Which of the Folloing Painters Illustrates Clement Greenbergs Insitence on Purity in Art
Beginnings
The fence about the limitations and defining character of fine art media originated in the 18th century, when German philosopher, art critic, and dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in 1776. The championship referenced the famous classical sculpture Laocoon and His Sons (27 BCE-68CE), which depicted the myth of Laocoon and his two sons, killed by behemothic pythons sent in punishment by the gods. In his essay, Lessing viewed poetry as extending itself in fourth dimension while painting extended itself in space. He wrote, "It is an intrusion of the painter into the domain of the poet, which expert taste tin can never sanction, when the painter combines in one and the same flick ii points necessarily separate in time." Lessing felt that considering painting and sculpture were static, material objects, they could not truthfully correspond narratives that happen over time. Clement Greenberg noted Lessing'south work as being the first to recognize "the presence of a practical as well equally a theoretical confusion of the art."
By the xixthursday century, a number of implicitly modern trends developed every bit artists and critics in diverse disciplines attempted to establish the characteristics of specific fine art disciplines. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle the Western tradition had well-nigh valued representational art that served a moral and philosophical purpose, but newer, modern trends, responding to rapidly irresolute industrial societies, reflected the search for art's value outside of representation. In this quest, many began to contend that art had value in and of itself, independent of social, political, religious, or historical purposes. The art-for-fine art's-sake attitude is oft attributed to the writer Théophile Gautier who used it as the epigraph for his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), though it was besides widely employed past a number of writers, including Benjamin Constant, Victor Cousin, and Edgar Allan Poe, earlier existence adopted by the writers Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Pater.
Oftentimes artists and critics relied on the musical analogies to argue for fine art's autonomy. American-built-in artist James McNeill Whistler argued, "Art should exist contained of all clap-trap - should stand up lonely." Considering music was understood as not-representational, it offered a model for painting in its search for autonomy. To emphasize this bespeak, Whistler began titling his paintings with musical terms, such as nocturne, symphony, harmony, study, and system. Ironically, in yoking painting to music, Whistler, in fact, undermined painting's autonomy, but for him and others, their insistence on the musical analogy was a means to re-recall what painting could be. In titling his paintings, he emphasized the color and tones of his composition instead of the representational subject matter. Past naming a portrait of his mother Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1 (1871), Whistler de-emphasized the subject field matter - what is represented - and encouraged the viewer to concentrate on the formal aspects of how the subject is equanimous.
Recognizing this history, the American art critic Clement Greenberg, 1 of the well-nigh well known and respected critics in the U.S. in the 20th century, idea it was with the Impressionist painters, and in particular Édouard Manet's scandalous painting Olympia (1863), that artists began to emphasize the flatness of the pictorial plane. Greenberg noted, "Modernism [starting with Manet] used fine art to phone call attention to art." In his depiction of the prostitute as the modern-day Venus, Manet's utilise of a nighttime outline around the woman's trunk and the visibility of the brush strokes, Manet calls attention to the flatness of the picture show airplane instead of illusionistic space. For Greenberg information technology was this flatness and not the field of study matter - also with controversial socio-political implications - that fabricated it one of the almost radical paintings of its fourth dimension.
Medium Specificity and Flatness in Abstract Fine art
Later on the Impressionists, artists such as Paul Cézanne, and later the Cubists, would continue the development of mod art. In the faceted compositions of Analytical Cubism, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque created ambiguous spaces in which background and forms merged, becoming almost indistinguishable. Later, artists like Piet Mondrian took brainchild to extreme ends, creating seemingly austere compositions with only horizontal and vertical blackness lines and blocks of primary colors. The intersecting black lines that structure Mondrian's composition recall two-dimensional grids, emphasizing not simply the flatness of the pic plane just also the shape of the canvas, thus abolishing illusionistic depth.
Importantly the German-built-in creative person Hans Hofmann absorbed this modernist tradition, and when he came to the The states in the 1930s, he taught countless young artists - and Cloudless Greenberg - these ideas. His ideas that "each medium of expression has its own club of being" and his concept of "re-created flatness" were a formative influence upon Greenberg, who noted how Hofmann's lectures in 1938 and 1939 "were a crucial experience" in his being "able to come across abstruse art." For Hofmann, once an artist applied paint to a canvas, the pristine flatness of the sheet was actually destroyed, as there was now a foreground - the mark - and a groundwork - the canvass, simply once the artist "destroyed" the flatness, he or she had to "re-create" it; that is, the modernistic artist could non rely on the illusionistic depth of foreground and background, but had to proceed the focus on the surface of the sail as a identify for expression. For Greenberg, the emphasis on flatness, then, was ultimately more than than just emphasizing painting's uniqueness among the arts, simply was essential for the very possibility of expressing oneself in pigment.
