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Modernist Painting by Clement

Greenberg
February 3, 2012 by Jeanne Willette
THE MODERNISM OF MODERNIST PAINTING, 1960/1
Clement Greenbergs Modernist Painting, originally given as a radio broadcast in 1961 for the Voice of
Americas Forum Lectures, was printed in 1961 in the Arts Yearbook 4 of the same year, reprinted in
1965, 66, 74, 78, and 1982. The article achieved a canonical status and served as one of the definitive
statements of formalism as a mode of visual analysis and of formalism as a critical stance, and possibly, of
formalism as a mode of making art. In his 1961 essay on Modernist Painting, Clement Greenberg
(1909-1994) defined Modernism as the period (in art) roughly from the mid-1850s to his present that
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displayed a self-critical tendency in the arts.
Greenberg considered Immanuel Kant the first Modernist. The essence of Kants thesis was the employment
of the characteristic methods of the discipline to criticize the discipline itself. According to Greenberg,
Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic. The Modernist goal of self-criticism grows out of the
critical spirit of the Enlightenment philosophical system which was based upon the belief in the power of
rational thought and human reason. Critique, as a method, analyzes from the inside, from within the
object being examined and does not judge from the outside, according to external criteria.
Painting must analyze itself to discover its inherent properties. Painting, according to Enlightenment
methodology, must be interrogated according to its inherent purposes. The key term here would be
inherent, for analyzing an object according to its essential definition must preclude bringing forward any
non-essential or external criteria. In other words, a painting telling a good story is not necessarily a good
painting. In this article, Greenberg carries on his attempt to save and to define high art, and
Modernist Painting of 1960 can be compared to Avant-Garde and Kitsch of 1939. Two decades had
passed and Greenberg had progressed from being an up-and-coming art writer to being the arbiter of fine
arts in New York, enjoying a truly hegemonic position. His crusade was all the more urgent in 1961, as
territory of the avant-garde was being invaded by popular culture and the forces of disrule, exemplified by
Neo-Dada and Pop Art and Fluxus. Greenberg had also shifted his political position, from being an
intellectual Marxist, to being a Kantian formalist, a far safer situation which removes the critic and art from
current cultural considerations.
Greenberg stated that art can save itself from being entertainment by demonstrating that the experience
it provides is unobtainable from any other source. It is the task of art to demonstrate that which is
unique and irreducible, particular or peculiar to art and that which determines the operation peculiar
and exclusive to itself. All effects borrowed from any other medium must be eliminated, rendering the art
form pure. Purity becomes a guarantee of quality and independence of avant-garde art. All extrinsic
effects should be eliminated from painting.
One could say that it is not the essential to the definition of a painting that it re-create the world
realistically. Today, that role can be fulfilled by photography or film. Film and theater are defined by
storytelling and narrative, enhanced by illusions of everyday reality. Following Greenbergs line of
reasoning, realism and story telling and illusionism should be eliminated from painting. For Greenberg, art
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was used to call attention to art. Clement Greenberg logically worked out the limitations and peculiarities
of painting, which are a flat surface, the shape of the support and the properties of the pigment. These
physical and material limiting conditions became positive factors.
Once suppressed by artists through under-painting and glazing, these material aspects of painting were now
acknowledged by Modernist painters. Because he appeared to have considered and taken into account the
limitations of painting as the application of paint upon a flat surface, or a stretched canvas, douard Manet
is designated by Greenberg as the first Modernist artist. Manet declared the surface; his follower, Paul
Czanne, fit the drawing and design into the rectangle of the painting. In Modernist painting, the spectator
is made aware of the flatness and sees the picture first, before noting the content.
Modernist painting abandoned the principle of representation of Renaissance illusionistic space inhabited by
three-dimensional objects, giving the effect of looking through the canvas into a world beyond. Modernist
painting resists the sculptural, which is suppressed or expelled. The question is that of a purely optical
experience. With Greenberg, flatness alone is unique to painting. For this critic, art carries within itself
its own teleology. As art seeks self-definition and determines its own uniqueness, it becomes more pure,
more reductive in its means. More is eliminatedsubject matter, content, figuration, illusionism,
narrativeand art becomes independent, detached, and non-objective, that is, abstract. Content becomes
completely dissolved into form. Greenberg, in looking back selectively at the history of art, presented a
map of progress and evolution of painting, away from representation and toward purity, abstraction,
reductiveness; to flatness, to pure color, to simple forms that reflected the shape of the surface.
