Modernist Painting

Modernist Painting. A term used by Clement Greenberg to describe what he regarded as the mainstream of painting since Manet—painting that openly acknowledges its physical nature as a flat surface. Greenberg discussed the term in his essay ‘Modernist Painting', first published in 1960 and frequently reprinted. He writes: ‘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. Manet's paintings became the first Modernist ones by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the surfaces on which they were painted … Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture, one sees a Modernist painting 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.’ In Art in Theory 1900–1990 (1992), Charles Harrison and Paul Wood write that ‘More than any other single text in English, this essay has come to typify the Modernist critical position on the visual arts … At the time of its publication Greenberg was closely engaged with the painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, whose form of abstract painting he was soon to label “ Post-Painterly Abstraction”. The essay can be read as a form of response to this work … and as preparing a position for it as the most advanced outcome of an unquestionable historical development.’