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PARTISAN REVIEW
without enthusiasm as an architect and painting loose but conventional
watercolors. Stuart Davis was three.
In this country as in Europe, Beaux Arts grandeur still dominated
architecture, but there were glimmers of an exciting new way of thinking
about buildings. The skyscraper was a new phenomenon, both result and
cause of the way the massive masonry piling of tradi tional archi tecture was
yielding to a new, light method of constructing with iron and steel.
Forward-looking architects such as Louis Sullivan in the U.S. and
Jugendstil or Art Nouveau practitioners in Europe had begun to explore
these possibilities, as well as to rethink the role and form of ornament, sub–
stituting motifs drawn from nature and inspired by Japanese art for the
codified orders inheri ted from the classical pas t. All of this can be described
as modernism of a kind, although distinct from Modern Movement archi–
tecture (the equivalent perhaps of abstract painting) which had its birth
much later, in the 1920s.
Throughout this rapid and necessarily superficial survey of the art
world of 1896, I have used "modernism" as though it were a universally
understood term with a generally agreed upon significance. I hope you have
had no doubts about what I meant. But, despite the currency of its usage,
the defining characteristics of modernism are still being debated, even if
you restrict the question to a single discipline, such as the visual arts.
Clement Greenberg, concentrating on observable formal characteris–
tics, posited a notion of modernism as a process of self-criticism.
According to his model, each art form gradually purged itself of every–
thing not essential to it; or as he put it, each art restricted itself to its
"unique and proper competence," which, it quickly emerged, "coincided
with all that was unique to the nature of its medium." Painting jettisoned
narrative as the province of literature; it abandoned the illusion of three–
dimensional form as the proper province of sculpture. Traditional realistic
art, Greenberg declared, "had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal
art. Modernism used art to call attention to art." How? By forgoing the
fiction of illusionistic forms, textures, and space, to emphasize instead the
undeniable fact that a picture is made of stuff arranged on a flat surface.
Sculpture, for Greenberg, was more problematic; since by its very nature,
sculpture is unignorably, physically there, it had less to discard, and in fact,
a rethinking of sculptural possibilities-the substitution of open con–
structed form for the carved or modeled monolith-did not occur until
the late 1920s, not coincidentally soon after Modern Movement architec–
ture offered a definitive alternative to traditional masonry construction.
According to Greenberg's model, the ultimate modernist picture
would be a flat expanse of a single unmodulated color, something he
admitted as a possibility, although he denied it would necessarily be a work
