Modernist Painting 1965 by Clement Greenberg
Modernity
In "Modernist Painting," a 1965 essay by author Clement Greenberg, the writer elucidates a number of points that are fairly crucial to the definition and conception of the philosophy known as Modernism. Along with distinguishing a number of examples of this line of thought that applies to disparate fields such as science, formal philosophy (largely originating from Immanuel Kant) and literature, Greenberg focuses the duration of this literary work upon modernist painting. Some of the most important elements of such painting are denoted by the author as being a reduction of the form of art to its basic elements, which are largely optical and confined to the limited space in which the painting actually is found. Therefore, there are a number of eminent visual artists whose work typifies one, if not more than one of these conventions, and which provides an excellent example of...
A close examination of the work of visual artist Roy Lichtenstein indicates that several of the pieces that the author was known for can be characterized as Modern due to their invoking of traits described by Greenberg. Lichtenstein did a lot of visual art that can be characterized as comic strip art, and which was cartoonish in the sense of those comic strips that are found in traditional newspapers. The fact that his work was decidedly two dimensional and confined to simple, angular panels that are flat, adheres to the convention propounded by Greenberg that most modern art embraces flatness in an attempt to be reduced to its fundamental essence.
Andy Warhol was another artist whose visual representations became part of the Pop…
The manner in which Cezanne abstractly modulated color in his paintings was seminal to the controversial cubist style. What is more, Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon simplified previous endeavors in terms of structure by employing a savage two-dimensional angularity, and as such was exponential for early modern art. Modernist painting, in Clement Greenberg's words, "used art to call attention to art" (193) as opposed to Realism's alleged concealment of art.
In Braque's "Woman with a Guitar we can see the foreshadowing of the Synthetic Cubism period, when he introduces stenciling and lettering, a practice that Picasso was soon to imitate. Figure 7: Picasso, Le Guitariste"(1910 Figure 8: Braque "Woman with a Guitar" (1913 Synthetic Cubism/Collage 1912-1914: Braque was beginning to experiment further now by mixing materials such as sand and sawdust into his paint to create a more textured, built- up look and what