modernism and formalism
The Triumph of Modernism: Clement Greenberg's Appropriation of Heinrich Wölfflin's Formalism. Painterly, Linear, Plane and Recessive.
Rebecca Proppe December 2015.
In 1964 Clement Greenberg curated an exhibition in Lost Angeles titled "Post-Painterly Abstraction." For the small catalogue, Greenberg wrote an essay of the same name, introducing the artists and the ideas he believed to be behind their work. Not only did the exhibition help Greenberg solidify a canon of Modernist painters and an aesthetic which he favoured, he also developed the term "post-painterly abstraction" to define these artists in their milieu. Greenberg, admittedly, could not have developed such a terminology without the work of one of his very influential predecessors: art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. To be clear in his terminology, Greenberg's essay begins with direct reference to "the great Swiss art historian" who
"used the German word, malerisch, which his English translators render as 'painterly,' to designate the formal qualities of Baroque art that separate it from art of High Renaissance or Classical Art. Painterly means, among other things, the blurred, broken, loose definition of colour and contour. The opposite of painterly is clear, unbroken, and sharp definition, which Wölfflin called the "linear" (...) The kind of paintings that has become known as Abstract Expressionism is both abstract and painterly."1
This is just one instance of the kinds of broad statements Greenberg could make with his use of language and abstract terminology. Greenberg has been criticized for being a "bad formalist," in that he often never provided intense, or accurate, visual description of the work of art. 2 Yet he in fact helped popularize the notion of appreciating the work of art solely for its formal properties, as he strongly believed that work created with only the formal properties in mind would save art from the decline it was experiencing in his time.
While the use of Wölfflin's terms seems evident enough in Greenberg's work, there lies a deeper meaning behind his use of these terms. Greenberg's formalism and the aesthetic he endorsed in his criticism changed throughout his career. Yet while his aesthetic preferences changed, one thing remained at his core: his belief in the avant-garde as the way to save art from itself. What constituted avant-garde art is what changed in Greenberg's writing, but his essential belief was the same as Wölfflin's: not everything is possible at all times. Greenberg used Wölfflin's Principles to linguistically and conceptually help him define an American avant-garde aesthetic that would right the path of the progression of art, and propel a natural, unconscious evolution of form. Through such an analysis, we can reveal how, through one of the most prolific (if controversial) art historical figures of the recent past, the work of Heinrich Wölfflin was not only well-received, but his methods and terminology dispersed into the world of art history, and thus still used today.
Through Greenberg's writings, it is clear that he not only read Wölfflin's Principles, but understood them in the way Wölfflin likely intended: as a morphology, as a theory of the changing nature of style by suggesting that two styles, the Classic and the Baroque, would forever repeat and react to each other naturally. That this was a natural process based primarily not on artistic intent, but on how people saw and unconsciously reacted to their surroundings was integral to Wölfflin's formation of (and Greenberg's subsequent understanding of) the Principles.
"The progression from a palpable, plastic perception to a purely optical, painterly perception has a natural logic and cannot be reversed,"3 Wölfflin writes. Greenberg was concerned that the culture of his era was in a decline, that the 'natural logic' that drove art production was in reverse because of factors unique to his age, factors such as mass production, the expansion of the capitalist market, and the rise of totalitarianism. Thus Greenberg, in his capacity as art critic, aimed to fight this decline, or reversal, by promoting 'good' art he believed challenged the viewer in an optical confrontation; good art that necessarily stemmed from an unconscious act of inspiration on the part of the artist, and not from a conscious reaction to please the viewer. Greenberg believed, just as Wölfflin did, that a dominant art form existed within every age; but in an era where so many images were so available at once, art was at risk of regressing to old, and consequently uninspired, forms.
