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Una squisita indifferenza. Perché l'arte moderna è moderna
Un giorno del 1823, su un campo da calcio nel Nord dell'Inghilterra, un giocatore prese il pallone tra le braccia e, con squisita indifferenza per le regole del gioco, si mise a correre: aveva inventato il rugby. È opinione diffusa che intorno al 1860 alcuni artisti abbiano inventato l'arte moderna rifiutando tutte le norme della tradizione e liberandosi da quei vincoli che, come la prospettiva, formavano il linguaggio artistico comunemente accettato e capito. Ma non andò così: Degas, van Gogh, Rodin, Cauguin e Picasso non si limitarono a sottrarsi alle regole del gioco, ma proprio come l'inventore del rugby decisero di cogliere le possibilità che si nascondevano nell'arte tradizionale per creare un gioco nuovo con un nuovo sistema di regole. Kirk Varnedoe, con questo saggio brillante per scrittura e imprescindibile per ricchezza e profondità di analisi, offre una panoramica della nascita e degli sviluppi dell'arte moderna, elaborando un'interpretazione originale e sotto molti aspetti rivoluzionaria. Secondo lo studioso americano è semplicistico attribuire la nuova dimensione pittorica imboccata da Degas e van Gogh alle influenze della fotografia e della prospettiva piatta delle stampe giapponesi. Ed è altrettanto riduttivo interpretare il primitivismo di Cauguin e Picasso come un anelito romantico verso esotiche rappresentazioni di mondi lontani.
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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125 people want to read
About the author
Kirk Varnedoe
31 books12 followersJohn Kirk Train Varnedoe was an American art historian, the Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art from 1988 to 2001, Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Professor of Fine Arts at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.
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August 28, 2025A Fine Disregard—What Makes Modern Art Modern.
By Kirk Varnedo 1990 Pub:Harry Abrams 320 pages.
I took my grand niece and nephew to the Legion of Honor art museum here in San Francisco. It is a grand edifice on a hill overlooking the Golden Gate with a sweeping Paris-chateau inspired classical facade. Inside there are halls with high ceilings that seem to stretch on forever, off of which there are rooms that are connected in a labyrinthine flow from one to another.
It is a good collection, they have a smattering of everything.
The main show was the Thiebaud. The show is tagged with his statement that “Art comes from other art,” in the sense of being in a dialog with other artists of the past, and carrying on the work.
The art did not hold the children’s interest very much. Not even the 4000 year old graffiti from a pyramid. I did enjoy pointing out to my grand niece the golden section rectangles in a piece by Thiebaud. He is famous for his extraordinary abstractions of the impossibly foreshortened and humorously exaggerated elongated views of hilly San Francisco, making the strangely wonderful lyrical perspectives of our little cable car city seem like some kind of El Greco subsumption. Now this he has married with the boogie woogie rectangles of Mondrian.
The kids liked Thiebaud’s mauve and chiffon paintings of baked confections.
The Legion has a good room of Impressionists and early “modern” art. A beautiful calm little van Gogh street scene. Pissarro and cherubic Monet. I was delighted to see a Degas, especially after seeing his work so extensively discussed in A Fine Disregard which I had recently read.
What caught my eye first about this book was the extensive attention the author pays to Degas (1834-1917). I had not really thought of him so much as a precursor of modern Art. I was struck by the sketches Degas did in preparation for his paintings. They showed the draftsman at work using construction lines based on the golden rectangle.
I was pleasantly surprised by the insights this book gave to the development of modern art. I was pleased to have a number of received ideas about modern art thoughtfully confronted by the author.
The richly illustrated tome takes us on a journey, on what aestheticians of modern art call ‘The Road to Flatness’. The way to the modern inclusion in a non-representational art. At one point he sums it up in a humorous simile: “While some explanations hold that Photographs undermined Western spatial representation from within, like termites, while others feature Japanese woodblock prints invading from outside the system like killer bees.”
