Modern Art: New York School

 Introduction to Modern Art 26/4/04 – New York School

The centre for art shifted from Paris to New York with the advent of the second world war and artists moving abroad. These artists included Marcel Durham and Man-Ray. In fact, nearly every major surrealist moves from Paris to NY during the 1930’s and WWII.

Slide 1: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (Readymade, 1917).
Duchamp_Fountain

Duchamp (French) and Picabia (Spanish) moved to NY in 1913, because of the war and because of the Armory Show. 1,600 works of early modern art were displayed for the first time.

Man-Ray is American and links up with Duchamp and Picabia. A little Dada cell starts in NY in 1916.

Slide 2: Francis Picabia, I See Again in Memory my Dear Udnie (c.1914).
Picabia_I_see_again_in_memory_my_dear_Udnie_1914

Outside NY in 1918-1919 there is a Matisse and another show but the art activity is mainly concentrated in NY at this time. But there are no galleries, no bars, and no dealers in the 1920s, this all changed in the 1930s.

Grant Wood American Gothic 1930, images of small town life in America, naturalistic, almost photographic.

Slide 3: Grant Wood, American Gothic (1930).

Wood_American_Gothic_1930

Slide 4: John Steuart Curry, Kansas Pastoral (Kansas Murals, 1937-42).
Curry_sketch_for_Kansas_Pastoral_1937

Cotton Loading and Kansas Pastoral. Benton is Jackson Pollock’s teacher. Is there social content? Are the pictures ironic? It was the Great Depression at the time.

Works Progress Association was the Roosevelt funding for art in the 1930-1931 New Deal. Traditionalism about scene, distortion, surrealist and pointillist techniques used. Informed by a general notion of what the avant garde has allowed.

Slide 5: Thomas Hart Benton, Cotton Loading (1928).
Benton_Cotton_Loading_1928

Slide 6: Thomas Hart Benton, America Today: Deep South (1930).
Benton_Steel_from_America_Today_murals_1930

Slide 7: Jackson Pollock, Going West (1 934-5).
Pollock_Going_West_1934

Early Pollock, Going West. Expressionism. Can Pollock paint that well? Is that important?

1930-31 Roosevelt was told about three Mexican artists who were painting murals on buildings on Mexico and they had come to the US and painted a mural in the NY Stock Exchange.

Roosevelt decides to set up a government department afterwards called “The Project” by artists.

Leger arrives in NY in the 1930s and paints some abstract murals. He is dazzled by the NY scene.

Slide 8: Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry, (Detroit Institute of Arts, north wall, 1932-3).
Rivera_Detroit_Industry_1932

Slide 9: Work in progress on Orozco’s Dartmouth College frescoes (photograph, c.1932).
Orozco_Frescoes_Dartmouth_College_detail_1932

Slide 10: Willem de Kooning, Study for NY World’s Fair Mural, ‘Medicine’ (1937).(image not found)

de Kooning was also involved in large scale projects.

WPA (Works Progress Association) meant that artists got paid and could meet and galleries were set by. This resulted in an explosion in the 1930s.

(Steiglitz 291 gallery NY earlier was a one off in WWI).

Picasso’s flat abstract paintings were not completely abstract. Major modernists Picasso, Klee, Kandinsky were shown in the magazine “Cahier D’Art” (Art Journal) which was read in the US. Gorky is an important artist as he is so aware of current trends in Europe.

Slide 11: Pablo Picasso, The Studio(1927-8).
Picasso_The_Studio_1927-1928

Slide 12: Arshile Gorky, Organisation (1936).
Gorky_Composition_1936

Early Rothko is still an art of the city and Pollock’s White Horses is pretty tame stuff. There were no masterpieces from Pollock early on, maybe he was just a poor figurative artists?

Slide 13: Mark Rothko, Subway Scene (1938).

Rothko_Subway_Scene_1938

Slide 14: Jackson Pollock, Landscape with White Horses (1 934-8).(image not found)

Slide 15: Photograph of Victor Brauner, Jacques Herold, and Marcel Duchamp (1942).(image not found)

Photograph of Marcel Duchamp leaving by boat as he had contacts. Brauner and Herold did not and were left in France, and joined the French resistance (the maquis).

Matta’s removal of the horizon line creates an abstract world, one of the major influences, same age as Pollock but with a perfect knowledge of (his is from Chile) Surrealism and automatic writing.

