Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, by T.J. Clark, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, 2001. 451 pp.
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BOOK, for two reasons. The first is its comprehensive overview of the two-hundred-year history of modernism in the visual arts, beginning with, as Professor T.J. Clark posits, Jacques-Louis David's painting Death of Marat (1793), and ending in the postmodern era of gargantuan museums and banal biennials. The second is the author's ...