Kirk Varnedoe:

Somewhere back in a rainy summer in the 1970s, I made a pilgrimage of sorts to a place in the north of England that had fascinated me for years; it's a playing field that's part of the Rugby School, and on the wall next to that field is fixed the marker I came to see. It reads: "This stone commemorates the exploit of William Webb Ellis, 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 distinctive feature of the Rugby game. A.D. 1823." After duly photographing that stone, I ceremonially smeared two postcards with the turf 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 away from that 1823 event.

It's a long tale how the game spread, then changed into eleven-man block-and-tackle football, and thus spawned a vast, expensive 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 grain. 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. I was among these primitivists; and as I 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?

I 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 failure 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, I 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 Ellis's 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 because it can change things dramatically, but because none of that machinery suffices to explain why it had to happen this way.

Among the rewarding, educating pursuits of my life, Rugby ran for many years in happy parallel with the study of modern art, and I don't accept the notion that they are incompatible. But when it comes to origin stories, there is a difference, and Rugby has the edge. It's not that I yearn for a Webb Ellis painter, and the clean simplicity of one originating gesture. The greater number of renegade players, the complexity of the audience, and the higher cultural stakes, all make the history of modern art a much more absorbing tale of change. But we need some better accounts of how that game, too, first got off the ground. The available ones tend to make the opening exploits seem all miraculous or all secular, too transcendent or too mechanical to properly credit some of our culture's fines and most fruitful transgressions of its rules.

On the side of miracles, we have to concede something to those who say modern art is like a religion. There has been a kind of orthodoxy, inculcated in countless devotees, about how it all came to be; and the doctrinaire version of that story, of Edouard Manet who begat Paul Cézanne who begat Pablo Picasso, in a march out of servile naturalism into the promised land of abstraction, explains what has happened in art since 1860 about as adequately as the seven days of Scripture account for the fossils in Devonian shale. Yet the people behind the weak gospels are often the very people who created the powerful art. Perversely, some of the liveliest rhetoric of artists and critics--the manifestoes and battle slogans of a pugnacious new minority out to change the world--has come to nourish the most inert, cardboard notions of what that art means. And though that embattled minority has now spread its domain to extents even its palmiest prophets never dreamed of, friends and enemies alike still look to these shopworn sermons as guides to understanding how it happened, and what it has all been about. In this sense, modern art after World War Two, and after 1960 especially, is not so much a cult with a bible as a culture without a constitution: a far-flung, complex republic that seems to keep flogging the propaganda of its founding guerrilla wars as its only operating charter.

It is not hard to see how this impasse developed. Any account of modern art's origins has to tie together a bewildering variety of objects and events, from Manet's urbane spaces and Claude Monet's landscapes, through styles as disparate as Paul Gauguin's flat color and Georges Seurat's dots, to the more hermetic departures of Picasso and Georges Braque in Cubism. The canonical way to make sense of that story was to describe all those rapid-fire changes as a march of progress, and explain the welter of new forms as revelations of necessary truths. This approach treats Auguste Renoir's portrait of Monet painting outdoors, for example, or Gauguin's "primitive" visions as emblems of discovery, almost in the fashion of pioneering science: Realists or Impressionists renouncing the musty academic studio to capture immediate sensations of natural light and color; and Post-Impressionists like Gauguin moving on to explore symbolic forms engendered deep within the mind. Such art was bound to succeed, the story goes, because it was RIGHT. Whether by fidelity to the givens of nature (Monet's trued observation) or to the structures of the mind (Gauguin's purer imagination), it reached outside the confines of mere convention, where the academics were mired, into the domain of the necessary and universal.

The more aggressive the changes, the greater the apparent need to claim a basis in something permanent and objective. When early modern painters broke established rules, and let go of resemblance to mundane reality, proponents typically maintained they were actually following better rules that charted a higher reality--according to the dictates of, say, Platonic philosophy, Bergsonian time-consciousness, or n-dimensional geometry. The push toward forms of abstraction around World War One brought this kind of advocacy to a special, fevered pitch. Discrediting familiar European artistic traditions, artists and supporters alike invoked the more absolutist authority of sources in science, mathematics, mysticism, primitive or exotic art, and so on, that were "timeless" by virtue of their disconnection from the historical clocks of Western taste. And for more than half a century since, we have continued to hear such appeals to non-art systems of determining order and higher truth, variously found via recourse to dreams, mathematics, or cognitive theory, in sources that range from X rays to entropy, form new religions like theosophy to new sciences like cybernetics.