Masson automate drawing by hanging a pen from a rope

Slide 16: Matta, Here Sir Fire, Eat! (1942).
Matta_Here_Sir_Fire_Eat_1942

Slide 17: Andre Masson, Delire Vegetal (drawing, 1924).
Masson_La_bougie_allumee_1924

Max Ernst 1942 – four years before Pollock.

Slide 18: Max Ernst, Drawing (1942).

Ernst_The_Antipope_1942

Duchamp mile of twine installations. Motherwell also displayed is the 1942 exhibition. See Artists in Excile photograph with so many famous artists.

See development of de Kooning from 1946 to 1952 Woman II.

Figurative v. abstract. Surrealists are not abstract. Kooning’s work “screams its painterly presence in your face”.

Slide 19: Photograph of Duchamp’s twine installation for ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ (1942).
Duchamp_twine_installation_1942

Slide 20: ‘Artists in Exile’ (photograph, 1942).
Artists_in_Exile_1951

The irascibles, New York, 1951.

Top row, left to right: William de Kooning, Adolf Gottlieb, Ad Reinhart, Hedda Sterne. Middle row: Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clifford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley WalkerTomlin. Seated: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko

Slide 21: Photograph of Willem de Kooning in his studio (c.1
Kooning_in_his_studio_with_Woman_I_1952

Slide 22: Willem de Kooning, of Hearts (1946).
Kooning_Queen_of_Hearts_1946

Slide 23: Willem de Kooning, Woman II (1952).
Kooning_Woman_II_1952

Gorky – an Armenian American. The last major artist to join the surrealists. Works were given titles by friends. Pleasant, organic images, painterly. gestural style (an important phrase, e.g. “After World War II, America emerged as a great world leader and New York replaced Paris as the art center of the Western world. A group of New York artists called Abstract Expressionists captured the speed, energy, and power of American life with a new way of painting. Their spontaneous, gestural style, known as action painting, often revealed the raw physical vigor of the creative process. The application of the paint became their subject, as they slashed, spattered, spilled, and splashed it onto their canvases. Soon younger artists flocked to New York to become part of the New York School.)

Mason printings are also organic with leaves and insects, although they look different.

Gorky was not his real name, he “stole” the name to create an image like many artists he was concerned with self-image.

Importance of Greek myth in surrealism in the 1930s and 40s, e.g. the name Pasiphae and Tiresias.

Large Jungian group in NY. Pollock went through psychoanalysis.

Slide 24: Arshile Gorky, One Year the Milkweed (1944).

Gorky_one_year_the_milkweed_1944

Slide 25: Arshile Gorky, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb (1944).
Gorky_The_Liver_is_the_Cocks_Comb_1944

Slide 26: Jackson Pollock, Moon Woman (1942).
Pollock_Moon_Woman_1942

Heavily textured pointing Pasiphae, Eyes in the Heat 1946 getting close to his mature style, also heavily impastoed. He is still using the title to guide the viewer, e.g. you tend to look for eyes. He stops naming soon after this. 1947 mature style in “Full Fathom Five”. Horizontality and gravity. Rauschenberg shows his work on the floor but not Pollock.

Slide 27: Jackson Pollock, Pasipha' (1943).

Pollock_Pasiphae_1943

The daughter of Helios and Perse, and wife of King Minos. She was the mother of Glaucus, Andogeus, Phaedra, and Ariadne. When Minos had the misfortune of insulting Poseidon, the god kindled a passionate love in Pasiphae for a bull. She had Daedalus design a construction so that she could mate with the bull, and thus she became the mother of the Minotaur.

Slide 28: Jackson Pollock, Eyes in the Heat (1946).

Pollock_Eyes_in_the_Heat_1946

Slide 29: Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five (1947).
Pollock_Full_Fathom_Five_1947

Slide 30: Photograph of Jackson Pollock in his studio.
Pollock_in_his_studio

Lavender Mist and Autumn Rhythm are two of his best works. (Twomby’s work seems to breach aesthetics completely but Pollock is still aesthetic).

Slide 31: Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist (1950).
Pollock_Lavender_Mist_1950

Slide 32: Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (1950).
Pollock_Autumn_Rhythm_Number_30_1950

Rothko’s Tiresias.

