Clement
Greenberg: Modernist Painting
Greenberg's first essay on modernism, clarifying many of
the ideas implicit in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", his ground breaking
essay written two decades earlier. Although he later came to reject it, in its
second parapgraph he offers what may be the most elegant definition modernism
extant:
... 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.
The essay is notable for its illuminating (and largely
undeveloped) observations about the nature and history of pictures, let alone
Greenberg's mid-life perception of the character and importance of the
avant-garde. If the theory has a weakness, it lies with the centrality of
pictorial art, which it seems to fit modernism like a glove. How much it
extended to other art media, let alone other disciplines, is debatable.
Greenberg's 1978 post-script remains relevant.
-- TF
Modernism
includes more than art and literature. By now it covers almost the whole of
what is truly alive in our culture. It happens, however, to be very much of a
historical novelty. Western civilization is not the first civilization to turn
around and question its own foundations, but it is the one that has gone
furthest in doing so. I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the
exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher
Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I
conceive of Kant as, the first real Modernist.
The
essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in 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. Kant used logic
to establish the limits of logic, and while he withdrew much from its old
jurisdiction, logic was left all the more secure in what there remained to it.
The
self-criticism of Modernism grows out of, but is not the same thing as, the
criticism of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment criticized from the outside,
the way criticism in its accepted sense does; Modernism criticizes from the
inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized. It
seems natural that this new kind of criticism should have appeared first in
philosophy, which is critical by definition, but as the 18th century wore on,
it entered many other fields. A more rational justification had begun to be
demanded of every formal social activity, and Kantian self-criticism, which had
arisen in philosophy in answer to this demand in the first place, was called on
eventually to meet and interpret it in areas that lay far from philosophy.
We
know what has happened to an activity like religion, which could not avail
itself of Kantian, immanent, criticism in order to justify itself. At first
glance the arts might seem to have been in a situation like religion's. Having
been denied by the Enlightenment all tasks they could take seriously, they
looked as though they were going to be assimilated to entertainment pure and
simple, and entertainment itself looked as though it were going to be
assimilated, like religion, to therapy. The arts could save themselves from
this leveling down only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they
provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other
kind of activity.
Each
art, it turned out, had to perform this demonstration on its own account. What
had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art
in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular
art. Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the
effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area
of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area
all the more certain.
It
quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art
coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of
self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any
and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of
any other art. Thus would each art be rendered "pure," and in its
"purity" find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of
its independence. "Purity" meant self-definition, and the enterprise
of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.
Realistic,
naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism
used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium
of painting -- the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of
the pigment -- were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could
be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same
limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged
openly. Manet's became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness
with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted. The
Impressionists, in Manet's wake, abjured underpainting and glazes, to leave the
eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colors they used were made of paint
that came from tubes or pots. Cézanne sacrificed verisimilitude, or
correctness, in order to fit his drawing and design more explicitly to the
rectangular shape of the canvas.
It
was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface that remained,
however, more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which
pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism. For flatness alone
was unique and exclusive to pictorial art. The enclosing shape of the picture
was a limiting condition, or norm, that was shared with the art of the theater;
color was a norm and a means shared not only with the theater, but also with
sculpture. Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with no
other art, Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing
else.
The
Old Masters had sensed that it was necessary to preserve what is called the
integrity of the picture plane: that is, to signify the enduring presence of
flatness underneath and above the most vivid illusion of three-dimensional
space. The apparent contradiction involved was essential to the success of
their art, as it is indeed to the success of all pictorial art. The Modernists
have neither avoided nor resolved this contradiction; rather, they have
reversed its terms. One is made aware of the flatness of their pictures before,
instead of after, being made aware of what the flatness contains. Whereas one
tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one
sees a Modernist picture as a picture first. This is, of course, the best way of
seeing any kind of picture, Old Master or Modernist, but Modernism imposes it
as the only and necessary way, and Modernism's success in doing so is a success
of self-criticism.
Modernist
painting in its latest phase has not abandoned the representation of
recognizable objects in principle. What it has abandoned in principle is the
representation of the kind of space that recognizable objects can inhabit.
