be able to explain, either to our- others, what we enjoy or love; it expands our u capaciy for eeperience. ” 18. Modernist Painting Seturdey Evening Past, August 1950; Adsenar: ofthe Mind, ed Richard Thruelsen and John Kobler, 1960 (uncevised), includes more than art and literature. By now it ie whole of what ace of Modernism characteristic methods of a itself, not in to entrench it of competence. Kant used logic to es- ic, and while he withdrew much from logic was lefe all the more secure in what ‘fnition, but as the 19th century wore on, it entered many other fields. A more rational justification had begun smanded of every formal sociavail ieself of Kantian, immanent, criticisen At frst glance the arcs mighe seem to c religions. Having been denied by the Enlightenment all tasks they could take seriously, they looked as though they were going to be assimilated to enter. faiament pure and simple, and entertainment itself looked as though it were going to be assimilated, like religion, to ther- apy. The arts could save themselves from this leveling down only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they pro- vided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity. Each art, it turned out, had to perfor oon its own account. What had to be that which was unique and ieredacib! also that which was unique and irredi each particular art. Each art had to determine, chrough its own operations and works, the effects exclusive ro itself. By doing so it would. co 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 which could demonstration nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to éliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effec that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the me- dium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered ‘meant self- } and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts be- self-definition with a vengeance. Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, us- {ng are to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art, The limitations that constitute the medium of paint. ing—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 ot rectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be ‘garded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly, Manet’s became the frst Modernist pictures by vireue of the frankeness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which ‘they were painted. The Impressionists, in Manet’s wake, ab- 86 "B and glazes, to leave the eye under no doube as to the fact that the colors they used were made of aint thar came from tubes or pots. Cézanne sacrificed verisi- militude, or correctness, in order to ft 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 ex. The enclosing shape of the piceure was OF norm, thae was shared with the are of ‘norm and a means shared not only with with sculpeure. Because fatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art, Modernist ‘caved itself ro fatness as it did to nothing else. s had sensed that it was necessary to pre- the integrity of the picture plane: that is, Presence of flatness underneath and of three-dimensional space. The n involved was essen e success of | iced to the success of all pictorial are. The Modernists have neither avoided nor resolved this contradic. tion; rather, they have reversed its terms. One is made aware of the facness of their pictures before, instead of after, beings itself, one sees a Modernist picture as a picture ftst. This is, of course, the best way of seeing any kind of picture, Old bandoned the representation of recognizable ‘What it has abandoned in principle isthe representat ‘kind of space that recognizable objects can inhabit. Abstractness, or the non figurative, ‘not proved to be an altogether neces- ism of pictorial at, even though artists as eminent as Kandins Mondrian have thought s such, representation, or illustration, does not attain the ‘uniqueness of pictorial arc; what does do so is the associations 87of things represented. All recognizable entities (including pic- themselves) exist in three-dimensional space, and the barest suggestion of secogaizable entity suffices to call up ing | two-dimensionaliy ‘which is the guarantee of painting's independence asan art. Fos, as has already been said, htee-dimensi is the province of sculpture. To achieve autonomy, painting has had above all ro divest itself of everything ic might share with sculpture, and it is in its effore to do this, and not so much—I repeat. fo exclude the representational or literary, that painting, has made itself abstract Ac the same time, however, Modernist painting shows, pre- cisely by its resistance to the sculptural, how femly attached it remains to tradition beneath and beyond all appearances to the contrary. For the resistance to the sculptural dates far back before che advent of Modernism. Western painting, in so far as ic is naturalistic, owes a great debt to sculpture, which the beginning how to shade and model for the relief, and even how to dispose that illusion in a complementary illusion of deep space. Yee some of the greatest feats of Western painting are due to the efort it has made over the las four centuries to rid itself of the sculptural. Starting in Venice in the 16th century and continuing in Spain, Bel. gium, and Holland in the 17¢h, that effort was carried on av fics in che name of color. When David, inthe 18th century, ‘tied to revive sculptural painting, it was, in part, to save ictotial arc from the decorative flattening out that the em. Phasis on color seemed to induce. Yet the strength of David's ‘own best pictures, which are predominantly his informal ones, dies as much in their color as in anything else. And Ingres, his faithful pupil, though he subordinated color far more consis. Finny than did David, executed portraits that were among the Alaccest, lease sculptural paintings done in the West by & sox Dhisticated artist since che r4th century. Thus, by the middle Of the roth century, all ambicious tendencies ia painting had converged amid their differences, in an anti-sculptural direction, Modernism, as well as continuing this direction, has mede 88 i more conscious of itself. With Manet and the Impressionists the question stopped being defined as one of color versus dren ing and became one of purely optical experience agtinst op. fical experience as revised or modified by tactile association, Xe was in the name of che purely and literally optical, noe an the name of color, chat the Impressionists set themselves cn undermining shading and mo and Cimabue—so flat indeed chat it ould hardly contain recognizable images. In the meantime the other cardinal norms of the att of Painting had begun, with the onset of Modernism, co undergo & revision that was equally thorough if not as spectecular, ie Would take me more time than is at my disposal to show hon the norm of the picture's enclosing shape, oF frame, wes loon saed) then tightened, then loosened once again, and isolated, ened once