He points out the main belief informing the opinion of the general public: “the story of the termites and bees, that change wrought by new machines or foreign influences is essentially a variant of an old Romantic notion which claims that real creation depends on getting outside all of our familiar cultural conventions.” Throughout the book he demonstrates “1) the crucial acts of invention can derive from finding new potentials in old, taken-for-granted conventions; and 2) invented devices and reinvented devices have the capacity to alter our sense of reality.”
The insight we will get from this book is that the main subject of modern art is stepping back and considering space itself.
Modern art does further what was done in the past, but perhaps not in the way we have come to understand. The modern was set upon its path by the artists seeking to get out from under the schools and do something that captured how consciousness was changing with the speed up, the technology, the availability of far flung influences from the world, the collapse of patronage of the wealthy. To escape from the trick of perspective and get into the improvisation of the now, to get on what the aestheticians call the Road to Flatness. In order for art to make progress and reflect the forces that shape the modern consciousness, the artist must understand what was done in the past but hold it in a fine disregard.
For example the influence on Picasso of primitive art which we had all come to receive as a good part of his inspiration was more about a further experiment on working with perspective and warping space. The heads — Dora Marr for example, does have a face view and a side view simultaneously, and this is an outgrowth of cubism, but the double view is more psychological, what goes on under the two-faced persona.
Varnedo weaves in scholarship to make a good history of the times during which modern art was evolving. He collects, for example, a Paris newspaper clipping from a day in 1908 showing in a column a story about Orville Wright in the city to do a demonstration of flying an aeroplane at an exhibition; right BELOW a clip about a gallery showing of cubist painting by Braque. (Ah Paris, the news of the conquest of the air by a flying machine is of lesser interest than a story about art.)
The profusely illustrated and conveniently laid out tome with the text near the colored picture under discussion on fine glossy paper approaches the subject of modern Art through four main topics:
Near and far is mainly about the influence of Japanese prints on modern art. It is also about perspective in particular from above.
Fragmentation and repetition gives a good perspective on Andy Warhol's pictures of stacks of identical cans suggesting industrialized nation. And Rodin’s using various body parts from the collection in different statues
The section on primitivism talks about the influence of tribal art on Picasso and others.
Flight, overview from above It touches on the lines of Naskaa, or earth mounds that could only be taken in from flight above,
The main work of the book is to trace the impacts and relationship across time of these artists to better understand the dialog and influences that become the tools for the emergence of a world view. For the sake of brevity I list a few in a functional notation.
Degas <-- ( Hokusai , . . . )
the enlarged foregrounds
art has a more powerful punch than a photograph
Gaugan <-- (Degas + Daumier + Hiroshige + Hokusai + Emil Bernard)
Vardoe makes the analogy of the patchwork nature the Wright brothers pieced together flying machine from parts lying around the bike workshop.
Van Gogh <-- ( Hokusai , . . . )
Warhol <-- ( . . . Detroit assembly plant… )
Varnedo explains the importance of Degas: “Degas codified in 1875 separate from photography the world of the odd and contingent, of the accidental and ephemeral; this offbeat sense of the crazy street is an invention. We have since comes to see this in photography and cinema but it was first willed into being by an artist.”
If painting is to be released from its dependency on pulling the viewer in with the 400 year old artificial mathematical tricks of perspective, it could be free to do what it is really strong at, the surfaces and rhythms of color. The feeling was “the lines between Realism and Symbolism — or more generally between an art of description and one of expression — may have too symbolistically drawn on the past.” It would lead to an art like Rothko or Pollock.
He starts to develop the story about how flight and other modern marvels like photography, tall buildings, led to a floating free perspective sometimes going into two dimensional.
The journey of art from perspective to flatland is worked out in many aspects. One is dimension. I was delighted to see mention of a favorite book, Flatland by Abbot. This book from1884 follows the protagonist, A Square, describes life in Flatland and his encounter with a 3D being from Spaceland. It was one of the first books to consider dimension. Abbot used he idea of dimensions metaphorically — to critique Victorian social hierarchy, classism, and gender roles.
