To the Editors:
To borrow from Wittgenstein, what can be shown need not be said, but if what can be shown still needs to be explained to undergraduates, it need not be explained at length. Or, as my former Sensei used to quote from the Chinese, a picture is worth a thousand words. Alas, not in departments of art history, which brings me to Mr. Kramer’s review of T. J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life in the March issue of The New Criterion.

Trying to explain or understand Clark’s attitude toward modernism, Mr. Kramer supposes a certain disappointment among liberals and leftish-oriented intellectuals, a disappointment with modernism for its not having been as revolutionary as it seemed at one time. Perhaps. There are, I think, other reasons. The class analysis of Marxism itself might explain the Marxist art historians. Clark is not the only art historian who is a Marxist; there are others, also young, in English universities. The representatives of the old school are, after all, getting old; some have already gone. I am thinking of men such as Kenneth Clark and Anthony Blunt. One wonders whether the present young Marxist art historians, or literary critics, come from the same social background as the members of the old school.

But there is another possible explanation which need not travel along class lines. It is this: T. J. Clark is teaching and “doing” art history in a university. And an American university at that, which means