The essay noted that Modernism resists sculpture or three-dimensionality and reminded the reader that
this resistance was by no mean recent. The critic pointed to Jacques-Louis David as an example of an
artist whose work was flat and surface based. Greenberg insisted that the scientific method justified the
demand that painting (and art) limit itself to what is given in visual experience. Greenberg equated the
artist to the scientists, both of whom test and experiment. The equation of art with science, replaces his
earlier equation of the avant-garde with politics: a superior culture is inherently a more critical
culture. One can only look at a work of visual art, which is discernible only to the eye. Poetry is
literary, art is not and should not attempt to be, for as Greenberg reminded us, any translation of the
literary into the visual loses the literary qualities.
Like Avant-garde and Kitsch, Modernist Painting, had a subtext, Enlightenment philosophy, especially that
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of Kants Critique of Judgment. The 1939 article concerned itself with aesthetics but more with the
experience of the aesthetic. In Avant-garde and Kitsch, it is possible to believe that Greenberg was
writing of the experience of the aesthetic in terms of the placement of art in the culture, in other words, it
is not so much the how of the experience but of the where of the aesthetic. In Modernist Painting, the
experience of the aesthetic is located in the realm of the how one looks at a work of art.
The proper attitude of the spectator was important to Kant who recommended a posture of detachment
from personal desire and indifference to artistic content in search of a universal means of judging the
efficacy of art. The Enlightenment philosophy cherished the idea of the universal or the absolute, for some
kind of standard had to be erected to replace the all-knowing presence of the now-banished God. Kant was
not interested in defining what art was but in establishing the ground for the judgment of art. Working in
the new philosophical field, aesthetics, Kant attempted to establish the epistemology of art, based, not in
individual works but in a method of knowledge.
Greenbergs understanding of Kant led him to use the methodology of critique but the critic took critique
in a rather different direction. Writing two centuries after the German philosopher, Greenberg looked
backwards in time and implied another favorite Enlightenment idea, that of progress. Modernist art, if one
understands the essay correctly, seems to progress and move forward in time, away from manifestations
of extrinsic properties and towards a purity of means. Modernist art develops out of the past without gap
or break, and wherever it ends up, it will never stop being intelligible in terms of the continuity of art.
The ground has shifted away from a means of judgment (Kant) to a theory of the evolution of art along
telelogical lines with a goal in mind: purity. Even though as Greenberg pointed out, The first mark made
on the canvas destroys its virtual flatness, purity seems to imply a historical rejection of representation
and a validation of abstraction. The point of noting Greenbergs development of Kantian theory and its
application toward Modernist Painting is that, without the notion of progress, the critics theory of artistic
development would have to include some of the masters of flatness, such as William Bourguereau and some
of the masters of the surface such as Thomas Kincaide, both of whom Greenberg would have excluded from
the family tree of modernism.
While Kant would at least judge these two artists (and perhaps find them wanting), Greenberg seems to
imply a connection between Modernism and the avant-garde and establish ground for exclusion of the
unworthy. The oppositions of the dialectic are implied: those who did not follow the path of Modernist
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reductionism were, like dinosaurs, left behind. If one reads in a connection between Modernism and the
avant-garde, even if only through the names of the canonical artists Greenberg mentioned and thought his
previous articles, then the conflation between the continuity of art and the avant-garde, which supposedly
breaks with the past, becomes rather awkward. Indeed, Greenberg does not mention the avant-garde, he
uses the term authentic art, instead.
Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of
continuity. Art is, among many other things, continuity. Without the past of art, and
without the need and compulsion to maintain past standards of excellence, such a thing as
modernist art would be impossible, Greenberg stated.
However, as pointed out in his earlier work, Greenberg refused to connect the avant-garde with a rejection
of the past: the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to experiment but to find
a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving (Greenbergs italics). The underlying
continuity of the two articles can be seen in the precursor remark in the 1939 writing on the role of the
avant-garde artist: Art for arts sake and pure poetry appear, and subject matter or content becomes
something to be avoided like the plague. Given the openness of the construction of this essay and the
plurality of texts mobilized by Greenberg, it is no wonder that Modernist Painting lent itself to so many
causes, whether as a rallying point or as a bte noir.
If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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"Modernist Painting, aesthetics, art-for-art's sake, avant-garde, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Clement
Greenberg, critique, Critique of Judgment, Edouard Manet, Immanuel Kant, Modernism, Paul
Cezanne
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What would Clement Greenberg think of Flat Design? - Web Design Notes says:
April 1, 2014 at 7:53 pm
[] Greenbergs ideas on flatness, Jeanne S. M. Willette writes Modernist painting abandoned the
principle of representation of Renaissance []
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