“Tiresias was the son of Everes and the nymph Chariclo; he was a blind prophet, the most famous soothsayer of ancient Greece. The most famous account of the origin of his blindness and his prophetic talent is as follows. When Tiresias was walking in the woods one day, he came upon two great serpents copulating; he struck them with his staff, and was thereupon transformed into a woman. Seven years later, she/he passed by the same place and came upon the same two serpents copulating; she/he struck them again with the staff and was turned back into a man. Some time later, Zeus and Hera were arguing over who had more pleasure in sex, the man or the woman: Zeus said it was the woman, while Hera claimed men got more pleasure from the act. To settle the argument, they consulted Tiresias, since he had experienced life as both sexes, and Tiresias sided with Zeus. In her anger, Hera struck Tiresias blind. Since Zeus could not undo the act of another deity, he gave Tiresias the gift of prophecy in compensation. Another account says that Tiresias accidentally saw Athena naked, and she covered his eyes with her hands, thus rendering him blind. When Tiresias’ mother Chariclo asked Athena to restore her son’s sight, the goddess could not undo her own action but gave him the gift of prophecy as compensation. There are many tales about individual prophecies of Tiresias: he predicted the manner of Narcissus’ death; he tried to warn Oedipus of the rashness of that king’s inquiries about his parents; he predicted that the sacrifice of Menoeceus, son of Creon, would permit the forces of Eteocles to repulse the army of the Seven Against Thebes. Tiresias eventually died from drinking from the spring Tilphussa, but even after death his shade was able to offer valuable prophecy to the hero Odysseus.”), suggests precognition, an interest of surrealists.

Slide 33: Mark Rothko, Tiresias (1946).

Rothko_Multiform_1948

In 1947 with Number 26 he moved on from surrealism, reinvigorates modernism with pre-surrealist abstraction. Untitled 1948.

Slide 34: Mark Rothko, Number 26 (1947).
Rothko_Number_17_1947

Slide 35: Mark Rothko, Untitled (1 948-9).
Rothko_Untitled_1948

Seagram murals (most artists by late 1940s were using mural size canvases). Meant to look at Rothko close to. Spiritual religions aspect to work. Were painted (Seagram in Tate) for a restaurant but he went off the idea and finished them for the Tate.

Barnet Newman, Rhinehardt are other artists.

Slide 36: Mark Rothko, Ochre and Red on Red (1954).
Rothko_Ochre_and_Red_on_Red_1954

Slide 37: Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow (1956).(image not found)

Slide 38: Mark Rothko, Untitled (1958).

Slide 39: Jasper Johns, False Start (1959).
Johns_False_Start_1959

 

Critic Clement Greenberg is very important. Greenburg and his description of modernism from 1939, “Modernist Painting” 1960, 6-7 pages. A new bohemia, 1840-1850 in France, Courbet and Manet created an art outside of academic art. Followed by Impressionism, Post-Impressionism. Picked up by Fauvists and Cubism, Greenberg then hops over surrealism as it does not fit he jumps to Abstract Expressionism to create a linear artistic development towards a greater and greater flattening and abstraction. His “Michelangelo” is Jackson Pollock.

Leo Castello 1958 gallery showed Johns and Rauschenberg had content reappearing followed by Pop Art, which upset Greenberg so for him modern art ends in 1960 and we get postmodernism (covered in 2 weeks).

Modernist Painting

Clement Greenberg (1960)

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 criticise 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 19th century wore on, it entered many other fields. A more rational justification had begun to be demanded of every formal 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 idea 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 by 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 into 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 is in its latest phase and 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 suffices 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 complimentary 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. What 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 14th 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 become 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 modelling 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 modelling, 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 else 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 re-revised. New risk have been taken with all these norms, not only in the interests of expression but also in order to exhibit 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.

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 at 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 later 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 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 travelled through, literally or figuratively, only with the eye.

The latest abstract painting tries to fulfil the Impressionist insistence on the optical as the only sense that a completely and quintessentially pictorial art can invoke. Realizing this, one begins to realize that the Impressionists, or at least the Neo-Impressionists, were not altogether misguided when the 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 Albertoi, 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 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 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 much in 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 unravelling, 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 Palaeolithic 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 masts 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.

Forum Lectures (Washington, D.C.: Voice of America), 1960; Arts Yearbook 4, 1961 (unrevised); Art and Literature, Spring 1965 (slightly revised); The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, 1966; Peinture-cahiers théoriques, no. 8­9, 1974 (titled “La peinture moderniste”); Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, 1978; Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, 1982; Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian, 1993.

 

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