“The concept of beings unable to perceive higher dimensions as a metaphor for intellectual limitation or closed-mindedness in 1884 was well ahead of its time.”
Higher-dimensional space had been considered by a handful of mathematicians earlier by freeing geometry from Euclid’s basic postulate that parallel lines don’t meet. Riemann and Lobachevsky imagined positively and negatively curved space. Gauss and Bolyai had thought of it too. Einstein in 1905 made curved spacetime real.
Varnedoe gives examples of warped drawings by cartoon illustrator Grandeville. Drawings from odd perspective, or fun house mirror effect of warped space or space of varying density. It enhanced the perspective of flight. The way Varnedoe included maths as an indicator of cultural penetration reminded me of Oswald Spangler using cues from the cultural history of mathematics to reflect the mindset of the times.
Varnedoe writes a very lively and interesting and well researched book. It taught me a lot. I am looking forward to reading his work Pictures of Nothing about art after Pollock. Also I’d like to read his catalog of the legendary Cubist show on the Washington Mall for which he was the curator. He is a trustworthy and erudite road chief.
By Kirk Varnedo 1990 Pub:Harry Abrams 320 pages.
I took my grand niece and nephew to the Legion of Honor art museum here in San Francisco. It is a grand edifice on a hill overlooking the Golden Gate with a sweeping Paris-chateau inspired classical facade. Inside there are halls with high ceilings that seem to stretch on forever, off of which there are rooms that are connected in a labyrinthine flow from one to another.
It is a good collection, they have a smattering of everything.
The main show was the Thiebaud. The show is tagged with his statement that “Art comes from other art,” in the sense of being in a dialog with other artists of the past, and carrying on the work.
The art did not hold the children’s interest very much. Not even the 4000 year old graffiti from a pyramid. I did enjoy pointing out to my grand niece the golden section rectangles in a piece by Thiebaud. He is famous for his extraordinary abstractions of the impossibly foreshortened and humorously exaggerated elongated views of hilly San Francisco, making the strangely wonderful lyrical perspectives of our little cable car city seem like some kind of El Greco subsumption. Now this he has married with the boogie woogie rectangles of Mondrian.
The kids liked Thiebaud’s mauve and chiffon paintings of baked confections.
The Legion has a good room of Impressionists and early “modern” art. A beautiful calm little van Gogh street scene. Pissarro and cherubic Monet. I was delighted to see a Degas, especially after seeing his work so extensively discussed in A Fine Disregard which I had recently read.
What caught my eye first about this book was the extensive attention the author pays to Degas (1834-1917). I had not really thought of him so much as a precursor of modern Art. I was struck by the sketches Degas did in preparation for his paintings. They showed the draftsman at work using construction lines based on the golden rectangle.
I was pleasantly surprised by the insights this book gave to the development of modern art. I was pleased to have a number of received ideas about modern art thoughtfully confronted by the author.
The richly illustrated tome takes us on a journey, on what aestheticians of modern art call ‘The Road to Flatness’. The way to the modern inclusion in a non-representational art. At one point he sums it up in a humorous simile: “While some explanations hold that Photographs undermined Western spatial representation from within, like termites, while others feature Japanese woodblock prints invading from outside the system like killer bees.”
He points out the main belief informing the opinion of the general public: “the story of the termites and bees, that change wrought by new machines or foreign influences is essentially a variant of an old Romantic notion which claims that real creation depends on getting outside all of our familiar cultural conventions.” Throughout the book he demonstrates “1) the crucial acts of invention can derive from finding new potentials in old, taken-for-granted conventions; and 2) invented devices and reinvented devices have the capacity to alter our sense of reality.”
The insight we will get from this book is that the main subject of modern art is stepping back and considering space itself.
