A RT

from Modernity

Modernism, flatness and

form
 When was Modernism?

Mid 19th Century France to American Abstract

Expressionism and Post Painterly Abstraction in the
1960’s ??

Modernism
c 1850 ? c 1965 ?

Post-modernism ?
 This is ‘modernism’
Something happened to art at the turn of the century and in
the decades that followed, and the world has never been
the same. The excitement in the air then was intense: all
Europe (and eventually America) was breathless with the
new directions and the wild risks artists were taking.
Painters, poets, sculptors, architects, novelists, and
composers were drastically changing the look, the sound,
the very meaning of art.
 Artists were no longer merely skillful delineators of the
visible world, they were now the creators of, and guides
to, a completely new realm. This mystical role of the
artist was echoed by the Dadaist Hugo Ball in his diaries
written between 1910 and 1921: "When we said
Kandinsky and Picasso, we meant not painters, but
priests; not craftsmen, but creators of new worlds and new
paradises."‘
 ‘Make it new’

Beginning of
Contemporary Art

1885
Clement Greenberg. Modernist
Painting. 1960

‘Modernist Painting oriented itself

to flatness as it did to nothing else’
 Modernism: progress towards
abstraction.

Edouard Manet. Bar at the Folie Bergeres. 1881-2

Courtauld Institute. Oil on Canvas. 96 x 130cm
 Henri Matisse. The Dessert (Harmony in red)
1908. Oil on canvas. The Hermitage. 180-220cm
Wassily Kandinsky. Study for composition No 7.
1913
Gustav
Klimt

Elisabeth
Bachofen-
Echt

c1914

Geneva

Oil on canvas
180 x 128cm
Pablo Picasso. Seated Nude 1909-10.
Oil on canvas. Tate Britain. 921-730cm
Mondrian, Piet. Composition with Yellow,
Blue, and Red. 1921. Tate Gallery. Oil on
canvas. 72.5 x 69 cm
Jackson Pollock. One: Number 31. 1950.
MOMA New York. Oil and enamel on canvas.
Morris Louis. Number 99. 1959. Cleveland
Museum of Art. Acrylic on canvas.251 x
360cm
Kenneth Noland. Bloom. 1960. Dusseldorf.
Acrylic on canvas. 1993. 170 x 171cm.
 Abstraction
and Flatness ?

Titian. Venus of
Urbino. 1538

Edouard Manet. Olympia. 1863-5 Musee d’Orsay Paris.

Oil on canvas
Georges Grosz

The Pillars of
Society

1926

Berlin

Oil on canvas
200 x 108cm
 Salvador Dali. Metamorphosis of
Narcissus. 1937 Oil on canvas. Tate
Britain. 510 x 780cm
Marcel Duchamp
L.H.O.O.Q. Rectified
Ready Made. Pencil on
Postcard.
1941-2
Progress towards abstraction
Alfred J Barr. 1936
(Drct. Of M.O.M.A. New York)
 Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’ is a
dominant account of modernism, which
builds on the formalist theories of key
19th and 20th century writers, who
believed that aesthetic experience was
art’s predominant aim and value, and
explained the development of modern art
as a progression towards an increasingly
pure abstraction, characterised by a
focus on form
 Modernism’s terminology
• Modernism
• Form
• Formalism
• Self criticism (self referential)
• Abstraction
• Aesthetic experience
‘The self-criticism of Modernism’
Clement Greenberg. 1960

‘The essence of Modernism lies, as I

see it, in the use of the characteristic
methods of a discipline, to criticise
the discipline itself’
 “The use of the characteristic methods of a
discipline , to criticise the discipline itself”

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1902-04

 The self-criticism of Modernism
• The traditional notion of dance as the enactment of
a story set to a musical score; …. was purged in
preference for purely functional movement
• Brecht, concentrated on theatre as theatre, and
employed techniques to remind audiences that
they were watching an illusion

• Meecham P, Sheldon J. Modern art: a critical

introduction. P.2ff
 This…
• To an early twentieth century composer,
nausea is praise. A retch proved the power
of the music; it declared the ability of the
composer to overcome a century’s worth of
stale rewrites and flaccid additions to the
musical canon. The music of Arthur
Schoenberg ….made his audience ill.
 ‘By dispensing with established
musical structures and replacing
them with an impenetrable
assortment of dissonance,
atonality, and finally twelve-tone
theory, Schoenberg uprooted
classical music’

http://www.scribd.com/doc/311958/Mo
dern-and-Postmodern-Music
 “ Away! Let us break out since we cannot much
longer restrain our desire to create finally a new
musical reality, with a generous distribution of
resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins,
pianos, double basses and plaintive organs. Let
us break out ”

Luigi Russolo
The Art of Noises
1913
 What is formalism ?

