Clark s general thesis, if he can be said to have one, is that great modernist paintings are great precisely in virtue of the impossibility of the task they set themselves. Revolution, political or painterly, breaks out at the clash between these incompatible wants. And there is nihilism at its heart, for revolutionaries know the totality they want to destroy but in their constituting autonomy and contingency cannot know a totality to create. Clark finds the most explicit evocation of modernity s inner longing for nothingness in the black square obsessively painted by the suprematist guru Malevich. Modernist painting s problem is finally insoluble because painting itself is part and parcel of the way the bourgeoisie represents the world to itself.
Modernist painting wants to represent, but differently, indeed antithetically.
Yet painters cannot simply inhabit some other society, nor abandon the procedures of putting paint on a canvas of such and such dimensions by which painting is constituted as an activity. An easel painting, after all, is an object made to be sold in the market, for bourgeois interior decoration, and the means and techniques of such painting are those developed to represent reality the bourgeois way. Again an example will be best. I had read the bodies in Cezanne s late paintings of Bathers simply as late impressionist nudes patterned to the modernist grid and colors of the composition, and taken pleasure in the nudes and the pattern. And, indeed, Cezanne was philosophically a materialist.