At the same time, though, others have preached that modern art's progress was shaped by an internal aesthetic logic that accorded with the most advanced intellectual spirit of its time and place. The most sophisticated version of this story describes a sequence of step-by-step refinements, in which each art form gradually moved toward a purer realization of its essential nature. Painting, for example, stripped itself of illusionism and literary reference to arrive at an unadulterated presentation of color and shape of a flat plane. In this reading, Monet and Gauguin pioneered not by superior advance toward facts, but by retreat from art's perspective and modeling and the forthrightness of their bold brushstrokes or unalloyed color, inaugurated a world-spurning drive toward the medium's self-definition--a drive that, so the creed upholds, distinguishes the truly modern from the merely novel in twentieth-century creativity.

Clearly there's a big difference between explaining the last hundred years of art as a search for ultimate truths, and analyzing it as a baton race toward historically appropriate aesthetics. Yet both those stories are about focused movement toward absolute forms, and both evoke an air of destiny. That kind of vision--the kind that makes modern art a goal-oriented crusade and a cause of faith--has been indispensable in embattled times, and generative in crucial ways. For countless artists, a deep belief in one or another of these higher systems has been a key motivation to creativity, in the face of few other assurances and against considerable resistance. And histories based on such an idealistic sense of purpose--showing, for example, how the flat picture plane ultimately triumphed or how form hewed ever closer to function--have set the benchmarks for any account of modern art's origins and development. Like other kinds of evangelism, though, these credos degenerate into dogma. And more important, over the long haul and in the broader view, such stories about ordained progress and perfection just do not work.

As regards Monet and Gauguin, for instance, neither the notion of pure "impressions," nor that of eternal mental forms, stands up in terms of what we know about cognitive processes--or tells us anything useful about how their pictures were really made. And the subsequent path of modern art is littered with countless other lost causes, fad enthusiasms, and misused authorities, from Milarepa to Mesmer to Mandelbrot. Grand pronouncements of aesthetic/historical necessity have recurrently proved to be only excuses for a moment's taste; they invariably scant the complexity of modern art's origins, and crumble in the face of its ongoing permutations.

Such arguments for transcendent values also notoriously disregard the perturbations of history, to portray instead a grand procession that strides along above the muck of ordinary life. Little wonder, then, that as those claims have lost their credibility, the story of modern art should be retold--as it has been often in the past two decades--in a more tendentiously secular way, as a function of sociopolitical context. In this approach, for example, Monet's garden views aren't neutral glimpses of nature, but politically slanted fictions of 1970s suburban life in Paris; and Gauguin's glorifications of untutored rustics have less to do with eternal ideals of a pure mind than with dated illusions about France's rural underclasses.

This kind of demystification has substantial justice on its side. Countless modern artists have proclaimed that their boldness was an integral expression of the society of their time. And it is far more believable, just on a human level, that even the most potent innovations are less prompted by predestination than by a tangle of local motivations and conditions. Art historians love to unravel those tangles, too, because it involves fascinating sociological research and engages charged issues of political concern. But by shifting their emphasis to social context as the prime source of meaning, some of these historians are also devaluing the most basic notions of modern art's significance.

The crucially original aspect of later nineteenth-century art has always been seen to lie in the steadily more obtrusive inflections of style--Manet's peculiar spaces, Seurat's insistent geometry, and so on--that apparently began moving painting away from figurative representation toward abstraction. But the recent writing redefines these innovations as analog transcriptions of social conditions. The ambiguous space in Manet's Bar at the folies-Bergere is said to convey, for example, the confusions of class mixing in Parisian cabaret life; and the frozen architectural rhythms in Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte are meant to critique the starchy rigidity of the middle-class strollers. The new social historians treat such monuments of the later nineteenth century--previously seen as premonitions of a new, autonomous language of art--coded commentaries on the social conditions of their day.