It was, of grade, the Abstract Expressionist painters who quickly took this thought to heart, creating abstract compositions that emphasized the gesture or monochromatic swaths of color, which the artists insisted, were expressive of their own experiences, thoughts, and feelings.
Cloudless Greenberg's Championing of Modern Painting
Though earlier trends informed Medium Specificity and Flatness, the concepts became primary concerns among artists and critics after Globe War II. Greenberg divers medium specificity as "the unique and proper surface area of competence of each art [that] coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium." In other words, each fine art should concentrate on what set information technology apart from the other arts. He also called the concept medium purity, though he often used "pure" in scare quotes to indicate that accented purity was impossible.
To accomplish its independence as a medium, painting needed to be abstract, equally Greenberg wrote, "to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture, and it is in its effort to exercise this, and not and then much - I echo - to exclude the representational or literary, that painting has made itself abstract." In moving abroad from representational subject thing, painting would no longer endeavor to create an illusionistic three-dimensional infinite that ane could imagine inhabiting. Instead, in pursuing abstract forms, painting would emphasize its flatness.
Flatness, or what Greenberg described as the "literal two-dimensionality" of the sheet was considered the defining element of medium specificity in painting. As he noted, "flatness lone was unique and exclusive to pictorial fine art... the simply status painting shared with no other art." For Greenberg, the recent paintings of Jackson Pollock, with their swirling skeins of paint and lack of representational imagery, were the epitome of flatness. Later, he would likewise champion the works by other abstract expressionists, including Barnett Newman, Marking Rothko, and Clyfford Still, whose Color Field paintings Greenberg argued fix a new trajectory for painting.
Concepts and Styles
Flattening the Canvass Farther: Post-Painterly Abstraction
Later on formalizing his thoughts on medium specificity and flatness in his 1960 essay "Modernist Painting" and his 1962 essay "Afterward Abstract Expressionism," Greenberg's theories greatly influenced a group of artists centered in Washington D.C. The Washington Colour Schoolhouse, as it came to be known, was first described equally Post-Painterly Brainchild, from the name of a 1964 exhibition curated by Cloudless Greenberg at the Los Angeles State Museum of Art. Its practitioners, including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, emphasized the planar field of the sail. The artists used color, and not cartoon, to create and delineate simple geometric forms, and they often spoke of wanting to put pure color on the canvass to create an immediate, all at once, visual experience for the viewer. This optical experience became more of import than carrying bailiwick affair. They also ofttimes left big portions of their canvases blank and untreated, further emphasizing the shape and flatness of the physical sail. In eschewing the gestural approach of the Abstract Expressionists, their paintings seem impersonal, or at to the lowest degree not as expressive as their predecessors, just Greenberg heralded the new approach as one of "openness and clarity."
Minimalism-A New Approach to Medium Specificity
In the 1960s, a young critic and acolyte of Greenberg, Michael Fried praised the piece of work of Olitski and Noland equally well as the work of Frank Stella as exemplifying "a new illusionism [that] both subsumes and dissolves the picture-surface." According to Fried, the Post-Painterly artists used literal shapes on a flat surface in club to bring together canvas, shape and color into 1 unified whole, where each entity ceased to be independent. Put most simply, these artists achieved a complete flatness past eliminating the illusion of depth.
Frank Stella's piece of work, emphasizing the shape of flat canvass past employing precise only uniform color, minimal detail, and a cool impersonal technique, had a determinative influence on Minimalism. Several of Stella'south paintings were pregnant in this regard considering of their unique shapes. By fitting the canvas to the contours of the paintings' colors, Stella redefined the traditional support system and made paint itself the painting's form.
