In 4 Fine Disregard, a brilliant, radically new yet profoundly humane interpretation of the history and meaning of modern art in presented by one of the outstanding scholars of his generation.

Modern art is a signal achievement of our century. The students room full of Van Gogh posters an well an the millionaires townhouse full of Van Gogh paintings make it apparent that modern art has become the repository of our widest spectrum of values and hopes. from the crassest search for status to the most exalted and refined search for meaning. Yet, for all that modern art has become a common language and a shared e\perience, the museumgoer searching for a way to understand its origins and meanings is usually offered narrow polemics far removed from the pleasures and stimulations to be found in the works. Too often, modern art is still “explained” as a parade of prohibitions that cut art off from any broad engagement with modern life, or as a series of coded messages, cryptograms from the recent but irretrievable past whose “real” meaning lies hidden in ciphers only experts can interpret.

Now, Kirk Varnedoe, Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, offers an entirely new vision of modern arts origins and its subsequent meanings —how modern art went about changing the rules, and what that legacy means to us today. Varnedoe looks at four crucial, formgiving moments in the genesis of modern art: at the

| sudden birth of a “flat” pictorial space in Degas and Van Gogh; at the replacement of complete figures by broken, insistently repeated fragments in Rodin; at the attention to the primitive in Gauguin and Picasso; and at the sudden proliferation, in places that ranged from Belle Epoque Paris to revolutionary Russia, of the overhead viewpoint, the world seen from above. [n each case, he refutes the conventional view that these innovations were the consequence of influences—Japanese prints, for example, or photography—that came from outside.

Instead, Varnedoe shows us how the pioneering modernists recognized the potential for innovation in traditions and processes that lay near at hand: how Degas discovered a world of space in the peculiar margins of perspective conventions, how Rodin recognized the possibility of a language of modular form in the detritus of a sculptor's studio. And Varnedoe shows us how the palace revolutions within art in turn emboldened artists and spectators alike to see the world outside art in an entirely new way.

With a unique, farreaching grasp of the intellectual history of the early modern period, Varnedoe points out the places where there is gurprising overlap between the history of ideas and the history of art—and then convinees us of all the ways in which pioneer modern artists transcended the ideological certainties of their time to arrive at a view of modernity whose intricacy continues to move and challenge us today. Written in a muscular prose touehed by an ardent engagement with the particulars of great paintings, A Fine Disregard asks us to look at modern art—and the culture that has nourished

it—in a way that restores the primacy of the individual mmagination to its history.

Before taking his current post at The Museum of Modern Art, Kirk Varnedoe taught at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, and at Columbia University, Stanford University, and Williams College. He has organized, and written catalogues for, several ground-breaking exhibitions, among them Vienna 1900, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art (with William Rubin), Northern Light, and Gustave Caillebotte. He is currently preparing, for 1990-91, the exhibition High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture. Varnedoe wrote this book with support from a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

PILOOTA) KEN COLTENe.

JACKET FRONT: CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI.

TORSO OF A YOUNG MAN. 1924. POLISHED BRONZE, H. 18°. HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, WASHINGTON, D.C,

JACKET BACK: FRANK STELLA.

KAST RA. 1979, OIL AND EPOXY ON ALUMINUM, WIRE MESH, 9'7” x 7'B” x 30", COLLECTION THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW \ORK

Somewhere bach in a rainr summer iu the 1070e, | made a pilerimage af sorts to a place in the north of England that had fascinated me for vears: its a plaving lield (fig. Lp. 10) that's part of the Rugby Sehool, and on the wall next to that Beld is fired the marker Leame to sce (ligg. Zp. 10), It reads: “This stone commemorates the erploit of William Webb Eltis, who with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinetive feature of the Rugby game. AD. 1823” After duly photographing that stone, L ceremonially smeared two postcards with the (url of the field, and sent them to two brothers, who, along with me, had caught the bug of the Rugby game, an ocean and a century and a half amar from that 1823 event,

Its a long tale how the game spread, then changed into eleven-man bloek-and-tachle football, and thus spawned a vast, e\pensive industry that absorbs American Saturdays and Sundays from the sweat of August to the ice of January. But in the late 1960s, a lot of American collegians, disenchanted with the corporate, semimilitary aspects of that industry, regressed against its graìn. They went back to what seemed the simpler fun of Rugby, a rough but virtually equipmentless game without substitutions or time-outs, then played by makeshift clubs with few spectators and no publicity—in a spirit of sportsmanship that revered, in about equal measure, a hard contest and a good party afterward. 1 was among these primitivists; and as Ì moved back toward the bare essentials of the sport, I found my curiosity enduringly piqued by the tale of its origin. What possessed Webb Ellis, in the heat of a soccer game, to pick up that ball? And stranger still, why didn't they just throw him out of the game?

1 understand now that it's all more complicated. Not just soccer but the broad variety of English schoolboy ball sports provided Ellis a panoply of waiting options, and the opportune moment was owed partly to Rugby's desire for a game of its own to match those, like the Eton wall game, of its rivals. The spread of the British Empire then did a lot to foster the branching diversity of seven-man, thirteen-man, Australian rules, and gridiron eleven variants that followed. Also, French “revisionists” try to argue that British chauvinism ignores the precedents in some ancient Gallic ball game, and so on. But whatever blurring these alternatives effect, and whatever historical details flesh out the tale, Webb Ellis's exploit still seems to me to be as sharply chiseled out a kernel as we could | hope for of what cultural innovation is all about. Somebody operating in the context of one set of rules sees that there is another way to go, and takes matters into his or her own hands; and someone else, or a lot of others, chooses to view this aberrant move, not just as a failuro or a foul, but as the seed of a new kind of game, with its own set of rules,

The rest, we say, is history. And when we say so, | think we mean that, while the consequences (like the football industry) lend themselves to mundane chronicling, there's something about this kind of “fine disregard” that doesn't easily fit into that kind of history. A gesture such as Webb Elliss explains what followed from it a lot more convincingly than it is itself explained by what came before. Nothing we could know of the boy and his background, nor any account of the circumstances of the school, could independently suffice to rationalize the wonder at the core: a charmed moment of fertilization between a gesture that might otherwise have fallen on fallow ground and a receptive field that might otherwise have gone barren. Innovation is a kind of secular miracle: secular, because it happens amid the humdrum machinery of life getting along, and virtually everything about it is comprehensible without recourse to any notion of supernatural mystery or fated destiny; miraculous, not only