Thus, in his quest to save art from itself, Greenberg constantly referred back to Wölfflin, in his theory and in his language, to validate his sense of formalism, and to prove that not everything is possible at all times. Foundations of Formalism
Greenberg's writing and his specific brand of formalism, championing certain Abstract Expressionists and American artists as the new avant-gardistes, has certainly gone down in history as the culmination of formalism for many scholars today, likely because of Greenberg's incredible influence in the establishment of a modernist narrative through his writing. Yet, as Martin Warnke declares, "Heinrich Wölfflin is one of those art historians who stands for a school."4 Wölfflin and his circle developed the notion of formalism in the late 19th century, but it was Wölfflin himself who popularized it, especially in his highly controversial 1915 publication of the Principles of Art History.5 While many art historians of his time reacted negatively to his work, the fact that it was so highly contested demonstrates the influence Wölfflin had within his field.
Wölfflin not only acted as a tremendous influence upon the work of Greenberg, but his legacy as a formalist carried with it so much authority that Greenberg would use and appropriate his ideas. He found special use of Wölfflin's terms, in order to historically justify his own formalism - just as he consistently used carefully chosen artistic precedents to construct a modernist narrative that seemed to arrive at Abstract Expressionism as if no other course was available.6
Indeed, it has been Greenberg's use of Wölfflin's terms, particularly his use of the 'painterly,' that has been most extensively written about. Before diving into an analysis of Greenberg's understanding and subsequent appropriation of these terms, however, it is necessary to describe how Greenberg shared - or at least believed he shared - many of Wölfflin's beliefs at the core of his own formalism. Greenberg's formalism was, necessarily, different from Wölfflin's, in that the work he was endorsing was not only specifically American (a charge he denied on several occasions) but was almost always non-representational. 7
It was not that Greenberg could not see the value of representational art at other times; but he truly believed that history had arrived at a point such that non-representational art was the only possible option for the creation of good art in his time. As he lays out in some of his more famous essays, such as "Towards a Newer Laocoon" and "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," that, among other social factors, artists has simply mastered the skill of illusionism too much, to the point that art was no longer art but was simply becoming an extension of life.
Thus art, and culture, necessitated a return to its roots - art would be based upon itself, and other forms of art; to become self-referential and not refer to the outside world. What made art art - a question Wölfflin also considered in the Principles - was that it was not non-art, or in other words that it was nothing but art and thus not an extension of life, or the natural world.8 Again, this is not to say that Greenberg did not see the usefulness of representational art in the past, but that representational art was inappropriate for meeting the demands of his time.9 Like Wölfflin, Greenberg believed that different forms were better for expressing different epochs - not only better, in fact, but the only possible forms that artists could, or would choose, because of how they saw.10 This, according to Wölfflin, resulted in the cycling between 'classical' and 'baroque', or 'linear' and 'painterly' styles, which changed each time they came around again.11
While Wölfflin was accused of creating a taxonomy through the very notion of his concepts, the Principles truly seek to examine the nature of art and how changing or evolving ways of seeing and perceiving the world inherently, and unconsciously, has a direct connection to how the artist expresses themselves through the forms that are available to them. As he states in his introduction: "... demonstrating all the differences between Raphael and Rembrandt just avoids the main problem, for what is important is not showing how the two of them differ but how they both arrived at the same thing via different paths, namely great art."12 Different forms were appropriate at different times, but not at the same time - Rembrandt and Raphael could not have both been considered great artists had they coexisted in time, and thus, in the twentieth century, abstract expressionism could not share its dominance with representational work along the lines of Norman Rockwell.13
While Wölfflin ends his Principles consciously avoiding any hard conclusions about the changing nature of art, and why culture ended up as it had at the time of his writing, the text provides a framework from which one can infer many possibilities. The nature of Wölfflin's Principles, as Marshall Brown has described them, as a morphology rather than a taxonomy, is apparently how Greenberg interpreted them.14 Particularly important in Greenberg's understanding of Wölfflin's formalism was the sense of a natural development stemming from a psychological, inner drive, that cannot be consciously avoided. Wölfflin writes that "(...) there are definite processes in the psychological nature of man that, like psychological development, have to be said to conform to certain laws."15Breaking these laws had not been a possibility before-the creation of art had always and only been mediated by the unconscious manner in which seeing was mediated. However, while Wölfflin never ventured to draw such conclusions, Greenberg believed that the art of his time was at risk of stagnating and perhaps dissipating altogether because so many different ways of seeing were available in the form of prints, decorative art, and kitsch. Therefore, the artist who unconsciously allowed themselves to draw inspiration from the world around them would create good works of art; those who consciously drew from forms of the past, or with a conscious intent to evoke a specific emotion from the viewer, created bad art.