Modern art does further what was done in the past, but perhaps not in the way we have come to understand. The modern was set upon its path by the artists seeking to get out from under the schools and do something that captured how consciousness was changing with the speed up, the technology, the availability of far flung influences from the world, the collapse of patronage of the wealthy. To escape from the trick of perspective and get into the improvisation of the now, to get on what the aestheticians call the Road to Flatness. In order for art to make progress and reflect the forces that shape the modern consciousness, the artist must understand what was done in the past but hold it in a fine disregard.
For example the influence on Picasso of primitive art which we had all come to receive as a good part of his inspiration was more about a further experiment on working with perspective and warping space. The heads — Dora Marr for example, does have a face view and a side view simultaneously, and this is an outgrowth of cubism, but the double view is more psychological, what goes on under the two-faced persona.
Varnedo weaves in scholarship to make a good history of the times during which modern art was evolving. He collects, for example, a Paris newspaper clipping from a day in 1908 showing in a column a story about Orville Wright in the city to do a demonstration of flying an aeroplane at an exhibition; right BELOW a clip about a gallery showing of cubist painting by Braque. (Ah Paris, the news of the conquest of the air by a flying machine is of lesser interest than a story about art.)
The profusely illustrated and conveniently laid out tome with the text near the colored picture under discussion on fine glossy paper approaches the subject of modern Art through four main topics:
Near and far is mainly about the influence of Japanese prints on modern art. It is also about perspective in particular from above.
Fragmentation and repetition gives a good perspective on Andy Warhol's pictures of stacks of identical cans suggesting industrialized nation. And Rodin’s using various body parts from the collection in different statues
The section on primitivism talks about the influence of tribal art on Picasso and others.
Flight, overview from above It touches on the lines of Naskaa, or earth mounds that could only be taken in from flight above,
The main work of the book is to trace the impacts and relationship across time of these artists to better understand the dialog and influences that become the tools for the emergence of a world view. For the sake of brevity I list a few in a functional notation.
Degas <-- ( Hokusai , . . . )
the enlarged foregrounds
art has a more powerful punch than a photograph
Gaugan <-- (Degas + Daumier + Hiroshige + Hokusai + Emil Bernard)
Vardoe makes the analogy of the patchwork nature the Wright brothers pieced together flying machine from parts lying around the bike workshop.
Van Gogh <-- ( Hokusai , . . . )
Warhol <-- ( . . . Detroit assembly plant… )
Varnedo explains the importance of Degas: “Degas codified in 1875 separate from photography the world of the odd and contingent, of the accidental and ephemeral; this offbeat sense of the crazy street is an invention. We have since comes to see this in photography and cinema but it was first willed into being by an artist.”
If painting is to be released from its dependency on pulling the viewer in with the 400 year old artificial mathematical tricks of perspective, it could be free to do what it is really strong at, the surfaces and rhythms of color. The feeling was “the lines between Realism and Symbolism — or more generally between an art of description and one of expression — may have too symbolistically drawn on the past.” It would lead to an art like Rothko or Pollock.
He starts to develop the story about how flight and other modern marvels like photography, tall buildings, led to a floating free perspective sometimes going into two dimensional.
The journey of art from perspective to flatland is worked out in many aspects. One is dimension. I was delighted to see mention of a favorite book, Flatland by Abbot. This book from1884 follows the protagonist, A Square, describes life in Flatland and his encounter with a 3D being from Spaceland. It was one of the first books to consider dimension. Abbot used he idea of dimensions metaphorically — to critique Victorian social hierarchy, classism, and gender roles.
“The concept of beings unable to perceive higher dimensions as a metaphor for intellectual limitation or closed-mindedness in 1884 was well ahead of its time.”
Higher-dimensional space had been considered by a handful of mathematicians earlier by freeing geometry from Euclid’s basic postulate that parallel lines don’t meet. Riemann and Lobachevsky imagined positively and negatively curved space. Gauss and Bolyai had thought of it too. Einstein in 1905 made curved spacetime real.
