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Modernist Painting Clement Greenberg

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 criticise 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 19th

century wore on, it entered many other fields. A more rational justification had begun to

be demanded of every formal 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 idea 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 standard of quality as well as of its

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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 by 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 into 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

Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with a Fan, 1872

Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid, 1895

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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 is in its latest phase

and 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 suffices 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. What 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

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Blue Plane, 1921

Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538

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David, executed portraits that were

among the flattest, least sculptural

paintings done in the West by a

sophisticated artist since the 14th 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 become

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 else

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 re-revised. New risk have been taken

with all these norms, not only in the interests of

expression but also in order to exhibit 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

Jacques-Louis David, Death of Socrates, 1787

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Louis-Francois Bertin, 1833

Giotto, Lamentation of Christ, 1305-6

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many directions. The essential norms or conventions of painting are at 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 later 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 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 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

Claude Monet, Water Lillies, 1908

Piero della Francesca, Flagellation, probably 1450s

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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 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 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 much in 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.

Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861

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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.

Rubens, Elevation of the Cross, 1610-11

Raphael, The Alba Madonna, c.1511

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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, 1974 (titled “La peinture moderniste”);

Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, 1978; Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical

Anthology, ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, 1982; Clement Greenberg: The Collected

Essays and Criticism vol. 4, ed. John O!Brian, 1993.

From: http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/modernism.html (Last access 21 July 07)

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