We might also highlight here that Greenberg's writing functioned differently from that of Wölfflin, in that Greenberg was an art critic, whereas Wölfflin is known primarily as an art historian. When Greenberg wrote in 1961 that "In the long run there are only two kind s of art: the good and the bad;"16 he was attempting to establish the importance of qualitative judgements as the basis upon which art could be understood.17 Greenberg, in his mission to save high art and culture, believed he was, through the presentation of seemingly objective facts based on sensory experience (though he typically avoided the word 'positivism'), defending and justifying the avant-garde and its changing, difficult to understand appearance(s).
This naturally led to controversy, as Joachim Pissarro noted that "Greenberg confuses aesthetic judgment and history of taste, always seeking objective criteria to validate the historical importance of masterpieces."18 Greenberg constantly refuted the notion that his judgements were not based on objectivity, and it is perhaps possible that he wholeheartedly believed his taste was based on objective facts alone. Known to change his mind and revise judgements he had made earlier in his career, when asked if it is possible that his taste changed, he simply responded that "my eye was off," insinuating there is an objective, positivistic truth within the work of art, and one must be trained to be able to perceive it.19
The avant-garde work of art, while originating from the creative drive of the artist, was not mean to be an expression of self, but of art. Abstract expressionism, based purely on form that was meant to instigate self-reflection within the viewer was thus, in some ways, similar to Wölfflin's notion of " an art history without names,": while the Principles examines forms in part as expression, it is an expression of time rather than self.20
Greenberg tried to use a seemingly objective history to justify the "dominance" of Abstract Expressionism in the mid-twentieth century, a (false) objectivity upon which he based his qualitative judgements to shield himself. Therefore it would seem only natural that, in advocating an art form that was based on pure form, that Greenberg should look to Wölfflin, one of the most prominent founding figures of the study of pure form in art. 21 In fact, history was not just what Greenberg used to justify the avant-garde, but to rationalize it; as T.J. Clark wrote, "it was historical consciousness; Greenberg had argued (...) which was the key to the avant-garde's achievements."The stakes were high, in Greenberg's mind, not only because art was potentially losing its position as art, but his own value judgements were constantly being called into question. Using historical precedent to justify the avant-garde work of art as well as his own criticism is then perhaps to be expected.
Avant-Garde and Kitsch
Greenberg's notions of kitsch are integral to understanding the stakes of his formalism. Though Greenberg's aesthetic requirements of what constituted good art changed dramatically over the years (an aesthetic he defined and re-defined using terms derived explicitly from the Principles), it is a reflection of his response to the changes of art in relation to his core values, namely that images which are consciously created to have a specific effect upon the spectator are not true art, and lack the substance to instigate a spiritual experience of self-reflection. His passage in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in which he compares the work of Picasso and Ilya Repin is particularly insightful into the experience he expects of the cultivated viewer faced with the avant-garde work. Repin for Greenberg, represented kitsch; it is easily appreciated by the peasant who sees a continuation of the world they know within the painting; it is illusionistic in form as in content, and the technique is irrelevant. The avant-garde, however, was necessarily unfamiliar, and consequently:
"(...) the ultimate values which the cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at a second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic values. It is only then that the recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic enter. They are not immediately or externally present in Picasso's painting, but must be projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react sufficiently to plastic qualities."
Thus, the educated viewer experiences a 'miraculous' moment of self-reflection, and presumably self-growth, when, under the right circumstances, confronted with the avant-garde work of art.
The problem with kitsch, what Greenberg later refers to simply as non-art, is that the effect is already presented for the viewer, who is effectively taught what to feel by the forms, instead of being cued to search inside themselves for their own response. Such forms that were created to induce a specific effect he calls 'mannerisms,' and at this early stage in his career he was very concerned such mannerisms could be easily manipulated by totalitarian governments to manipulate the emotions of the viewer.