Abstractness, or the non-figurative, has in itself still not proved to be an
altogether necessary moment in the self-criticism of pictorial art, even though
artists as eminent as Kandinsky and Mondrian have thought so. As such,
representation, or illustration, does not attain the uniqueness of pictorial
art; what does do so is the associations of things represented. All
recognizable entities (including pictures themselves) exist in
three-dimensional space, and the barest suggestion of a recognizable entity
sufffices to call up associations of that kind of space. The fragmentary
silhouette of a human figure, or of a teacup, will do so, and by doing so
alienate pictorial space from the literal two-dimensionality which is the
guarantee of painting's independence as an art. For, as has already been said,
three-dimensionality is the province of sculpture. To achieve autonomy,
painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with
sculpture, and it is in its effort to do this, and not so much -- I repeat --
to exclude the representational or literary, that painting has made itself
abstract.
At
the same time, however, Modernist painting shows, precisely by its resistance
to the sculptural, how firmly attached it remains to tradition beneath and
beyond all appearances to the contrary. For the resistance to the sculptural
dates far back before the advent of Modernism. Western painting, in so far as
it is naturalistic, owes a great debt to sculpture, which taught it in the
beginning how to shade and model for the illusion of relief, and even how to
dispose that illusion in a complementary illusion of deep space. Yet some of
the greatest feats of Western painting are due to the effort it has made over
the last four centuries to rid itself of the sculptural. Starting in Venice in
the 16th century and continuing in Spain, Belgium, and Holland in the 17th,
that effort was carried on at first in the name of color. When David, in the
18th century, tried to revive sculptural painting, it was, in part, to save
pictorial art from the decorative flattening-out that the emphasis on color
seemed to induce. Yet the strength of David's own best pictures, which are
predominantly his informal ones, lies as much in their color as in anything
else. And Ingres, his faithful pupil, though he subordinated color far more
consistently than did David, executed portraits that were among the flattest,
least sculptural paintings done in the West by a sophisticated artist since the
I4th century. Thus, by the middle of the 19th century, all ambitious tendencies
in painting had converged amid their differences, in an anti-sculptural
direction.
Modernism,
as well as continuing this direction, has made it more conscious of itself.
With Manet and the Impressionists the question stopped being defined as one of
color versus drawing, and became one of purely optical experience against optical
experience as revised or modified by tactile associations. It was in the name
of the purely and literally optical, not in the name of color, that the
Impressionists set themselves to undermining shading and modeling and
everything else in painting that seemed to connote the sculptural. It was, once
again, in the name of the sculptural, with its shading and modeling, that
Cézanne, and the Cubists after him, reacted against Impressionism, as David had
reacted against Fragonard. But once more, just as David's and Ingres' reaction
had culminated, paradoxically, in a kind of painting even less sculptural than
before, so the Cubist counter-revolution eventuated in a kind of painting
flatter than anything in Western art since before Giotto and Cimabue -- so flat
indeed that it could hardly contain recognizable images.
In
the meantime the other cardinal norms of the art of painting had begun, with
the onset of Modernism, to undergo a revision that was equally thorough if not
as spectacular. It would take me more time than is at my disposal to show how
the norm of the picture's enclosing shape, or frame, was loosened, then
tightened, then loosened once again, and isolated, and then tightened once
more, by successive generations of Modernist painters. Or how the norms of
finish and paint texture, and of value and color contrast, were revised and
rerevised. New risks have been taken with all these norms, not only in the
interests of expression but also in order to exhibit them more clearly as
norms. By being exhibited, they are tested for their indispensability. That
testing is by no means finished, and the fact that it becomes deeper as it
proceeds accounts for the radical simplifications that are also to be seen in
the very latest abstract painting, as well as for the radical complications
that are also seen in it.
Neither
extreme is a matter of caprice or arbitrariness. On the contrary, the more
closely the norms of a discipline become defined, the less freedom they are apt
to permit in many directions. The essential norms or conventions of painting
are a the same time the limiting conditions with which a picture must comply in
order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limits can
be pushed back indefinitely -- before a picture stops being a picture and turns
into an arbitrary object; but it has also found that the further back these
limits are pushed the more explicitly they have to be observed and indicated.
