Clement Greenberg (1909-1994)

"Modernist Painting" 1961  

 

1) Modernism: almost all that is truly alive in our culture
a) it is Western civilization's questioning of its own foundations
b) the West has gone the furthest in this
c) Modernism is the intensification of this self-critical tendency 
d) it starts with Kant who was the first to criticize the means of criticism
e) Modernism's essence: use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself - to enrich it in its area of competence (as Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, leaving it more secure)
f) The Enlightenment criticized from the outside, Modernism from the inside.
g) this criticism appeared first in philosophy, and in other fields in the 19th century
h) a more rational justification for every formal social activity
i) religion could not do this [and would hence be assimilated to therapy]
2) at first [in the 19th century?] it seemed art would be assimilated to entertainment [and entertainment to therapy]
a) there was a need for the arts to demonstrate that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be had elsewhere
b) to find what is unique to art in general, and what is unique to the particular art
c) need for each art to determine through operations peculiar to itself the effects peculiar to itself
d) this would narrow its area of competence, but make the area more secure
e) the unique area of competence of each art coincides with all that is unique to its medium  
f) self-criticism involved eliminating the effects that might be borrowed from another medium
g) each art needed to be rendered "pure" [see addendum]: this would guarantee quality, independence and self-definition
h) realistic, illusionistic art, had lied about the medium: the Old Masters saw flat surface, shape of support, properties of pigment as negative factors
i) modernism used art to call attention to art: saw these factors as positive
j) Manet: first Modernist paintings: declared the surfaces
k) then the Impressionists [no underpainting or glazing] colors made of real paint
l) Cézanne: sacrificed verisimilitude to fit the design into the rectangular canvas
3) stressing of the flatness of the support remained the most fundamental process
a) that alone was unique to pictorial art, color for example was shared with theater
b) even the Old Masters had sensed the need to preserve the integrity of the picture plane, the enduring presence of flatness
i) the dialectical tension was essential to their art and to success of all pictorial art [Greenberg's answer to the question what makes good art good]  
c) in the Modernists, one is made aware of the flatness first
d) [actually] being aware of the painting as a [flat] picture first is the best way of seeing any painting
e) Modernism has abandoned the kind of space that recognizable objects can inhabit
f) abstractness is not absolutely necessary for Modernism's self-criticism, vs. Kandinsky and Mondrian
g) what abates uniqueness in the pictorial world are the associations of the things represented and the barest suggestion of a recognizable entity is enough to call up associations of a three-D space, and will then alienate painting's independence
h) painting has to divest itself of everything sculptural: made itself abstract
4) this resistance to the sculptural continues tradition
a) sculpture taught Western painting how to shade, model, and give the illusion of deep space
b) the first effort to dispel the sculptural, starting in Venice, emphasized color
c) even for David, who sought to rescue sculptural painting from color, his best pictures' strength lay in color
d) and Ingres, his student, produced the least sculptural paintings
e) Manet and the Impressionists stressed purely optical experience vs. optical modified by tactile
f) Cézanne and the Cubists reacted against the Impressionists in the name of the sculptural, and yet ended in the flattest kind of painting yet
5) the other norms of painting: enclosing shape, finish, paint texture, value, color contrast were tested and retested
a) risks were taken not only for the sake of new expression but to exhibit the norms more clearly as norms
b) they were tested for their indispensability: which led to the radical simplifications and complications of the very latest [1961] abstract art [e.g. Pollock]  
6) the more closely and essentially the norms become defined the less apt they are to permit liberties
a) the essential norms are the limiting conditions for experiencing a marked surface as a picture
b) they can be pushed back indefinitely before the picture becomes an arbitrary object
c) but pushing back further requires more explicit observation of such norms
i) Mondrian: the lines echo the enclosing space self-evidently and impose that shape as a regulating norm with a new force
ii) his work becomes almost too disciplined, and we discover that it is more traditional in color and in subservience to frame than late Monet
7) the flatness of Modernism can never be utter flatness: it permits optical illusion
a) the first mark on the canvas destroys the visual flatness
b) Mondrian still suggests a kind of illusion of a kind of third dimension, a strictly optical third dimension: you cannot walk in it
8) Kantian self-criticism finds its perfect expression in science: and when it was applied to art, art came closer in spirit to science
a) visual art should confine itself to what is given in visual experience: this is justified in scientific consistency, as a problem in physiology is solved in terms of physiology
b) in Modernist art a literary theme must be translated into strictly optical two-d
c) however the only consistency which counts in art is aesthetic consistency, which produces aesthetic quality
d) the convergence of art and science shows they belong to the same historical and cultural tendency
9) the self-criticism of Modernist art has been spontaneous and subliminal: a question of practice, not theory
a) despite appearances, Modernists have no more interest in programs or fixed ideas than earlier artists
b) [yet] certain refusals etc. are necessary for a stronger more expressive art
c) [still] the immediate aims of Modernist artists are individual, and the truth and success of their work is individual before anything else
d) Modernist art does not succeed as art by way of demonstration [proof]  
e) rather, it needed decades of individual achievement to reveal its self-critical tendency
f) indeed, no artist could work successfully in conscious awareness of this tendency: art to this extent gets carried on as before
10) Modernism has never meant a break with the past: it means continuation even if it unravels the preceding tradition
a) it is understood in terms of this continuity
b) Paleolithic painters could disregard the norm of the frame
c) but the making of pictures, and not mere images, means deliberate choice and creation of limits
d) the limitations of art have to be made altogether human limits [?]
11) Modern art converts all theoretical possibilities into empirical ones: it tests theories of art for relevance to actual practice and experience of art: in this, and this alone, it is subversive
a) factors thought to be essential to art have been shown to be dispensable
b) however this demonstration leaves most of our old value judgments intact: it revives our valuation of some artists (Uccello etc.) but does not lesson the value of others (the Grand Masters: e.g. Rembrandt).  
c) but the past appreciated these for the wrong reasons
12) Art criticism lags behind Modernist art
a) most things written about art belong to journalism not criticism
b) some journalistic critics have a millennial complex: a new phase of Modernism is hailed as the start of a new epoch of art, making a decisive break with the past
c) but each time the expectation is disappointed
13) Without the past of art, and without the need and compulsion to maintain past standards of excellence, Modernist art would be impossible

Postscript (1978) by Clement Greenberg from http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/modernism.html

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 and 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.”