Farewell To An Idea: Episodes From A History Of Modernism
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: dj repaired with tape.
At the turbulent crossroads of art, politics, and modernity stands Farewell to an Idea, T.J. Clark's monumental reckoning with the rise and fall of modernism — a movement that once promised to remake the world and ended in ruins. Clark, one of the most formidable art historians of the twentieth century, presents a sweeping yet intimately argued study through nine pivotal episodes, each anchored in a defining moment or artist — from Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution to Picasso, Pollock, and the Soviet avant-garde — charting how modernism was always inseparable from the utopian dreams and violent failures of capitalist and revolutionary politics. What distinguishes this work is Clark's unflinching Marxist lens, which illuminates not just what these works of art look like, but what they were straining to say and to whom. His prose is dense with erudition yet charged with an almost elegiac passion, mourning the collapse of a shared belief in the transformative power of art. Farewell to an Idea is not merely an art history; it is a profound meditation on the fate of human ambition — and a challenge to every reader to confront what we lost when modernism's great wager was finally called in.
Author: T J Clark
Format: Hardback
Published: 1999, Yale University Press
Genre: History of arts
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: dj repaired with tape.
At the turbulent crossroads of art, politics, and modernity stands Farewell to an Idea, T.J. Clark's monumental reckoning with the rise and fall of modernism — a movement that once promised to remake the world and ended in ruins. Clark, one of the most formidable art historians of the twentieth century, presents a sweeping yet intimately argued study through nine pivotal episodes, each anchored in a defining moment or artist — from Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution to Picasso, Pollock, and the Soviet avant-garde — charting how modernism was always inseparable from the utopian dreams and violent failures of capitalist and revolutionary politics. What distinguishes this work is Clark's unflinching Marxist lens, which illuminates not just what these works of art look like, but what they were straining to say and to whom. His prose is dense with erudition yet charged with an almost elegiac passion, mourning the collapse of a shared belief in the transformative power of art. Farewell to an Idea is not merely an art history; it is a profound meditation on the fate of human ambition — and a challenge to every reader to confront what we lost when modernism's great wager was finally called in.