Pictures like Monet's, formerly touted as transparent naturalism, are now interpreted as opaque screens, inscribed with the prejudices of a particular mind, class, and epoch. And where we were formerly asked to see opaque devices closing off worldly representation, as in Manet's spaces or Seurat's repetitious rhythms, the new account asks us to read specially structured reports on the conditions of the day. Realism is unmasked as disguised stylization, and stylization--even as it later moves into abstraction--is deciphered as disguised Realism. The frontier between them, that crucial line that modern art crossed, seems diminished in significance.

This kind of revision has been most provocative when it unveiled new, hidden meanings in icons of early modern art like the Bar and the Grande Jatte. The revisionists maintain that the attention and honor given these works over the past few generations have been either misdirected, or sublimated, away from recognition of the real critical function of the pictures. But critiques that require a century to decipher have failed in some basic sense. And it is hard to categorize these artists as exemplary failures--unless one is willing to count the whole enterprise of modern art which they initiated as equally inadequate and unsuccessful, on the same grounds of a pesky lack of political clarity. That larger conclusion, in fact, seems to lurk not too much further down this interpretive path.

This new social history of art is often deeply researched and subtle. Rather than dealing in simplistic notions of literal content, it recognizes that innovative forms are the key aspect of early modern art. But its interpretations of those forms almost always scant something basic. If literalism and critical precision were their aims, certainly these artists were foolish to pursue them in terms of unfamiliar and often willfully illegible, nonreferential new forms. And to say that they used such devices in order precisely to map particular unfamiliar and imprecise conditions (e.g., and untraditional and confusing pictorial space is a calibrated analog for a novel and complex social space) is to put back into the art new elliptical versions of the very things that were highest on the modern artist's reject list: little moralizing narratives and legible, one-to-one correspondences between art forms and specific, textual meanings.

The effort to enlarge the human import in modern art's innovations must entail more than reducing them to a freshly clever form of oblique social reporting. It has to allow that these innovations succeeded as they did by resisting simple explanation, and by proving adaptable to other, unexpected uses, as bearers of an expanding set of meanings. If Manet's core contribution was to capture class anxiety in cabarets, or if the most telling challenge Seurat posed was how to take a stand on the social problematics of leisure time in Paris in 1884, would these pictures have gone forth and fructified as they did? More baldly, why would anyone but academic partisans care? Ultimately, history has valued these pictures more for the questions they raised than for the ones they resolved, more for what they opened up than for what they pinned down.

A moral issue is entangled with an interpretive strategy here. Some people think that unless a picture bears timely social freight, it is not doing any useful work; and that idle art is the devil's plaything. For those who reckon art a pawn to larger societal powers, it follows that it must graft itself aggressively to a chosen aim, lest it be taken hostage for someone else's purposes. Art with less than secure ties to explicit texts (like Jackson Pollock's dripped paintings, for example, or abstract art in general) runs a higher risk, so the argument goes, of being appropriated by unacceptable admirers. Hence the new way of decoding makes an effort to rescue modern masterworks from a long history of such purported misuse, and rehabilitate their authors as adherents--at least by intention, if not by result--to this proper moral position.

But that's not how modern art works. Such discomfort with the vagaries of artistic license, and with the uncertainties of any art that is not didactic, is profoundly antimodern; and revalidating major monuments of modern art in these terms is a chillingly perverse enterprise. Besides delimiting the bounds of innovation on the artist's end, it also devalues the contemporary viewer's perception and judgment, and mistrusts the possibility for art, without attendant documents, to be intelligible in any worthwhile way. If the only real meanings of the work are those that we derive from understanding its original context, then the merely "visual" is to be mistrusted and must be heavily framed with research. In place of the close-order (but historically unconcerned) looking required by adepts of the "pure" analysis of form, the social history of modern art demands a detailed "reading," in which what is not present in the work is asserted to be just as important as (or more important than) what is.