While Fried praised Stella's use of the shaped canvas and his accent on flatness, he felt that other artists were taking the emphasis on fine art'south materiality too far. In 1967, Fried published "Art and Objecthood," a scathing indictment of Minimalism, or what he termed "literalist" art. In his estimation artists such equally Donald Judd and Tony Smith were intentionally creating not-art. Equally he saw it, their approach exaggerated the textile object of the work, focusing on an interactive experience for the viewer that he defined as "theatrical" and the "negation of fine art." In emphasizing the object and the viewer's physical interaction with the work, the "literalists" introduced a temporal chemical element to art, adjustment it more than with the temporal experience of theater. "Art" and "objecthood" were viewed as opposing forces, and Fried felt that modern art, committedly resisted objecthood, while still emphasizing its medium specificity.
Further Developments
Greenberg'southward championing of medium specificity and flatness had an outsized influence on much postwar art and criticism, but he likewise had his detractors, including his rival critic Harold Rosenberg. Already in 1952, Rosenberg asserted, "The new American painting is not 'pure' art, since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the artful. The apples weren't brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color. They had to do so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting."
While many of the Abstruse Expressionists welcomed Greenberg's championing of them in the press, most of them, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston, cared piffling for maintaining the purity of abstract forms in their work, and by the 1950s, they had fallen out of Greenberg's favor for including elements of figuration in their work. Subsequently, other artists, notably Robert Rauschenberg refuted medium specificity past creating what he called "combines," placing everyday objects such every bit blankets, drinking glass, and miscellaneous hardware onto his painted canvases.
Critic Leo Steinberg, who was non a fan of Greenberg's formalist criticism, took the idea of flatness in an entirely new direction with his description of Rauschenberg's screen-printed collages as "flatbed picture planes." Steinberg wrote, "Rauschenberg's film plane had to become a surface to which anything reachable-thinkable would adhere. It had to be whatever a billboard or dashboard is, and everything a projection screen is, with further affinities for anything that is flat and worked over - palimpsest, canceled plate, printer'south proof, trial bare, chart, map, aerial view. Whatever apartment documentary surface that tabulates information is a relevant analogue of his picture plane - radically unlike from the transparent projection plane with its optical correspondence to man's visual field." Here, Steinberg puts a cultural spin on the idea of flatness that had circulated through the 20th century, which is not so much about the flatness of the canvas but the flat screens and surfaces that deport the images we consume on a daily basis.
During the 1960s, artists concerned with Civil Rights, the war in Vietnam, a new feminist wave, and gay rights increasingly felt that the medium specificity championed past Greenberg and Fried was not upwardly to the chore to handle the cultural seismic shifts happening in U. South. guild. Operation, Installation, and Video Fine art became more common equally artists purposefully crossed artistic boundaries, blurring the distinctions between mediums and additionally insisted on the temporal nature of the work, which Fried had decried. In his influential essay accompanying the 1977 Pictures exhibition, Douglas Crimp argued that Fried'south lament of the increasing importance placed on temporality, on the viewer's experience, came to dominate much of the art making in the last 30 years of the xxth century. In describing the likes of Cindy Sherman and Jack Goldstein, Crimp explained, "If many of these artists can exist said to have been apprenticed in the field of operation every bit it issued from minimalism, they take all the same begun to reverse its priorities, making of the literal situation and elapsing of the performed even a tableau whose presence and temporality are utterly psychologized; operation becomes just i of a number of ways of 'staging' a film."
Afterwards critics such as Due west.J.T. Mitchell continued to oppose Greenberg'due south theory. In his influential 1989 essay "Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstruse Painting and the Repression of Language," Mitchell criticizes the emphasis on the atemporal attribute of painting, its pure visuality, equally a convenient myth that needs to be left behind.
Important Essays
"Towards a Newer Laocoon"
By Clement Greenberg
Originally published in Partisan Review, 1940
With the give-and-take "Laocoon," Greenberg referenced two sources: Gotthold Lessing'south 1766 "Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of Verse and Painting" and Irving Babbit'south 1910 essay, "Laokoon: An Essay on the Defoliation of the Arts." Greenberg specially noted Lessing's piece of work every bit recognizing "the presence of a practical likewise as a theoretical confusion of the arts." While Lessing was primarily concerned with literature, Greenberg's essay undertook the disquisitional contend of medium specificity in the arts.