more, by successive generations of Modesnist painters. Or how the norms of finish and paint tex, Accounts for the radical simplifications that are also to he econ in the very latest abstract painting, as well as for the radical complications that are also seen in Neither extreme is a marter of caprice or arbitrariness. On {he contrary, the more closely the norms ofa discipline become efined, the les fieedom they are ape to permit in many dives, {ions. The essential norms or conventions of painting are ae ihe same time the limiting conditions with which a picture ‘must comply in order to be experienced as @ picture. Moder, 89 ane ee ee aeism bas found that these limits can be pushed back indefinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbi, trary object; but it has also found char the farther back these limits are pushed the more ex they have to be observed black lines and colored rec- tangles of « Mondrian painting seem hardly enough to make a picture out of, yet they impose the picture's framing shape 23. new force and completeness by echo- ly. Far from incurring the danger of ss, Mondrian’s art proves, as time passes, almost too red, almost too tradition- and convention-bound in Certain respects; once we have gotten used to its utter abstract. ‘ess, we realize that ic is more conservative in ies color, for instance, as well asin its subservience to the frame, than the last paintings of Mone It is understood, I hope, that in plotting out the rationale of Modernist painting I have had to simplify and exaggerate The flatness cowards which i ion that suggests a kind of third dimension. Only now it is « strictly pictorial, strictly optical third dimension. The Old Masters created an of space in depth that one could imagine oneself walking inte, bbut the analogous illusion created by the Moder can only be seen into; can be traveled through, figuratively, only with the eye. The latest abstract painting tries to fulfill che Impressionist insistence on the optical as the only sense that a completely ists, were not alt they flirted with science. ‘turns out, has found its fullest expression in in philosophy, and when it began to be af latter was brought closer in real spirit to sc ever before—closer than it had been by Alberti, Uccello, Piero 90 della Francesca, or Leonardo in the Renaissance. ‘That visual act should confine itself exclusively t0 whet is given in vis. Sxperience, and make no reference to anything given in any other order of experience, is « notion whose only justification lies in scientific consistency. wethod alone asks, or might ask, that a situation exactly the same terms as that in which it is kind of consistency promises nothing in the way of aesthetic quality, and ehe fact that the best act of ‘he last seventy ot eighty years approaches closer and closer £0 Such consistency does nor show the contrary. From the point of view of at in itself, its convergence with science happens to. » and neither are nor science really gives ot assures the other of anything more than it ever did. What theit 48 a historical face. Te 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 and never a topic of theory. Much is heard about programs in con: ‘nection wich Modernist art, but there has actually been fat lees of the programmatic in Modernist than in Renaissance or Aca. demic psinting. 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 anything else. And it has taken the accumulation, over de- cades, of good deal of personal painting to reveal the general tical tendency of Modernist painting. No artist was, or sve of it, nor could any artise ever work freely in awareness of it. To this extent—and it is a great extenr—are Bets cartied on under Modernism in much the same way as before,And I cannot insist enough that Modernism bas never meant, and does not mean now, anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution, an unraveling, of tradi- tion, but it also means ies further evo continues the past without gap o: break, end up it will never cease being in past. The making of pictures has been controlled, since ic first began, by all the norms I have mentioned. ‘The Paleolithic paincer or engraver could disregard the norm of the frame and treat the surface in a literally sculpeural way only because he made images rather than pictures, and worked on a sup- port—a rock wall, « bone, a horn, of 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 fla surface, and the deliberate circumscribing and limiting of it. This deliberateness is precisely what Mod- ‘rnist 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 theo- retical demonstrations. It can be said, rather, that it happens 10 convert theoretical possibilities into empirical ones, i ing which it tests many theories about art for their to the actual practice and actual experience of art, In this re- spect alone can Modernism be considered subversive. Certain factors we used to think essential ro the making and experi- cencing 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 farther fact that this demonstration has left most of our old value judgments intact only makes it the more conclusive. Modera- ‘may have had something to do with the revival of the rutations of Uccello, Piero della Francesca, El Greco, Georges de la Tour, and even Vermeer; and Modernism certainly con- firmed, if it did not start, che revival of Giotto’s reputation; bur ic has not lowered thereby the standing of Leonerdo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Rembrande, or Watteau, What Modernism has shown is that, though the past did appreciate these masters justly, it often gave wrong ot irrelevant reasons for doing so. 92 some ways this situation is hardly changed today. Art ism 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 chan ro ism or art history. It belongs to journalism—and to the complex from which so many journalists and jour- intellectuals suffer in our day—that each new phase of Modernist are 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 ex- pected 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 abour it. And each time, this expectation has been disep- pointed, as the phase of Modernist art in question finally takes its place in the intel Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Are is—among other things—continuity, and unthinkable without it. Lacking the past of art, and the need and compulsion co maintain its stan- Modernist art would lack both substance Foram Lectures (Washington, D. C.: Voice of America), 1960; Arts Ys (unrevised); Art and Literature, Spring 1965 revised); The New Art: A Critial Antholo ‘Ars and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, cd, Francis Pascina and Charles Harrison, 1982 1, In 1978, Greenberg added « postscripe tom sprinting of "Modernist aia z cocks anthology The New Art (1966) rane fo take this chance co correct an erro, one of interpretation and sot of fact. Many ‘hough by no means al ing a postion adopeed hat what he describes he also advocates. This 93