Why Modernist Claims for Autonomy Matter

Historicist critics of modernism characterize modernist claims about abstraction, impersonality, and autonomy as escapist denials of a plausible realism. This essay uses examples from the visual arts—Pissarro, Cézanne, and Malevich—to argue that modernist autonomy is not an escape from nature but a recasting of art's relation to the world. The dream of autonomy derives from artists who, rather than picturing the world from a position of external authority, imagine that they have to work from the inside out. Instead of presenting pictures of discreet entities or objects, they render situations characterized by mutually dependent and mutually determining elements. Autonomy names a principle by which artists claim the right to redefine every element of their heritage by balancing energies and tensions that are exemplified in the mutual involvement of authorship, audience, work, and world. A literary example of such autonomy, and of the value of autonomy, is Wallace Stevens's "Nomad Exquisite."