Acknowledgements

Clark, T. J.

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Acknowledgements

T. J. Clark

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 …

Author

T. J. Clark

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00048.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13742

Acknowledgements

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 done without them.

Some of the book’s chapters have appeared previously in preliminary form. Chapters 1 and 3 are revised and expanded from my “Painting in the Year Two,” Representations, 47 (Summer 1994) and “Freud’s Cézanne,” Representations, 52 (Fall 1995). Chapter 7 sticks fairly close to my “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism,” October, 69 (Summer 1994). Chapter 6 is based on my “Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction,” in Serge Guilbaut, ed., Reconstructing Modernism (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1990).

When a book tries to pull together the work and teaching of three decades, as this one does, it is obviously impossible to thank all those who helped along the way. I have acknowledged specific debts, chapter by chapter, in the footnotes. But there are others, of a more general and pervasive kind. The group of colleagues I had at the University of Leeds – in particular Terry Atkinson, Fred Orton, and Griselda Pollock – helped shape my thinking about modernism in fundamental ways. The friends made through Monroe Engel’s and Leo Marx’s reading group in Boston kept the book’s questions alive at a difficult moment. Here in Berkeley, the individuals associated with Iain Boal and Retort – especially Jim Brook, Chic Dabby, Joseph Matthews, Sanjyot Mehendale, Dick Walker, and the unstoppable Iain himself – have mattered, and helped, in all sorts of ways. So have Jenny and Greil Marcus. I shall always be thankful to Serge Guilbaut for goading me first into writing on Pollock, something I was thoroughly afraid of doing. Gail Day did much the same service in the case of El Lissitzky. Patricia Boyer, Anna Indych, Peter Nisbet, Kirk Varnedoe, Gabriel Weisberg, and Julie Wolf were especially generous in the search for illustrations. Particular readings, comments, and criticisms from Caroline Arscott, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Thomas Crow, Whitney Davis, Brigid Doherty, Hal Foster, Francis Frascina, Charles Harrison, Christina Kiaer, Howard Lay, Michael Leja, John O’Brian, Alex Potts, Jennifer Shaw, Lisa Tickner, Kathryn Tuma, Jonathan Weinberg, Christopher Wood, Marnin Young, and members of the Representations editorial board, remain in my mind as fruitful. Then there has been the example of Michael Fried. My footnotes tell part of the story: time and again over the years, looking at pictures in Fried’s company, or absorbing his reactions to what I had to say in lecture or article form, has pushed my thinking forward and reminded me of what writing about painting is about. His opposition has been true friendship.

Michael Rogin’s reading of the manuscript was typically generous, searching, and constructive – he and Ann Banfield have made Berkeley a better place. (I promise, Mike, to read Andrey Biely’s St. Petersburg one of these days.) Donald Nicholson-Smith gave the whole book a real going-over, of the kind I’ve come to rely on. He has been a friend, a touchstone, in good times and bad – without him there would not have been enough laughter and anger in the world.

I want to thank those at Yale University Press who worked hard to turn an unwieldy manuscript into a book – especially Laura Church, Sheila Lee, Sally Nicholls, and Abby Waldman. Above all, I am indebted to Gillian Malpass, my editor, whose enthusiasm for the book really mattered, and whose patience and energy drove the whole process on.

Finally, the reading, and the friendship, that always went deepest – to the heart of the matter – was Anne Wagner’s. This book is hers through and through; though I know she will want to share it with Sam, Hannah, and Ruby Clark. Modernism is not exactly a cheery subject, but looking at it in this company – maybe even defending it to this company – has been a good cure for modern life.

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