The crisscrossing black lines and colored rectangles of a Mondrian painting
seem hardly enough to make a picture out of, yet they impose the picture's
framing shape as a regulating norm with a new force and completeness by echoing
that shape so closely. Far from incurring the danger of arbitrariness,
Mondrian's art proves, as time passes, almost too disciplined, almost too
tradition- and convention-bound in certain respects; once we have gotten used
to its utter abstractness, we realize that it is more conservative in its
color, for instance, as well as in its subservience to the frame, than the last
paintings of Monet.
It
is understood, I hope, that in plotting out the rationale of Modernist painting
I have had to simplify and exaggerate. The flatness towards which Modernist
painting orients itself can never be an absolute flatness. The heightened
sensitivity of the picture plane may no longer permit sculptural illusion, or trompe-l'oeil,
but it does and must permit optical illusion. The first mark made on a canvas
destroys its literal and utter flatness, and the result of the marks made on it
by an artist like Mondrian is still a kind of illusion that suggests a kind of
third dimension. Only now it is a strictly pictorial, strictly optical third
dimension. The Old Masters created an illusion i of space in depth that one
could imagine oneself walking into, but the analogous illusion created by the
Modernist painter can only be seen into; can be traveled through, literally or
figuratively, only with the eye.
The
latest abstract painting tries to fulfill the Impressionist insistence on the
optical as the only sense that a completely and quintessentially pictorial art
can invoke. Realizing this, one begins also to realize that the Impressionists,
or at least the Neo-Impressionists, were not altogether misguided when they
flirted with science. Kantian self-criticism, as it now turns out, has found
its fullest expression in science rather than in philosophy, and when it began
to be applied in art, the latter was brought closer in real spirit to
scientific method than ever before -- closer than it had been by Alberti,
Uccello, Piero della Francesca, or Leonardo in the Renaissance. That visual art
should confine itself exclusively to what is given in visual experience, and
make no reference to anything given in any other order of experience, is a notion
whose only justification lies in scientific consistency.
Scientific
method alone asks, or might ask, that a situation be resolved in exactly the
same terms as that in which it is presented. But this kind of consistency
promises nothing in the way of aesthetic quality, and the fact that the best
art of the last seventy or eighty years approaches closer and closer to such
consistency does not show the contrary. From the point of view of art in
itself, its convergence with science happens to be a mere accident, and neither
art nor science really gives or assures the other of anything more than it ever
did. What their convergence does show, however, is the profound degree to which
Modernist art belongs to the same specific cultural tendency as modern science,
and this is of the highest significance as a historical fact.
It
should also be understood that self-criticism in Modernist art has never been
carried on in any but a spontaneous and largely subliminal way. As I have
already indicated, it has been altogether a question of practice, immanent to
practice, and never a topic of theory. Much is heard about programs in
connection with Modernist art, but there has actually been far less of the
programmatic in Modernist than in Renaissance or Academic painting. With a few
exceptions like Mondrian, the masters of Modernism have had no more fixed ideas
about art than Corot did. Certain inclinations, certain affirmations and
emphases, and certain refusals and abstinences as well, seem to become
necessary simply because the way to stronger, more expressive art lies through
them. The immediate aims of the Modernists were, and remain, personal before
anything else, and the truth and success of their works remain personal before
anything else. And it has taken the accumulation, over decades, of a good deal
of personal painting to reveal the general self-critical tendency of Modernist
painting. No artist was, or yet is, aware of it, nor could any artist ever work
freely in awareness of it. To this extent -- and it is a great extent -- art
gets carried on under Modernism in much the same way as before.
And
I cannot insist enough that Modernism has never meant, and does not mean now,
anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution, an unraveling,
of tradition, but it also means its further evolution. Modernist art continues
the past without gap or break, and wherever it may end up it will never cease
being intelligible in terms of the past. The making of pictures has been
controlled, since it first began, by all the norms I have mentioned. The
Paleolithic painter or engraver could disregard the norm of the frame and treat
the surface in a literally sculptural way only because he made images rather
than pictures, and worked on a support -- a rock wall, a bone, a horn, or a
stone -- whose limits and surface were arbitrarily given by nature. But the
making of pictures means, among other things, the deliberate creating or
choosing of a flat surface, and the deliberate circumscribing and limiting of
it. This deliberateness is precisely what Modernist painting harps on: the
fact, that is, that the limiting conditions of art are altogether human
conditions.
