Vol. 64 No. 2 1997 - page 279

ART AND LITERATURE
279
of art-which has not stopped a great many serious, gifted, powerful
painters from apparently trying see how much they can leave out of a pic–
ture and still have something expressive and interesting to look at. (I am
oversimplifying, of course.) Greenberg discussed architecture very little,
but his reductionist model certainly works for the Modern Movement's
fierce antipathy to ornament, its insistence on the revelation of structural
means for their own sake, its much-quoted dictums "less is more" and
"form follows function."
Greenberg was generalizing from his experience, describing what he
had seen, not prescribing what he thought modernist art should be. That
his reading of modernist painting should be reduced to the single word
"flatness," chiefly by his detractors, probably has to do with the persua–
siveness of the metaphor he offers for his observations. In a well-known
passage, Greenberg compares our experience of tradi tional art to looking
through a proscenium into a stage. "Modernism has rendered this stage
shallower and shallower until now its backdrop has become the same as its
curtain, which has now become all that the painter has to work on."
Social historians of art tend to see the formal manifestations
Greenberg observed as a response to a particular experience of modernity,
to the emerging phenomenon of life
in
an industrialized, increasingly lit–
erate, increasingly middle class world with new kinds of spectacles and
technology. Some take issue with his notion of modernism as a quest for
narrow certainties. For
T.].
Clark, for example, modernist painting's sub–
stitution of discontinuous, flattened passages of color for the smooth,
unbroken transitions of illusionist modeling has nothing to do with a
search for a "pure" art faithful to the inherent characteristics of its medi–
um, but instead reflects a growing taste for uncertainty, for the disjunctive.
Clark doesn't deny the increasing flatness of modernist paintings, but ques–
tions the meaning of the phenomenon, asking, for example, why Parisian
painters in the second half of the ninteenth century should suddenly
become receptive to the compositional strategies suggested by Japanese and
popular French prints of the day, instead of continuing to regard them as
curiosities that had nothing to do with the goals of painting as preached
by the official Academy.
Michael Fried offers ·yet another model of modernism having to do
not with flatness, but with frank revelation of material means, process, con–
ception, and even intention.
There's general agreement that modernism is an act of rejection, not
of the great tradition of Western art, but of the nineteenth century
Academy's debased version of past excellences. Part of modernism's oppo–
sition to the Academy, with its stringent rules and codified standards, took
the form of a new inclusiveness. Manet's generation drew on sources rang–
ing from the Renaissance to eighteenth century prints openly and with
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