Varnedoe gives examples of warped drawings by cartoon illustrator Grandeville. Drawings from odd perspective, or fun house mirror effect of warped space or space of varying density. It enhanced the perspective of flight. The way Varnedoe included maths as an indicator of cultural penetration reminded me of Oswald Spangler using cues from the cultural history of mathematics to reflect the mindset of the times.
Varnedoe writes a very lively and interesting and well researched book. It taught me a lot. I am looking forward to reading his work Pictures of Nothing about art after Pollock. Also I’d like to read his catalog of the legendary Cubist show on the Washington Mall for which he was the curator. He is a trustworthy and erudite road chief.
January 10, 2020
I've wanted (intended?) to read this for a long time. And I was disappointed. The ideas were wonderful but the writing was, well, not so much. He frequently uses what I would call academic style, more suited for a professional journal. His ideas were frequently obscured by overly complex sentence structure and usage. For example he might start a new paragraph with something like: The two divergent paths of interpretation and explanation.... But he never actually has a precisely defined the paths. In the previous paragraphs he has talked about various nterpretations/explanations etc. with multiple examples, so which does one pick. Or is one to decide for oneself.
I am quite able to read "difficult" books, both fiction (Pomo) and non-fiction (mostly science & technology) and am well educated (three Ivy League degrees). I say this as a reference that I was not, so to speak, reading over my head.
I really like how Varnedoe chooses the examples to illustrate (both meanings) his ideas and I was excited to find some new ways to love modern art. I was born and raised in NYC and MOMA has always been in my top three museums ever since I could travel the city alone (pretty small), along with the Metropolitan and come-and-go others. I always visit there whenever I am in the city.
Despite the flaws, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who cares about modern art, or any art for that matter.
I am quite able to read "difficult" books, both fiction (Pomo) and non-fiction (mostly science & technology) and am well educated (three Ivy League degrees). I say this as a reference that I was not, so to speak, reading over my head.
I really like how Varnedoe chooses the examples to illustrate (both meanings) his ideas and I was excited to find some new ways to love modern art. I was born and raised in NYC and MOMA has always been in my top three museums ever since I could travel the city alone (pretty small), along with the Metropolitan and come-and-go others. I always visit there whenever I am in the city.
Despite the flaws, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who cares about modern art, or any art for that matter.
January 12, 2018
This is one of those amazing books that I can reread at any time, time and time again. I love this book. It is so well written, so articulate and really makes you understand the importance of Rodin, the influence of Japanese art on the Impressionists, etc. I think I should probably go back and read this again! Love it!
March 12, 2018
Excellent read. Kirk Varnedoe is an imaginative thinker and wonderful writer. This is an inspiring and expansive book.
June 22, 2023
Spoko, zaczęłam szanować Degasa.
March 19, 2010
I'm embarrassed to say that I have a very shameless love for art criticism, as well as a very juvenile fantasy to be as eloquent and evocative and insightful about art as art historians and art critics. I find my self enjoying art pieces in museums that have accompanying comments than those that don't.
In that way, it's a bit sad that I have trouble appreciating contemporary art without having first read about a piece, or someone's interpretation of that piece. A lot of things just don't reach me.
Now this isn't entirely true: I love Cy Twombly and Banksy (he's easy) and Takashi Murakami (he's cool) and Hollis Sigler and some Van Gogh, and ADORE Francis Bacon and the whole Conceptual art movement. But I needed Simon Schama to explain to me why Caravaggio and Bernini and Rothko are so incredible. While I've always enjoyed Andy Warhol, but appreciate his purposeful emptiness so much more after watching a few documentaries.