The avant-garde alienated the viewer enough that the desired reaction was not presented to the viewer, and therefore made the work more difficult than a work of kitsch. Art is by its very nature something to be looked at, and the estrangement between the viewer and the content encouraged prolonged looking.24 In this, Greenberg shares with Wölfflin the importance of the act of looking at forms, which is all the more important in the American avant-garde in which the content is pure form.25 Greenberg, basing his beliefs on Wölfflin, believed that there is, or should be, one dominant way of seeing at any given time which is what allows for a natural progression of culture; however Greenberg believed that the capabilities of mass production and the preponderance of kitsch was destroying this natural order by encouraging viewers and artists to instead draw upon recycled forms of the past, outside of historical context. Of the avant-garde, he wrote in the 1940s that "Only such an art, resting on rationality but without permitting itself to be rationalized, can adequately answer contemporary life," and consequently only certain forms could properly express life of his age.
In Theory
Likewise, Greenberg also believed that artists who had a good theoretical grasp on art could not apply it in practice, because they were too conscious of the theory itself. For example, Kandinsky, who wrote about the spiritual implications of form, seems to have grasped the theory surrounding new forms in avant-garde art and their relationship to Cubism; however because Kandinsky had such a good grasp on theory he was rendered incapable of producing good art in practice.27 This is a current that runs through Greenberg's work, and reinforces his beliefs that good art was produced through forms that unconsciously come from the artist, from their particular way of understanding and perceiving the world: "Inspiration alone belongs to the individual; everything else, including skill, can now be acquired by any one."The crisis that had arisen in his time was that now any skill or style was seemingly accessible to anyone and everyone: how could art move forward and evolve from a dominant way of seeing if all forms were present at once?
As the artist was meant to be creating unconsciously, with forms derived from the spirit and not from the natural world, Greenberg's criticism was, he believed, necessary to explain the work of art to the uneducated viewer. His belief in a 'dominant' way of seeing, and thus a dominant way of creating good art, while Wölfflinian, required him to constantly justify the dominance of the avant-garde, as it was, inherently, difficult to understand. It was this difficulty, the estrangement from the subject matter, which instigated the 'spiritual' experience which Greenberg craved from the work of art, for it was "detachment, which is the indispensable preliminary to justness of spirit."29
This detachment was meant to cause a moment of self-reflection, or self-criticism, which for Greenberg was the primary action that constituted modernity.30 Thus Greenberg's emphasis on the opticality of the work, over its tactility, re-enforced the estrangement of the work: as the subject matter was unknowable, and the 'feeling' of the work equally unknowable, the viewer would draw upon themselves to determine their own, inner reaction to the work.It is Greenberg's emphasis on the optical experience of the work of art, expressed by a specific and ever-changing aesthetic, that not only drove his work, but also solidified his reputation not only as one of the most influential formalists, but one of the most influential art writers of the twentieth century.
The Linear and the Painterly
It was in search of this spiritual, "moralizing" experience that Greenberg found use of Wölfflin's "painterly."32 Greenberg used Wölfflin's term "painterly" throughout his career, taking from it what he would, and ultimately using the term to evoke the spirit of Wölfflin, and of formalism, in his own writing. Greenberg makes explicit the Wölfflinian origins of the term several times in his writings, and his own understanding of it, most explicitly in his essay "Post- Painterly Abstraction," quoted above.
It was precisely Wölfflin's emphasis on the opticality of the painterly, or the Baroque, that drew Greenberg to the term. The painterly was so important to Greenberg's notion of what should constitute the avant-garde of the 1940s and '50s in that he understood Wölfflin's use of the term to describe a focus on the optical; a loss of sure, tactile perception associated with the linear.
Wölfflin's Principles reflect his belief in the autonomy of the art object, as art, and form, and not an historical representation of life. While the same ethos is re-iterated more subtly throughout the Principles, he makes clear in his introduction that art is not just a reflection on how we see, or perceive, the world around us, but on our notions of pleasure, and of beauty.It was for this combination of reasons that the linear would develop into the painterly, which would again take on linear qualities. Through his concepts of the Classic and the Baroque, Wölfflin claims to provide a case study of the differences between the two and demonstrate how they change out of and into each other, noting that he was "(...)convinced that the same concepts would prove applicable to other periods as well."34 Thus, like Greenberg, Wölfflin provided his concepts as theoretically objective observations on the history of form.
