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| Odilon Redon Cellule auriculaire 1893 lithograph Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| Edvard Munch Death of Marat 1907 oil on canvas Munch Museum, Oslo |
"Modernism's brokenness and ruthlessness, say its enemies, are willed, forced, and ultimately futile. We may even have escaped from them at last. Modernism's extremity, say its false friends, is just surface appearance, beneath which the real matter of art – not just delights of manufacture, but what those delights have always given onto, moments of vision, here-and-now totalities, a usable past – is kept in being, no doubt against the odds. When I say "false friends," it is not that I doubt the passion of their defense, or even that its rhetoric corresponds to much that modernists said of themselves. But modernism, we shall see, is a process that deeply misrecognizes its own nature for much of the time. How could it not be? It is Art. And for Art to abandon what Art most intensely had been, and nonetheless to proceed, nonetheless to go on imagining the world otherwise – just otherwise, not epitomized or complete – is not likely to happen without all kinds of reaction-formation on the part of artists."
– T.J. Clark, from Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999)
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| Edvard Munch Shore with red house 1904 oil on canvas Munch Museum, Oslo |
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| Edgar Degas Woman ironing ca. 1892-95 oil on canvas Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool |
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| Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Ladies in the dining room ca. 1893-95 oil on cardboard Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest |
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| Eugène Jansson Ring Gymnast I 1911 oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne |
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| Koloman Moser Loïe Fuller in the dance, The Archangel 1902 watercolor Albertina, Vienna |
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| Gustave Klimt Hope II 1907-08 oil on canvas Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Maximilien Luce Street in Paris in May 1871 oil on canvas ca. 1903-06 Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Nackte Mädchen unterhalten sich 1907 oil on canvas Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Ferdinand Hodler The Sacred Hour ca. 1902-1916 oil on canvas Cincinnati Art Museum |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Study for Patriotism ca. 1893 oil on paper Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan |
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| Lovis Corinth Blind Samson 1912 oil on canvas Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
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| Édouard Vuillard The Artist’s Mother opening a door 1886-87 oil on cardboard Minneapolis Institute of Arts |