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Beginning with Edouard Manet, artists progressively abandoned the illusion of depth achieved through linear perspective. They exchanged the Renaissance concept of mimesis for an ideated notion of flatness in which figure and ground, shape and field seem to merge indissolubly on the canvas. This affirmation of the flatness of the picture plane became a distinguishing characteristic of Modernist painting.
In the formalist tradition of art criticism, flatness is inseparable from aesthetic value, or what Clement Greenberg—formalism’s leading voice—defined as “quality.” This aspect of Greenberg’s doctrine has been the most polemical in recent critical reevaluations of his work, but nonetheless his definition of painting’s reduction to flatness is still the most complete. Greenberg applied the Kantian model of self-definition to support his view that each art must isolate and make explicit that which is unique to the nature of its medium. The “irreducible essence” of pictorial art, he wrote in his 1965 essay “Modernist Painting,” is the coincidence of flattened color with its material support: “Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no other art, and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.”
Greenberg championed a narrow lineage of artists who insistently asserted two-dimensionality. He credited Manet with creating the first Modernist paintings because they declared the restricted space of the picture plane so frankly. Greenberg included Paul Cézanne because the placement and shape of the flat brushmarks in his paintings recall the shape of the flat rectangle on which they were placed. Cézanne, and the Cubists after him, also solved the passage from the contour of an object to its inhabited space without violating the integrity of the flat continuum of the picture surface. He described Piet Mondrian as the flattest of all easel painters, while he identified Jackson Pollock’s strength as deriving from the tension inherent in the constructed, re-created flatness of the surface. Greenberg concluded his retrospective account with the Color Field painters, whose technique of staining the weave of the canvas visibly weds figure and ground. His list stops short of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings on the grounds that they pushed painting so far into the third dimension that they verged on becoming “arbitrary objects”—and therefore sacrificed their “quality.”
LISA DENNISON
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See Paul Cézanne,
Bibémus
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