Comparing modernist art and the old masters

(I have been writing this for quite some time now, so excuse inconsistent tenses and occasional excessive flowery language , I admit much of it is paraphrasing of what Greenberg said and predicted in the 60s, but with the benifit of more hindsight, I hope anyone that reads it all learns something new and valuable)

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 self-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 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 must reiterate - 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 (David is the name of revolutionary and imperial art, it would take me a thousand words to describe it properly so just take my word), 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 mamade 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.

Greenberg: "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."

Sounds like pretentious drivel, to be honest. Then again, most essays written for high school and university are.

Originally Posted by Octy

Sounds like pretentious drivel, to be honest.

Interesting.

Jeez I did my best.

Originally Posted by Octy

Then again, most essays written for high school and university are.

I actually tried to "dumb" it down for lack of a better word. I'd get laughed at if I put this in for assessment.

41 views and only one "reply", come on guys I put a lot of work into making the explanation accessible to "normal" people.

Mine was a pity post. Nobody responds to threads like these.

Maybe this forum should be re-named "Entertainment: Discuss hollywood and pop-music."

Nobody gives a crap about art anymore.

Nobody gives a crap about art anymore.

At least not about modern art.
The OP seems to try to explain the unexplainable and excuse the inexcusable.
IMHO art is to be experienced on an emotional level, not to be dissected like that.

Originally Posted by Trax

At least not about modern art.

That's because they don't understand it.

I don't mean to sound condescending and elitist. (but I am so that's the way it sounds )

Originally Posted by Trax

The OP seems to try to explain the unexplainable and excuse the inexcusable.

Not really, I simply (tried) to summarise established art theory and history of the last hundred years in a simpler and more accessible language than what is found in published essays and text books.

Originally Posted by Trax

IMHO art is to be experienced on an emotional level, not to be dissected like that.

The "whole" point of modern art is an attempt to dignify art, to answer the question of: why bother? To answer that is really is neccessary to "dissect" it so.

Should art be experienced on an emotional level? Of course, but there's so much more to it than that. There's the audacity of Pollock, the humour of O'Keefe, the self-deprication of Hirst, the restraint of Hockney, the child-like point of view of Tracey Emin. Art is life frozen in time, people need to remember that. IMO.

112 views and only two peope have posted.............that makes me a sad panda.