Much has been said about this text published more than forty years ago, in 1983. If this Critique of Modernity still finds its place today, it is because it puts at the centre of its reflection the gradual erasure of painting at the end of the Second World War. From the abstract gestuality of the post-war years to the monochrome spray of the neo-abstraction of the 70s, it is to an unheard-of decline of the art of painting that we will have witnessed”. This evolution leads, according to the author’s terms, to a “scarcity of the sensitive” that a glossy often absconse tries in vain to cover: “the thinner the work, the more learned its exegesis”. This is what everyone has been able to see all too often when reading the critics, exegeses and exhibition catalogues.

Jean Clair opposes modernity to “the avant-garde”: modernity gives itself the task of returning to the past, to culture, while the avant-garde submits to the ideology of Progress. This leads the author to draw a sharp parallel between avant-garde and socialist realism. Both subscribe to an aesthetic of amnesia: nothing before, and nothing after we have announced.
The last chapter of the book, “Apocalypsis cum Figura”, goes even further. Jean Clair proposes a daring variation on the theme of rupture: the artistic avant-gardes transpose in the aesthetic field the cult of tabula rasa and the tomorrows that sing proper to totalitarian regimes. But this pseudo-modernity is only a mask of archaism, as the author shows us in his evocation of Munich architecture, “phantasmagoria archaising”. To this deadly restoration, Jean Clair opposes an invigorating renaissance, and closes his work on the description of a watercolor by Egon Schiele, imprisoned in Vienna for immorality. A chair, a bucket, two miserable objects to which the painter gives the mark of eternity.

Jean Clair, Considérations sur l’état des beaux-arts, Gallimard, 1983