• Formalism is a particular method of

analysis
• It refers to an approach that a writer might
take
• “an abstract painting is perhaps the most
impressive manifestation of pure form”
(Panofsky, 1940)
 What is Form in painting ?
• Is not content

• Is the artist’s visual

language: line, shape,
colour, tone, shade
(light and dark)

• Is the source of a
Kantian aesthetic
response
 Form in painting?

• Colour
• Line
• Space
• Tone
• Shade
• Depth
• Paint
• Frame
• Canvas
• Surface plane (the flat surface)
 Aesthetic pleasure

‘Ever so many factors thought to be

essential to the making of art have been
shown to be so by the fact that
Modernist art has been able to
dispense with them and yet continue
to provide the experience of art in all
its essentials’
 ‘The experience of art in all its
essentials’

Immanuel Kant. 1724-1804

Beauty … a feeling of delight…what simply
pleases

‘Flowers, free patterns, lines aimlessly

intertwining technically termed foliage
have no signification, depend upon no
definite concept, and yet please’
Kant. The Critique of Judgement. 1790 Section
1. Book 1. SS4.
 So what should painting be?
Realistic, illusionist 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 pigment – were treated by
the Old Masters as negative factors that could be
acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Modernist
painting has come to regard these same limitations as
positive factors that are to be acknowledged openly.
 Clement Greenberg
“What had to be exhibited and made explicit was
that which was unique and irreducible not only in
art in general, but also in each particular art. Each
art had to determine through the operations peculiar
to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself

Modernist Painting. 1960

 What distinguishes painting from
sculpture, photography….?
• Colour
• Line
• Space
• Tone
• Shade
• Depth
• Paint ?
• Frame
• Canvas
• Surface plane (the flat surface)
“….Flatness, two dimensionality was the only
condition painting shared with no other art”
Greenberg 1960
Kenneth Noland Morris Louis
Bloom. 1960 Number 99. 1959
 A tradition of art criticism
• Immanuel Kant. 1724-1804. Philosopher. Wrote
The Critique of Judgement.1790. A founder of
modern aesthetics
• Roger E. Fry. 1866-1934. Art critic, aesthetic
philosopher and painter.
• A.Clive H. Bell. 1881-1964. Critic; English
literature and art.
• Clement Greenberg. 1909-94. American art
critic.
 Roger Fry
Let us see how the artist passes from the stage of merely gratifying our demand for
sensuous order and variety to that where he arouses our emotions.....rhythm of
line....mass....space.....light and shade.....colour...the inclination to the eye of a plane
An Essay in Aesthetics. 1909
 Clive Bell

“The starting point for all systems of aesthetics must

be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion.
The objects that provoke this emotion, we call works
of art”

The Aesthetic Hypothesis. 1914

 “Formalist” criticism
• Emphasises “form”
• Emphasises the “aesthetic response” to the
visual as the core value in art
• Renders “content” subordinate to all of the
above.
• Is arguing for and supporting, a particular
kind of painting (and sculpture) specifically
that which involves a focus on form;
abstraction
 Greenberg’s ‘Modernism’
• Is valid in that a clear focus on form during the period
known as Modernism is characteristic of many paintings
• Expresses valid insights – e.g. the self critical tendencies
of modernist painting
• Is limited in that the work of the period is vastly diverse
and formalism as a method of analysis, is not universally
appropriate
• Conveniently ignores different and distinct concerns in
paintings to foreground his own theoretical imperatives
• Imposes a characteristically historical ‘progression’ on the
art of the period
• Privileges painting and particularly French painting, in a
summary history of Modernism
• Is limited in its clear set of personal preferences for a
particular kind of contemporary American painting