Modernist painting

Modernist painting

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 selfcritical
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 selfcriticism,
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
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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 selfhttp://
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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 twodimensionality
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.
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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.
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
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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
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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
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justification.
Postscript (1978)
The above appeared first in 1960 as a pamphlet in a series published by the Voice of America. It had
been broadcast over that agency’s radio in the spring of the same year. With some minor verbal changes
it was reprinted in the spring 1965 number of Art and Literature in Paris, and then in Gregory Battcock’s
anthology The New Art (1966).
I want to take this chance to correct an error, one of interpretation an not of fact. Many readers, though
by no means all, seem to have taken the ‘rationale’ of Modernist art outlined here as representing a
position adopted by the writer himself that is, that what he describes he also advocates. This may be a
fault of the writing or the rhetoric. Nevertheless, a close reading of what he writes will find nothing at all
to indicate that he subscribes to, believes in, the things that he adumbrates. (The quotation marks around
pure and purity should have been enough to show that.) The writer is trying to account in part for how
most of the very best art of the last hundred-odd years came about, but he’s not implying that that’s how
it had to come about, much less that that’s how the best art still has to come about. ‘Pure’ art was a useful
illusion, but this doesn’t make it any the less an illusion. Nor does the possibility of its continuing
usefulness make it any the less an illusion.
There have been some further constructions of what I wrote that go over into preposterousness: That I
regard flatness and the inclosing of flatness not just as the limiting conditions of pictorial art, but as
criteria of aesthetic quality in pictorial art; that the further a work advances the self-definition of an art,
the better that work is bound to be. The philosopher or art historian who can envision me — or anyone at
all — arriving at aesthetic judgments in this way reads shockingly more into himself or herself than into
my article.

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