Obviously, most artists don't create with a commentary in mind, and to rely on someone else's interpretation entirely misses the point. However, I think that in order for an artist to produce anything consciously, they draw from their experience, and the best art commentary enlightens its audience on the artist's intellectual background. Sometimes that might mean a biographical focus, like Simon Schama used in his fantastic "The Power of Art" series. Other times, we ought to understand the intellectual heritage that an artist developed in, and the zeitgeist that they were responding to. Describing the varied currents of thought that flowed into what we now call contemporary art is what Kirk Varnedoe does so well in this book.
In fact the title itself is an allusion to my point: contemporary artists disregarded the old rules of art, but did so in a beautiful way.
So, yes, this book introduces me to more artists. But more importantly, Varnedoe teaches me how the ideas behind contemporary art even came about, and that is an intellectual journey that I enjoy even more than the pieces themselves. I loved learing about how photography and japanese art introduced concepts that set contemporary art on the "Road to Flatness, how fragmentation and repetition revolutionized sculpture and was felt across all art mediums, how primitivism loosened artist's concerns about realism. Past that, Varnedoe is an eloquent commentator on art himself, and proves to be an astute and economical teacher.
In that way, it's a bit sad that I have trouble appreciating contemporary art without having first read about a piece, or someone's interpretation of that piece. A lot of things just don't reach me.
Now this isn't entirely true: I love Cy Twombly and Banksy (he's easy) and Takashi Murakami (he's cool) and Hollis Sigler and some Van Gogh, and ADORE Francis Bacon and the whole Conceptual art movement. But I needed Simon Schama to explain to me why Caravaggio and Bernini and Rothko are so incredible. While I've always enjoyed Andy Warhol, but appreciate his purposeful emptiness so much more after watching a few documentaries.
Obviously, most artists don't create with a commentary in mind, and to rely on someone else's interpretation entirely misses the point. However, I think that in order for an artist to produce anything consciously, they draw from their experience, and the best art commentary enlightens its audience on the artist's intellectual background. Sometimes that might mean a biographical focus, like Simon Schama used in his fantastic "The Power of Art" series. Other times, we ought to understand the intellectual heritage that an artist developed in, and the zeitgeist that they were responding to. Describing the varied currents of thought that flowed into what we now call contemporary art is what Kirk Varnedoe does so well in this book.
In fact the title itself is an allusion to my point: contemporary artists disregarded the old rules of art, but did so in a beautiful way.
So, yes, this book introduces me to more artists. But more importantly, Varnedoe teaches me how the ideas behind contemporary art even came about, and that is an intellectual journey that I enjoy even more than the pieces themselves. I loved learing about how photography and japanese art introduced concepts that set contemporary art on the "Road to Flatness, how fragmentation and repetition revolutionized sculpture and was felt across all art mediums, how primitivism loosened artist's concerns about realism. Past that, Varnedoe is an eloquent commentator on art himself, and proves to be an astute and economical teacher.
November 18, 2013
This was a very informative read. I enjoyed the author's style of writing, the clarity of his thoughts, the way he illustrated his points with photos of the art he was referring to. He defined some of the various elements that emerged at the end of the 19th century that caused the art that was produced to differ from what came before. He also destroyed some of the myths surrounding the artists and their art by pointing out where many of their "influences" weren't exactly influential. His ideas are interesting and thought-provoking and give the reader a clear view of the origins of modern art.
January 29, 2008
There is no doubt that the author had a gift for beautiful prose that makes art history easy to understand and "see". I loved this book and look forward to reading his lectures on abstraction in D.C., though I would far prefer to watch the videos that will one day come out that will show his eloquence live.
November 17, 2007
I am rereading, after hunting down a copy -going in deeper, critically. The Rodin/Degas discussion was a revelation. So grateful for his almost single handed acknowledgement of the role of the artist.
May 2, 2010
Only read this if you want to understand what makes art art. An accessible, readable, work of art criticism and cultural history,
July 19, 2011
One of the best books about modern art ever written. This man was a genius, an original thinker whose ideas were totally accessible. The art world lost him a brilliant teacher.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews