The text presents the tube of paint, then the palette, next the virgin canvas, and finally the brush, not as the tools of the painter.. but as metonyms of potential yet accomplished paintings. But the tube of paint, the palette, the canvas and the brush are also the protagonists of an erotic saga which the rest of the text then unfurls, with dubious lyricism infused with machismo and colonialism.
De Duve rightly contrasts this with Duchamp's sending up of the colonialist enterprise in scattered remarks throughout his life, which he compares to that of Raymond Roussel in Impressions d'Afrique, but which could also be compared to Apollinaire's magnificent Les Mamelles de Tirésias. ‘For Kandinsky's abstract expressionism, for Malevich's suprematism, for Mondrian's neoplasticism and for all the purisms that sprang between 1912 and 1914 from the idea of pure colour,’ he goes on, ‘Duchamp substituted eroticism, which, as he very seriously explained to Pierre Cabanne, he wanted to turn into a new artistic “ism”.’ There is, however, nothing very macho about Duchamp's eroticism, as we have seen, since the poor Bachelors never get to the Bride and have to be satisfied with what Duchamp, commenting on his chocolate-grinding machine, termed ‘olfactory masturbation’.
De Duve uses Duchamp to throw doubt upon the enterprise of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, but also upon that of a later idealist like Beuys, whom he rightly sees as dreaming, like Novalis, of an ideal world replacing the real one. But of course he also uses Duchamp to throw doubt upon the whole notion of a tradition which, unaware that its foundations have been sapped, goes on acting as if it were imbued with authority, the authority to say what art is good and what art is bad; the authority to award prizes and to decide what art will be in and what out; the authority, finally, to decide what is art and what is not (is a bicycle wheel art? an enamel urinal?). Yet de Duve is no Duchamp. He does not quite know when to keep his mouth shut or how to speak only in riddles. With his back to the wall, so to speak, he is as prescriptive as Greenberg: ‘When push comes to shove’, he admits towards the end of his long book, ‘Rodchenko is an artist and Bonnard is not.’
A painter friend of mine tells how, when he was a student at the Slade in the mid-1960s, Greenberg's was the view of art history with which they were confronted: Modernism went from Manet to Pollock via Cézanne, Cubism and abstraction. This explained everything that needed explaining in the eyes of the tutors, but it left no room for twentieth-century artists who interested my friend, such as Bonnard, Balthus, Beckman and Bacon, to stick only to the Bs. A decade or two later the scene was so dominated by Duchamp that the story would be very different: it would go from Seurat to Duchamp to Pop Art to all the varieties of conceptual art now being practised. There would still be no room for the four Bs. The question is: how to tell a story compelling enough yet supple enough to contain both Mondrian and Bonnard, both Schoenberg and Satie, both Kafka and Queneau?
One recent critic who has managed to do just that, it seems to me, is T.J. Clark in his magnificent Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. Clark rightly recognises that modernity is bound up with disenchantment, which is linked to secularism. He quotes Hegel in the Aesthetics: ‘Art, considered in light of its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.’ This does not of course mean that art ceases after 1820, only that its ability effortlessly to articulate the world has gone. Viewing Modernism through the prism of Hegel's chapter on the Unhappy Consciousness in the Phenomenology, he argues that for art to remain meaningful in these changed circumstances it has to accept what he calls contingency, and I have called arbitrariness. Art's being able to continue, he argues, has depended on its being able to make Hegel's dictum in the Asesthetics ‘specific and punctual’. ‘That is to say, on fixing the moment of art's last flowering at some point in the comparatively recent past, and discovering that enough remains from this finale for a work of ironic or melancholy or decadent continuation to seem possible nonetheless.’ This he calls, invoking Beckett, the ‘can't go on, will go on’ syndrome. And he understands that once the Hegelian view is accepted technique will always be seen as ‘a kind of shame’, while at the same time artists, desperate for something stable beneath their feet, will tend, like Flaubert, to fetishize the notion of the sheer hard practical and technical work involved in making art.
One of the great strengths of Clark's book is that he understands (as I perhaps have been slow to do here) that even if there is a single story of Modernism it cannot be told in purely linear fashion — hence his subtitle. Writing about episodes in a history of Modernism, he is free to explore a whole web of stories rather than trace any linear sequence, and thus to restore a sense of history as being made — by artists, by events — rather than simply lived out, that the blindalleys down which artists have gone at certain periods of their lives are as important as their achieved successes, and that different responses are called for in pre-First World War France, in post-Revolutionary Russia and in America after the Second World War.
Though I have borrowed the notion of the false friends of Modernism from him to describe those who purport to be its champions but who in fact distort and mislead, I have applied it to a different group of people. For Clark the false friends are those like Greenberg and Herbert Read who, in the 1950s, were Modernism's most passionate advocates.
Even at the time it was chilling to see Greenberg's views become an orthodoxy. What was deadly, above all, was the picture of artistic continuity and self-sufficiency built into so much modernist writing: the idea that modern art could be studied as a passing-on of the same old artistic flame (…) from Manet to Monet to Seurat to Matisse to Miró…
He would have found a parallel in literary studies during that same period, though rarely articulated with the passion and elegance of Greenberg and Read. There Eliot, Proust and Virginia Woolf were co-opted into an essentially Christian discourse which stressed the redeeming powers of art and so, in like manner, blunted the anguish and often despair of these writers, and thus distorted their achievement. Today such readings seem not merely inadequate, but quaint. On the other hand, as I have suggested, Modernism is never short of false friends, whether in the guise of fervent American deconstructionists or coolheaded English poets and novelists.
One of the great strengths of Clark's book is the intensity with which he questions the art he is dealing with: it matters. As a result his book is full of brilliant aperçus. Two that chimed particularly with my own explorations here are, first, his comparison at one point of Pissarro's Two Young Peasant Women of 1892 with the exactly contemporary popular painting by Jules Breton, June. The latter presents us with an idealised scene of country folk at rest for us to gaze at in comfort: this is June in the countryside as we would like to imagine it. In contrast, in the Pissarro ‘we could worry endlessly about the peasants' actual poses, and the distance between them, and where the ground plane is; but of course the painting does not offer us sufficient clues to answer these kinds of questions, and does not mean to. It means us to be in limbo. We have to come in close — too close to get the whole picture.’ This is precisely the kind of contrast I was trying to establish between Némirovsky's treatment of the events of May 1940 and Claude Simon's. The difference is that no-one today would make any claim for Jules Breton but Némirovsky is compared to Tolstoy.