap philosophy, or distaste for its heavy breathing, or boredom with its sublimity, or even resentment at the part it played in the Cold War. Not that any of those feelings has dissipated, or ever should, but that it begins to be clear that none of them – not even the sum …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.371-403
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.010

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Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
There are always many modernisms, and I do not want the last two chapters to give the impression that the important ones in the late twentieth century all took place in New York. The modernism that mattered most to me in the beginning – for years I had a blow-up from Roberto Rossellini’s Paisa on my wall – was that of film and literature in Italy after 1945. Modernism from Italo Calvino’s The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), roughly, to Antonioni’s The Cry (1957) and …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.405-408
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.011

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Free
Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
Photograph Credits
PublisherYale University Press
Free
Description: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
Index
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.012
Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
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