In tracing the history of modern painting, Greenberg notes that in the past, various fine art forms imitated the art that was most prominent. In doing so, the "subservient arts" betrayed that which was unique to them, "concealing their medium," and according to Greenberg, "A defoliation of the arts results." In this context, Greenberg stressed the importance of the "purist'due south" attitude toward fine art. He wrote that a "purist's" concern with fine art translates to "an anxiousness as to the fate of art, a business organisation for its identity. Nosotros must respect this." A desire for a "pure" form of fine art, therefore, is a want for the survival of painting and sculpture, or plastic arts, in the face of mass-produced kitsch and entertainment. Additionally, Greenberg created the foundation for ane of his more controversial positions in this essay, writing, "it is not so easy to decline the purist's assertion that the best of contemporary plastic art is abstract."
With this historical analysis, Greenberg understood abstraction every bit an "historical imperative," noting, "what I have written has turned out to be an historical apology for abstruse art." In subsequent, future writings, Greenberg would keep to explain how Abstract Expressionism, what he preferred to call "American-Blazon" Painting, was not just the dominant art form of its day just the purest art form to accept emerged in the mod era.
"Modernist Painting"
Past Clement Greenberg
Originally published in Forum Lectures (Voice of America), Washington, D. C., 1960
Analyzing Modernism within the historical continuity of fine art, Greenberg wrote, "it includes almost the whole of what is truly live in our culture" and defined it as self-critical, "the feature methods of a discipline to criticize the subject itself...to entrench it more deeply in the area of its competence."
Greenberg argued that the essential and unique chemical element in Modern painting is its flatness. As he wrote, "Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the merely condition painting shared with no other art, and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as information technology did to nothing else."
The limitations of painting, which he divers every bit "the apartment surface, the shape of the support, the properties of pigment...were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly." In dissimilarity, "Modernist painting has come to regard these same limitations as positive factors that are to be acknowledged. Manet'due south paintings became the first Modernist ones by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the surfaces on which they were painted."
He also paid close attention to Cubism every bit a defining moment for flatness in Modern art. Artists like Picasso and Braque used the canvas plane to create spatial ambivalence, a representation of class without a clear and singular perspective. Greenberg wrote, "the Cubist counter-revolution eventuated in a kind of painting ...and so flat indeed that information technology could hardly contain recognizable images."
Greenberg did concede that "the flatness towards which Modernist painting orients itself can never be an absolute flatness." He wrote, "The first mark made on a surface destroys its virtual flatness, and the configurations of a Mondrian however propose a kind of illusion of a kind of third dimension. But now it is a strictly pictorial, strictly optical third dimension." Perhaps drawing from Hans Hofmann'southward idea of "push-pull," in which forms and colors naturally shift from foreground to background based on their relationships to one another, Greenberg emphasizes the optical aspects of painting instead of its physicality.
"Art and Objecthood"
By Michael Fried
Originally published in Artforum, September, 1967
In the mid-1960s, Minimalism was seen equally an alternative to the loftier drama of Abstract Expressionism, merely Michael Fried was suspicious of Minimalism'southward foundations. Fried wrote his essay, "Art and Objecthood," in response to the work and theory of Minimalists Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Tony Smith, whom he deemed "ideologists" and "literalists." He defendant these artists of creating objects rather than autonomous works of art. With an emphasis on the viewer's physical interaction with work, literalist art demanded the viewer's attention, which Fried referred to equally its theatricality.
Fried acknowledged that Minimalists like Judd and Morris challenged the ways in which the viewer developed a relationship to the object. In his view, modern art, insisting on its autonomy, sought "to defeat or suspend its...objecthood." For Fried, art and objecthood were opposing forces, and in reveling in its objecthood, Minimalism could not exist art.
Fried as well argued "theater is at present the negation of art." His concluding points insisted on medium specificity and the separation of the arts. Fried argued, "The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their power to defeat theater," and that "art degenerates as it approaches the status of theatre."
Despite his ire for the sculptors, Fried felt that the Mail service-Painterly abstractions of Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella, were aware of the importance of "shape" in painting. Stating "a conflict has gradually emerged between shape equally a fundamental holding of objects and shape as a medium of painting," Fried felt these painters successfully dedicated the medium of painting. Unlike the literalist who viewed "shape as a given belongings of objects," these painters viewed shape as a pictorial quality and thus, following Greenberg, held to the all-of import self-criticality of the medium.
Source: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/medium-specificity-and-flatness/history-and-concepts/
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