Notes on Schapiro, "The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art"

<strong>Notes</strong> on Schapiro, "The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art"Introduction: Definitions and QualificationsThe essay begins with a few modest definitions and qualifications. First of all, theanalysis will be limited to “modern art”. By “modern” he means that which is particularand unique to the time and place—western society, postwar, late ‘50s. “Modern art” iswork by artists responsive to the “new possibilities” and “challenges” of the time.These are as much logical, social, and cultural distinctions as they are chronological.Schapiro is a social historian who believes that human experience is shaped by thepolitical, economic, and social conditions of life. What we do, think, and make—individually and collectively—must be understood in relation to these forces. So when hetalks about “modern life” and “the present time”, he’ll pay close attention to the complexfactors that distinguish it from, and relate it to, other historical moments.Having offered a rough definition of “modern art”, he then provides a justification forlimiting his discussion to the art and medium of painting. Painting, Schapiro claims,shares many of the characteristics of modern literature, architecture, poetry, and music—its highly personal quality and its freer sense of boundaries and formal limitationscompared with pre-modern art. But painting has a special status in that it containspossibilities not found to the same degree in other arts and mediums.In the past, it was taken for granted that the role of painting was primarily to represent ordepict various aspects of the objective world. This assumption that painting was arepresentational medium was called into question and abandoned by many artists in thefirst half of the 20 th century.This radical rethinking of the essential conventions of painting produced a change incriteria and standards comparable to the well-known and contemporaneous paradigmshift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, or the change in axioms that gave rise tonew non-Euclidian geometries in the 19 th century.Schapiro acknowledges that the change in the foundation of modern painting triggered aproliferation of styles, which strikes many critics as symptomatic of social chaos. Butpoints out that this conclusion is not warranted. To see this we need a larger historicalperspective. For example, in 19 th century France, artists such as Ingres, Delacroix, andCourbet adopted different and challenging artistic styles that may have been shaped notby disorder and lack of direction, but rather by the re-emerging ideals of order, liberty, andtruth. So, Schapiro argues, something analogous took place in the 20 th century—the reemergenceof the positive and much-needed social and political values of freedom,creativity, and self-reliance.The change in art dethroned not only representation as a necessary requirementbut also a particular standard of decorum or restraint in expression which hadexcluded certain domains and intensities of feeling. The notion of the humanity ofart was immensely widened. Many kinds of drawing, painting, sculpture andarchitecture, formerly ignored or judged inartistic, were seen as existing on the sameplane of human creativeness and expression as “civilized” Western art. That wouldnot have happened, I believe, without the revolution in modern painting.The idea of art was shifted, therefore, from the aspect of imagery to its expressive,constructive, inventive aspect. That does not mean, as some suppose, that the oldart was inferior or incomplete, that it had been constrained by the requirements of1

epresentation, but rather that a new liberty had been introduced which had, as oneof its consequences, a greater range in the appreciation and experience of forms. 1The emphasis on freedom and faith in the "self-sufficiency of forms and colors" took holdand shaped the most inventive and forward-looking work throughout the 1940s and '50s.It also challenged and critiqued established understandings of art and its expressivepotential.Abstraction implies...a criticism of the accepted contents of the precedingrepresentations as ideal values or life interests. This does not mean that painters, ingiving up landscape, no longer enjoy nature; but they do not believe, as did thepoets, the philosophers and painters of the nineteenth century, that nature can serveas a model of harmony for man, nor do they feel that the experience of nature’smoods is an exalting value on which to found an adequate philosophy of life. Newproblems, situations and experiences of greater import have emerged: the challengeof social conflict and development, the exploration of the self, the discovery of itshidden motivations and processes, the advance of human creativeness in scienceand technology.All these factors should he taken into account in judging the significance of thechange in painting and sculpture. It was not a simple studio experiment or anintellectual play with ideas and with paint; it was related to a broader and deeperreaction to basic elements of common experience and the concept of humanity, as itdeveloped under new conditions.Schapiro defends individualism and the handmade quality of painting against thehomogenization one finds in mass-produced objects and the numbing effects of workthat flows not from one's intrinsic needs and interests, but is imposed by the desires andinterests of others.This art is deeply rooted, I believe, in the self and its relation to the surroundingworld. And the pathos of the reduction or fragility of the self within a culture thatbecomes increasingly organized through industry, economy and the state intensifiesthe desire of the artist to create forms that will manifest his liberty in this striking way—a liberty that, in the best works, is associated with a sentiment of harmony, andthe opposite stability, and even impersonality through the power of painting touniversalize itself in the perfection of its form and to reach out into common life. Itbecomes then a possession of everyone and is related to everyday experience.Notice the way Schapiro appeals to a populist value in avant-garde art—it reaches "outinto common life", he claims, and belongs to everyone. This is a utopian moment inSchapiro's essay, but one that reaches for an ideal and attempts to go beyond whatoffends so many as blatant elitism in Clement Greenberg's writings. Greenberg, in thatsense, is not at all utopian, but often seems to assume an unbridgeable gap betweenthose fortunate enough to have been educated in art and those whose circumstances inlife make it impossible. So it appears their assumptions may diverge on this issue.Schapiro goes on to argue that avant-garde art is radically distinct from mass mediasince its emphasis is not on communicating ideas but rather on expressive form andcontemplation.The artist does not wish to create a work in which he transmits an already preparedand complete message to a relatively indifferent and impersonal receiver. The painteraims rather at such a quality of the whole that, unless you achieve the proper set ofmind and feeling towards it, you will not experience anything of it at all.1 All quotes are taken from Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art”, Art News(Summer 1957), emphases added.2

But here's where his argument comes back to Greenberg and avant-garde art's need foran educated audience.Only a mind opened to the qualities of things, with a habit of discrimination,sensitized by experience and responsive to new forms and ideas, will be preparedfor the enjoyment of this art.Timothy Quigley, 5 Feb 103