This effort to reweave a net of original contextual linkages around modern art's experiments, as a way to capture and constrain its meanings, is born of a basic skepticism about human communication. Can the things people make in one set of circumstances communicate anything useful to other people in other times and places, without some explanatory lexicon? Can an insider language say anything to outsiders--or more pointedly, when rogue individuals transgress the limits of a consensus vocabulary, how can the forms they invent carry any real significance for a wide and diverse community? Some of the stories we hear about modern art are illegitimately optimistic on this question, and ignore the difficulties involved; others harden them into impossibilities. One side proposes that as it becomes more abstract, art approaches the domain of guaranteed truths. By implying that people can have access to universal truths through personal insight, this notion continues the venerable hope for an ideal language that could transcend time and place, and make the same sense to cavemen and nuclear physicists. The opposing view, skeptical of the possibilities for individuals freely to gain and transfer knowledge, sees modern art, and especially abstraction, as a set of time-determined conventions that only force into higher relief the artificial, limiting nature of all languages.

These positions are interwoven, too, with emotional assessments of the gains and losses of modern experience. In the one view, art is the partner of modern creative discovery and heightened consciousness; in the other, its virtue lies in a critical mirroring of modernity's failings and special injuries. Here in a nutshell is the familiar antinomy of utopian and dystopian views of modernism, and the characteristically modern mood swing between extremes of hope and despair--or intellectually between extremes of absolutism and relativism. Each side has its evidence, for there are lists of artists' statements and powerful works of art that seem to back up one or the other view: a positive exhilaration about the expanded possibilities of individual freedom, and liberation from the dead weight of tradition; and an alienated ache for lost stability and consensus, or the equal dread of monotonous conformity, and inescapable oppression. In such dilemmas, there is not going to be a final "right side"; experience tells us modern life is a mixed blessing whose mix keeps changing. But if we will never resolve this problem we might at least get a better fix on what modern art--unquestionably the signal, defining cultural invention of our epoch--has to tell us about it.

As the disenchanted never tire of pointing out, there are glaring disparities between what modern art promised in the manifestoes and what it has proved to be. But the problem is not just that a lot of the early utopian visions don't square with what went wrong--as in the gap between the reformist hopes of some architects and the mean uninhabitability of instant slums built to their model. It is also that such rhetoric, and the standard origin stories built on it, offer no adequate explanation for all that went right--no plausible way to account for the immense dissemination of modern art's innovations, or for the pleasure and stimulation diverse masses of people have derived from them. Even the most overreaching early claims made for the new art tend to tie it to a specific set of intentions and a focused destiny in a way that shortchanges its potentials for more complex meanings and a broader base of acceptance.

The importance of Monet and Gauguin is not measurable against a scale determined by perceptual theory, any more than it is delimited by Third Republic politics. We do not have to agree either with Seurat's color theories or with his anarchism to find profound human content in his landscapes, any more than we have to be Einstein to be fascinated by Cubist portraits. And only an infinitesimal percentage of those who jammed Picasso's 1980 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, or who have come to stand before Pollock's drip paintings in various degrees of bewilderment and thrall, cared an iota about the historical destiny of the picture plane. And yet people--a broad range of ages and types of people--have found in these odd and difficult things a rich spectrum of meanings and uses, in private, social, and civic life. Those Pollocks, for example, which at first seemed only like spattercloths or chimpanzees' scribbling, have swiftly come to inform a spectrum of visualization and thought that runs from banal decorative patterns to the most serious efforts to reimagine the sublime, and have served in turn to empower a vast, expanding field of art that in no evident way resembles his. Modern art's most salient and valued attributes have to do, not with absolutism and exclusivity, but with this heterogeneous inclusiveness and unprecedented openendedness, in its means, its concerns, and its audience.