Yet, as we have been discussing, these concepts (like Greenberg's criticisms) were in fact not objective, as Warnke and Adler have made most clear in regards to Wölfflin's conception of the painterly. As Germany advanced towards the onset of World War I, art was growing increasingly tied to the state, and to nationalistic sentiments.For Wölfflin, the painterly was used to impart a spiritual education upon students. In insisting on the autonomy of the work of art, Wölfflin and other formalists were insisting on deriving pleasure from pure form, regardless of historical context, which Wölfflin argues for in the Principles.In divorcing the work of art from any historical context, Wölfflin was divorcing it from any potential use in a contemporary context as well. The painterly, relying so much on the sensations of movement and depth, was thus seen as the most suitable principle for injecting life into the pure form of the work of art, as it was based purely on the optical, and was thus further removed from reality and, consequently, historical context.
It should now be clear that Greenberg took Wölfflin's literal and political meanings of the painterly when he appropriated it for his own formalism, and applied it as a requirement in the creation of art in the early twentieth century. Particularly evident in his early writings, Greenberg was concerned about the use of inferior art, particularly kitsch, as elements of Stalinist or fascist propaganda.Through kitsch, art was mingling with everyday entertainment, and soon there would be no high art answering the cultural needs of modern life. In Greenberg's history of modernism, this caused the avant-garde artists, beginning with Manet, to instigate an "escape from ideas," creating an art in which the form was the content, and re-affirmed the art object as art, as forms, and not as illusion, or an extension of the real world."The avant-garde (...) becomes the embodiment of art's instinct of self-preservation."
For Greenberg, the painterly injected life into the canvas, but in a different way. In losing illusionism and focusing on pure form, the work of art "retreated into itself" to make explicit what had always been implicit to painting - namely, the use of the materials.The 'new painting,' since Manet, emphasized the painting as a painting, as art, and nothing else: "Manet's paintings became the first Modernist ones by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the surfaces on which they were painted."The painterly was purely optical, the loss of tactility as well as subject matter ensured a level of estrangement, and of detachment, that would allow for self-reflection, self-criticism, and self-growth. The viewer had to "humble" themselves to experience a certain level of unsureness, and of anxiety, to be intellectually and spiritually moved by pure form and colour.As form was so integral to Greenberg's understanding and development of Abstract Expressionism, it then seems only natural that he would keep calling upon Wölfflin throughout his career.
Thus, just as the painterly, was, for Wölfflin, focused on opticality over tactility, over visual sensations over tactile or bodily ones, so too it was for Greenberg. And in this opticality, the viewer would find it more difficult to recognize their world, or themselves, within the work, prolonging the visual experience with the work of art, re-affirming its existence as high art. And, continuing along Wölfflin's train of thought, the painterly was, for Greenberg, the most important quality of good art of his time as it grew out of, and reacted to, the linearity of cubism.While the work of the cubists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an appropriate response to the forms available to them at the time, the progression into a painterly aesthetic, which denied the tactility of forms that was so present in the works of Cezanne or Picasso, was not only the natural progression "from a palpable, plastic perception to a purely optical, painterly perception," it was a necessary change required to maintain the estrangement between the viewer and the work of art. Wölfflin's theories about the cyclical nature of art then confirmed Greenberg's objective notions about the modernist narrative, and simultaneously instilled in him the notion that his own work was necessary to help the avant- garde stay on course.
The linear forms of cubism - naturally derived from the painterliness of the work of the Impressionists-adhered to many of the qualities Wölfflin outlined in the Principles: it was concerned with clear outlines and silhouettes, tactility and multiplicity, creating images by connecting or overlapping abstract, yet clearly defined, geometric shapes. The painterly, for Greenberg, also adopted many of the aspects Wölfflin attributed to it: movement, opticality, and a focus on the surface appearance of the painting, rather than the illusion of the clear, whole, three dimensional object, or space. However, Wölfflin states that "The corporeal form does not lose the trait of tangibility, but the stimulus it presents to the sense of touch is no longer primary."
