Modernist Painting

Clement Greenberg, 1965

• Greenberg's first essay on modernism. Championing of avant-garde and developing ideas from Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939) with a focus on the nature and history of pictures.
  • defined modernism as "the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence." (i think of it as using a discipline's own methods as a way to critique and strengthen it).
• Modernism spans all cultural domains but is historically new. The West questioned its own foundations most deeply, starting with Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (the first real modernist).
  • Kant limited logic's scope while reinforcing its core, demanding rational justification for every formal social activity. Religion failed to use Kantian internal critique to justify itself.
• Arts, similarly reduced to entertainment-as-therapy, could only recover by proving their unique intrinsic value. Each art had to define what it alone could do, narrowing its scope to secure a pure, exclusive effect.
  • For Greenberg, "purity" meant self-definition: the discipline's methods critiqued the discipline, not to destroy but to secure its essential domain.
  • Modernism ∴ = using a field's own methods to critique and entrench its competence.
• Realist painting hid its nature as art; Modernist painting foregrounds it.
  • Manet was the first Modernist because he openly acknowledged the canvas's flatness. The Impressionists followed, using paint straightforwardly without underpainting. "to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colors they used were made of paint that came from tubes"
  • Under Modernism, flatness became painting's unique and defining trait. Other features like rectangular shape are shared with theater, color with sculpture. Only flatness belongs purely to painting.
  • Old Masters preserved flatness beneath the illusion of depth; Modernists force the viewer to notice flatness first, asserting that it must be seen before the painting's subject.
    • (with Old Masters one sees what is in the painting before seeing the painting, with Modernist painters one sees the painting first). Modernism imposes this as the only way to see a picture, their success in doing so is a success of self-criticism.
  • By highlighting flatness, Modernist painting critiques and defines itself, abandoning space for recognizable objects to focus on painting's intrinsic essence.
• Abstractness is not essential for painting's self-criticism, contrary to Kandinsky and Mondrian's belief.
  • Even a silhouette of a figure or teacup suggests 3D space, undermining painting's two-dimensional purity and thus its independence.
  • Achieving autonomy requires distinguishing painting from sculpture, not necessarily rejecting representation. This drive led to abstraction.
• Western (naturalistic) painting borrowed shading and spatial illusion from sculpture, yet its greatest achievements often stem from efforts (over 4 centuries) to abandon sculptural qualities.
  • first in Venice (16th c.), then Spain, Belgium and Holland (17th c.) → emphasized color over sculptural form.
  • Jacques-Louis David tried to reintroduce sculptural painting (18th c.) to counter color's flattening effects, but his best works still relied on his use of color.
  • By the mid-19th century, major trends converged in an anti-sculptural direction.
• Manet and the Impressionists shifted focus from color vs drawing to purely optical experience vs optical experience with tactile associations.
  • Impressionism, in service of pure opticality, rejected shading, modeling, and all sculptural inheritances.
• In the name of sculpture, Cézanne and the Cubists reacted against Impressionism, just as David reacted against Fragonard. But just as David and Ingres' reaction paradoxically culminated in a painting less sculptural than before, the cubist counter-revolution
  • ended up even flatter than the Impressionists and anything in Western art since before Giotto and Cimabue, almost eliminating all recognizable imagery.
  • New norms (frame shape/size, color contrasts, paint texture) are tested as essential conditions to experience a picture as a picture. This testing drives modernist painting's current radical simplification and complication.
  • As norms become explicit, less freedom remains and adherence becomes more deliberate: Mondrian's minimal lines and blocks of color confirm the picture's frame as a critical norm, eventually allowing viewers to recognize and appreciate a painting's structured abstractness.
• Modernist painting cannot achieve perfect flatness--any mark introduces some illusion of depth, even abstraction like Mondrian evoke an illusion of space and depth that suggest a kind of third dimension.
  • Old Mster's representation of space allowed the viewer to image oneself inside of it. Modernist painters' abstraction of space requires the eye to travel through its optical illusions.
• Both abstract painters and Impressionists insist on the purely optical, excluding tactile or other senses. This aligns Modernist art's self-criticism, Impressionsits and neo-Impressionists with a scientific approach: visual art references only visual experience, mirroring the scientific method's demands for consistent terms.
  • Kantian self-criticism has found its fullest expression in science rather than philosophy. Its application to art has brought out closer to the scientific method than ever before, more than Alberti, Uccello, Pier della Francesca or Leonardo did in the Renaissance.
  • The idea that Visual art should confine itself to the visual experience, making no references to any other order of experience can only be justified thought scientific consistency (scientific method as asking that a situation be resolved in exactly the same terms as that in which it is presented). This consistency promises nothing in the aesthetic and its presence in the best art of the past 70-80 years shows a convergence of art with modern science.
  • Neither art nor science assure the other of anything more than it ever did, but their convergence does show the profound degree to which Modernist art belongs to the same cultural tendency as modern science. this is of the highest significance as a historical fact.
• Modernist self-criticism is practical, not theoretical. The immediate aims, truth and success of its works remain personal above all, but the self critical tendecy has been revealed only after the accumulation of individual works over time.
  • Artists themselves aren't fully aware of this tendency and can't freely work with it consciously; Modernism proceeds much as before, but now theoretical possibilities become empirical → this makes Modernism subversive.
  • Modernism has never meant and doesn't mean a break with the past, it means its further evolution.
• The Paleolithic painter could ignore the frame and treat the surface in a sculptural way because he made images, not pictures + worked on a supports (rock, bones, horns, stone) with surfaces and limits given by nature.
  • Modernists deliberately choose and limit the flat picture plane. By emphasizing these constraints as human-made, Modernism makes the conditions of art explicit.
• Modernist painting has disproved some factors once thought essential to art, yet still achieves the essence of the art experience.
  • Modernism inspired reevaluations of Uccello, Piero, El Greco, de la Tour, Vermeer, and and maybe started the revival of Giotto's status, without diminishing masters like Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, or Watteau.
  • Modernism has shown that while the past justly appreciated these masters, it did so for the wrong or irrelevant reasons.
• Art criticism and history still trail behind Modernism, as before.
  • Each new art form is expected to be so radically free of tradition that everyone can judge it without knowledge, but this expectation always fails: no true art, including Modernist art, breaks with continuity; it relies on past excellence and standards for its substance and justification. Modernism, once understood, fits smoothly into the continuity of taste and tradition.
  • Nothing is further from the the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture in continuity. Art is continuity and unthinkable without it. Lacking the past of art and the need and compulsion to maintain its standards of excellence, Modernist art would lack both substance and justification.