The choice between determined, explicit meaning and no meaning at all is a false one. Abstraction, for example, has proved to be an enduringly fecund aspect of the culture of this century, without being either a universal lingua franca, or a code for hidden textual meanings. The willingness to explore such forms, without defined, consensus significance, has been the motor force of modern art. In this regard, the progressive arguments about the search for truth and perfection get things backward: the art has turned out to be more accessible and replete with meaning, more powerful and enduring, than the authoritative systems or historical destinies that supposedly produced it and gave it significance. Such art has persisted, and been generative, by failing to fulfill, and thus outstripping, the claims its advocates made; and even, in many cases, the boldest intentions of its creators. This dissemination, moreover, had nothing to do with destiny. The astonishing thing is that a whole array of outrageous new forms was produced and accepted, proliferated, and eventually radically transformed Western visual culture--though there was not historical necessity, and no foundation in fixed Truth with a capital T, that justified the oddities or validated the attention paid them. In sum, the art works, and the stories do not.

We need better stories. To recover a truer sense of the secular miracle in modern art, we have to replace its conventional genesis accounts with a genuinely Darwinian notion of evolutionary origins and growth. The record of its history so far--the succession of fault lines and fissures, the mix of extinctions and expansions of new family trees--doesn't present just a roster of forms developed to fit changing conditions, any more than it reveals the playing out of some predestined design. It is a powerful demonstration of the creative force of contingency--the interaction of multiple mutations with special environments that started with a few basic reshufflings of the existing gene pool, and has yielded an amazing, diverse world of thriving new forms of life.

The signal difference, of course, is that this evolution has nothing to do with universal, natural law. Its unfolding depends on (though its results are not determined by) the conditions of specific cultures at a distinctive moment in history. The shaping "environment" is a shifting cast of people who have decided, for a panoply of reasons noble and ignoble, to tolerate, pay attention to, or actively support, an unprecedented expansion of artists' prerogatives to create what a biologist might call "hopeful monster"--variations, hybrids, and mutations that altered inherited definitions of what could be. The profligacy modern art needed in order to grow--the seemingly gratuitous attempts to adapt familiar things to unexpected purposes, the promiscuous couplings of disparate worlds of convention--could not survive outside this climate. And the raw material here is not random change, but personal initiative: the individual decisions to be an outsider within one's own world, to try new meanings for old forms, and attack old tasks with new means, to accept the strange as useful and to reconsider the familiar as fraught with possibility.

That's why Webb Ellis's exploit seems such an apt model--not as a determining stroke of genius, but as a seemingly gratuitous rearrangement within a fluid set of established conventions, that finds its possibilities and purposes as its ripples spread. The act focuses our attention on the indispensable role of personal will and initiative, certainly. But precisely because this act was so simple, human, and willfully contrary, it illuminates the creative power that lay around it, in the interplay between the possibilities a culture offered, and those it proved willing to accept. We should not allow the power and complexity of the universe of artistic forms by which we have come to identify our epoch and ourselves in it, form Manet to Pollock and beyond, to blind us to its origins in just such occasions, when individual acts of conviction deflect known but neglected potentials to meet a field of latent but undefined opportunities, and thereby empower whole new systems of unpredictable complexity, with far more than intramural appeal.

A prime intention of this book is to honor those exploits: modern art, I hope to show in detailed examples, did not originate in the wholesale overthrow of all conventions and the protean creation of wholly new forms, nor in the impact of alien influences from outside the Western world. Nor were its innovations shaped by the grinding-wheel of local social forces. It has been the product of individual decisions to reconsider the complex possibilities within the traditions available to them, and to act on basic options that were, and remain, broadly available and unconcealed.

This kind of art is conceivable only within a system that is in crucial senses unfixed, inefficient, and unpredictable--a cultural system whose work is done by the play within it, in all senses of the word, in a game where the rules themselves are what is constantly up for grabs. More than the forms themselves, it is this frame of mind, individually and societally, that is crucially new about modern art. That is why those early innovations, those first ruptures of convention that detonated the sequence, remain so fascinating as exemplary acts. If we lose sight of them in the fog of theories, or overrationalize them in the web of art-historical detailing, if we let them get hardened into legends of predestination or reduced to mechanical responses to circumstance, we explain away modern art's birthright. But if we can have better, more accurate stories that do justice to those origins--to the initial moments of "fine disregard" when artists grasped new possibilities from within established games, and transformed what was known into the seeds of something new--we will have a better sense of why the rest is history.