In Greenberg's definition of the painterly, the painting lost all sense of tangibility. Though Greenberg called for a return to materials, to "a progressive surrender to the resistance of [the] medium," this was for the sake of the artists' inspiration, and not the viewer.46 As the artists returned to their own materials, and what they were familiar with, the work would naturally grow more distant from society and become more difficult for the viewer, requiring a higher level of cultivation to be completely understood. And as the public had grown comfortable with, and even endorsed the forms found in cubism, a painterly form of abstraction was, in the 1940s, required to maintain that distance.
In his introduction to "Post-Painterly Abstraction," Greenberg makes his most direct reference to Wölfflin's concepts, noting his understanding of the Principles in that "the dividing line between the painterly and the linear is by no means a hard and fast one."Yet Greenberg's essay, and indeed much of his oeuvre up until this point (1964), was largely a demand for a specifically painterly mode of abstract expressionism, one which simultaneously estranged the viewer and expressed the internal, unconscious feelings of the artist. It is in such instances that we can more clearly see how Greenberg understood Wölfflin's terms, yet re-interpreted and appropriated them for his own agenda. The 'painterly' ultimately became, in many ways, a Greenbergian term, as Greenberg's formalism dominated the modern discourse as he and similar writers, like Alfred Barr, used their language to solidify a particular narrative of modernity.
Plane and Recession
Mondrian, for Greenberg, took the linear principles of cubism and brought them to their extreme through his own intuition.49 However, Mondrian's work also eliminated one essential component of Cubism which began the progression from Greenberg's ideas of the linear and the painterly: Mondrian attempted to eliminate the illusion of depth, which was constantly present yet repressed in the work of the Cubists.
One might have imagined, in Greenberg's constant homage to Wölfflin, that plane and recession would have been the most important pair of concepts Greenberg would have worked with. Greenberg's formalism is perhaps best known for his emphasis on the flatness of the work of art, and the increasing flatness, and reduction of the picture plane, was one of the main currents Greenberg traced through his narrative of modernism. Cezanne and Matisse in particular "contributed to the reduction of the easel picture's fictive depth."50 For example Cezanne's many Mont Saint Victoire (fig. 3) paintings break up the space into small patches of colour which seem to float to the surface, distorting the space the eye might perceive, forming the transition from painterly to linear, and from recessional to "flat," for modernist historians like Greenberg and Barr.
The flatness of the painting draws attention to the canvas as such, the work of art as art, and nothing else. The illusion of depth was just that: illusionism. Even if the work of art contained no representational subject matter, tonalities inferred the illusion of a three dimensional space existing beyond the wall, or the picture plane. However, Wölfflin's notions of plane and recession, while helpful in some ways, perhaps did not adequately describe what Greenberg wanted to express about the importance of the flat nature of the canvas. More likely, though, was that, as "flat" is a word that is much easier to grasp than "painterly," and as the flatness of the canvas was such an important part of Greenberg's ethos, he decided to take this particular opportunity to stake his own claim in the language and history of art.
Yet Greenberg does owe something to Wölfflin's notions of plane and recession. Wölfflin discusses this pair of concepts in particular in terms of the relationship of the eye and the canvas, appealing to Greenberg's sense of the importance of opticality. The concept of planarity, associated with the Classical, saw art organized in strata, related to the edge and shape of the canvas (fig. 4), whereas recessional, Baroque works of art embody "the inclination to withdraw the plane from the eye, to deprecate it and make it inconspicuous by accentuating the relationship between forward and backward," (my italics). 51 While both the Classic and the Baroque create an illusion of depth, the Baroque work of art seeks to trick the eye, disguising the canvas as a surface with edges, and drawing the eye into the illusionistic space.
