Modernist Painting
By Clement Greenberg
(originally published in Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1963)
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.
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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.