But
I want to repeat that Modernist art does not offer theoretical demonstrations.
It can be said, rather, that it happens to convert theoretical possibilities
into empirical ones, in doing which it tests many theories about art for their
relevance to the actual practice and actual experience of art. In this respect
alone can Modernism be considered subversive. Certain factors we used to think
essential to the making and experiencing of art are shown not to be so by the
fact that Modernist painting has been able to dispense with them and yet
continue to offer the experience of art in all its essentials. The further fact
that this demonstration has left most of our old value judgments intact only
makes it the more conclusive. Modernism may have had something to do with the
revival of the reputations of Uccello, Piero della Francesca, El Greco, Georges
de la Tour, and even Vermeer; and Modernism certainly confirmed, if it did not
start, the revival of Giotto's reputation; but it has not lowered thereby the
standing of Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, or Watteau. What
Modernism has shown is that, though the past did appreciate these masters
justly, it often gave wrong or irrelevant reasons for doing so.
In
some ways this situation is hardly changed today. Art criticism and art history
lag behind Modernism as they lagged behind pre-Modernist art. Most of the
things that get written about Modernist art still belong to journalism rather
than to criticism or art history. It belongs to journalism -- and to the
millennial complex from which so many journalists and journalist intellectuals
suffer in our day -- that each new phase of Modernist art should be hailed as
the start of a whole new epoch in art, marking a decisive break with all the
customs and conventions of the past. Each time, a kind of art is expected so
unlike all previous kinds of art, and so free from norms of practice or taste,
that everybody, regardless of how informed or uninformed he happens to be, can
have his say about it. And each time, this expectation has been disappointed,
as the phase of Modernist art in question finally takes its place in the
intelligible continuity of taste and tradition.
Nothing
could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture
of continuity. Art is -- among other things -- 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.
Postscript
(1978)
The
above appeared first in 1960 as a pamphlet in a series published by the Voice
of America. It had been broadcast over that agency's radio in the spring of the
same year. With some minor verbal changes it was reprinted in the spring 1965
number of Art and Literature in Paris, and then in Gregory Battcock's anthology
The New Art (1966).
I
want to take this chance to correct an error, one of interpretation an not of
fact. Many readers, though by no means all, seem to have taken the 'rationale'
of Modernist art outlined here as representing a position adopted by the writer
himself that is, that what he describes he also advocates. This may be a fault
of the writing or the rhetoric. Nevertheless, a close reading of what he writes
will find nothing at all to indicate that he subscribes to, believes in, the
things that he adumbrates. (The quotation marks around pure and purity should
have been enough to show that.) The writer is trying to account in part for how
most of the very best art of the last hundred-odd years came about, but he's
not implying that that's how it had to come about, much less that that's
how the best art still has to come about. 'Pure' art was a useful illusion, but
this doesn't make it any the less an illusion. Nor does the possibility of its
continuing usefulness make it any the less an illusion.
There
have been some further constructions of what I wrote that go over into
preposterousness: That I regard flatness and the inclosing of flatness not just
as the limiting conditions of pictorial art, but as criteria of aesthetic
quality in pictorial art; that the further a work advances the self-definition
of an art, the better that work is bound to be. The philosopher or art
historian who can envision me -- or anyone at all -- arriving at aesthetic judgments
in this way reads shockingly more into himself or herself than into my article.
Forum Lectures (Washington, D.
C.: Voice of America), 1960
Arts Yearbook 4, 1961 (unrevised)
Art and Literature, Spring 1965 (slightly revised)
The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, 1966
Peinture-cahiers théoriques, no. 8-9, I974 (titled "La peinture moderniste")
Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, 1978
Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, 1982.
Arts Yearbook 4, 1961 (unrevised)
Art and Literature, Spring 1965 (slightly revised)
The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, 1966
Peinture-cahiers théoriques, no. 8-9, I974 (titled "La peinture moderniste")
Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, 1978
Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, 1982.