Farewell to an Idea-轻识

In this intense and far-reaching book, acclaimed art historian T. J. Clark offers a new vision of the art of the past two centuries, focusing on moments when art responded directly in extreme terms to the ongoing disaster called "modernity". Modernism, Clark argues, was an extreme answer to an extreme condition - the one Max Weber summed up as "the disenchantment of the world". Clark focuses on instances of maximum stress, when the movement revealed its true nature. The book begins with Jacques-Louis David, painting at the height of the Terror in 1793, then leaps forward to Pissarro a hundred years later, struggling to picture Two Young Peasant Women in a way that agreed with his anarchist politics. Next, the author turns in succession to Cezanne's paintings of the Grand Baigneuses and their coincidence in time (and maybe intention) with Freud's launching of psychoanalysis; to Picasso's Cubism, and to avant-garde art after the Russian Revolution. Clark concludes with a reading of Jackson Pollock's tragic version of abstraction and suggests a new set of terms to describe avant-garde art - perhaps in its final flowering - in America after 1945. Shifting between broad, speculative history and intense analysis of specific works, Clark not only transfigures our usual understanding of modern art, he also launches a new set of proposals about modernity itself.

以新马克思主义艺术史家闻名于当代美术界的T.J.克拉克（Timothy J.Clark, 1943- ）早年就学于剑桥大学圣约翰学院，30岁在伦敦大学考陶尔德艺术研究院获得美术史博士学位，同年出版《人民的形象：库尔贝与1848年革命》与《绝对的资产阶级：1848至1851年间的法国艺术家与政治》，立刻被认为是英语国家“新艺术史”的杰作，一举奠定了他作为一位国际型学者的地位。在英国多所大学担任教职后，年仅37岁的他就成为了美国哈佛大学艺术史教授。现为伯克莱加州大学现代艺术校级教授。除上述两部成名作，尚有《现代生活的画像：马奈及其追随者艺术中的巴黎》，从而合成其著名的“新艺术史”三部曲。另著有《告别观念》（2001）及《瞥见死神》（2008）等。