Includes bibliographical references and index.

T. J. Clark rewrites the history of modern art. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, he explains, "there is general agreement at present that the project called socialism has come to an end, roughly at the same moment as modernism." Have modernism and socialism died together? And did the two of them depend on each other for life - for their sense of the future, their wish to live in a fully material world? Not flinching from modernism's dangers and blind spots, but passionately attached to the movement's wildness, Clark poses these fundamental questions to the culture and politics of the past two centuries.