Urban Animals - Art Gallery of Alberta

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Program
Modernism according to Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) was an influential American art critic closely associated with
Modern art in the United States and Canada. He helped to articulate a concept of medium
specificity and championed abstraction in the visual arts. In 1940, in an influential piece in
Partisan Review, Greenberg argued that the value of art was located in its form, which is
inseparable from its content. In his first essay on modernism, written in 1960, Greenberg gave
what has been described as what may be the most elegant definition of modernism in
existence. In the essay Greenberg defined modernism as:
...the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to
subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.
According to Greenberg’s essay, all the arts, in order to not be devalued in society, had to
demonstrate that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in their own right and not
to be obtained from any other kind of activity. As a result, what had to be exhibited was not only
that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and
irreducible in each particular art.
In this process it quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of
each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. In criticizing itself,
it became art’s task to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that
might be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Through this each art would be
rendered “pure” and in this “purity” it would find the guarantee of its standards of quality.
In painting, the limitations that constitute the medium of painting - the flat surface, the shape of
the support, the properties of the pigment - were traditionally treated as negative factors that
could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. In an Old Master painting, for example, one
tends to see what is in the painting before one sees the picture - the paint itself, the works
format - itself. Traditionally artists attempted to create an illusion of space in depth that the
viewer could imagine oneself walking into. Modernism in painting reversed this. Through
stressing the flatness of the surface, the flatness of the picture plane being the only
thing unique and exclusive to pictorial art, Modernist artists created a situation where
the viewer sees a Modernist picture as a picture first. In a modernist painting, the illusion
created can only be seen into and can only be traveled through, literally or figuratively, with the
eye. In other words, the painting is an object itself, not merely a vehicle for a story or an
illusion.
Modernism in the visual arts is closely linked to the concept of formalism. Formalism is the
concept that a work’s artistic value is entirely determined by its form - the way it is made, its
purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such
as colour, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context and content. In visual art,
formalism posits that everything necessary to comprehending a work of art is contained
within the work of art. In formalist theory, the focus is on the aesthetic experience gained from
the piece.
AFA Travelling Exhibition Program, Edmonton, AB. Ph: 780.428.3830 Fax: 780.421.0479
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