While this was fine in previous epochs, the market and mass production had, in the twentieth century, made art objects and kitsch so readily available that Greenberg believed the true work of art was at risk of becoming no different from wallpaper or a magazine cover. Thus flatness - the complete absence of the suggestion of space - became the keyword in Greenberg's writing, and the constant force that drove his avant-garde aesthetic. Cubism had begun to break down three-dimensional space, but the linearity of the forms and the use of tone inadvertently created depth.52 Thus the painterly flatness of Greenberg's abstract expressionism was the natural reaction to Cubism, the logical next step in the progression of art, just as Cubism had been the natural linear reaction to the painterly forms and space in Impressionist work.53 The Decorative Principle
The problem with eliminating all depth and subject matter was that, in Greenberg's mind, the work of art ran dangerously close to resembling the decorative. He writes: "though the 'all- over' picture will, when successful, still hang dramatically on a wall, it comes very close to decoration-to the kind seen in wallpaper patterns that can be repeated indefinitely - and insofar as the "all-over" picture remains an easel picture, which somehow it does, it infects the notion of the genre with a fatal ambiguity."54
It is likely that Greenberg dismissed all forms of recession - even abstracted ones - not just on the basis of the suggestion of illusionistic space, but also because of the increased use of decorative devices that would be necessary to create such space. Wölfflin concedes throughout the Principles that the decorative sensibility is inherent in the act of art making, noting in particular that, in regards to plane and recession, "it is perhaps here rather than elsewhere that one best learns to perceive that there is a decorative principle at work."However, Wölfflin and Greenberg clearly understand the idea of the decorative quite differently. For Wölfflin, the decorative is just as he says: a principle. The artist, in transferring their surroundings into a work of art, will always alter the work of art, consciously and unconsciously, to properly express their ideas or feelings, typically in regards to a certain ideal of beauty. In his second chapter for instance, Wölfflin notes that "This striated space is not a makeshift for depicting depth, there is a pleasure in stratification. It is simply the form in which that age enjoyed spatial beauty."56
Greenberg's notion of the decorative is instead very different, and yet relies on the premise that the decorative is derived from aesthetic pleasure -however, for Greenberg it is an aesthetic pleasure that is too easy and knowable. The decorative had also become a derogatory term for "inferior" art forms throughout the first half of the 20th century, as decorative arts (furniture, wallpaper, textile design) became huge industries of mass production throughout Europe and America.57 Yet, as Wölfflin rightly posits, the decorative principle is inherent in the act of art-making.58 Thus the decorative, looming so close to Greenberg's ideal avant-garde aesthetic, became "the spectre that haunts modernist painting."59 Shock Value The autonomy of the work of art, and the work of art as art and nothing else was central to Greenberg's beliefs. It was for this reason he hated mannerisms, the conscious use of forms based on purely aesthetic goals, hoping to induce an effect upon the viewer.
While Greenberg knew that the avant-garde, in order to engage the viewer in a prolonged session of looking, had to be distanced from the reality of the viewer, he did not endorse the use of "shocks" just for the sake of it. For this reason he was not a fan of Marcel Duchamp, and later the Pop artists, whom he believed were purposefully trying to offend the viewer's sensibilities rather than working with or questioning the nature of art itself.60Abstract expressionism thus emphasized the expression; the work of art should be an unconscious expression through forms, and not a conscious manipulation of forms.
Yet something happened that Greenberg perhaps did not anticipate: the public grew to appreciate the new, American avant-garde - just on a purely aesthetic (to Greenberg, decorative) basis.61 Thus, in the mid-1950s abstract expressionism "cried out" for representation, which arrived in Willem de Kooning's "Women" series.Yet this did not work out in Greenberg's mind. De Kooning and his followers, like Philip Guston, understood that the public could more easily appreciate the loose handling of paint people enjoyed in abstraction expressionism, combined with the easily accessible, representational subject matter.63 Even Picasso fell prey to the use of mannerisms, repeating forms from his own oeuvre that he knew to be popular, rather than seeking for true innovation in his old age.64 Such mannerisms became standardized, and whole schools of artists would become "mannerists", producing art for aesthetic effect rather than to express interior feeling. "Equations like these cannot be thought out in advance, they can only be felt and discovered," Greenberg wrote, clarifying that true art was primarily a product of inner feeling, and not a product for the market.
Openness and Clarity
In the midst of this crisis within abstraction, in the 1960s Greenberg was now looking for a new abstract aesthetic which would ensure the work maintained a distance from the viewer. Likewise, he needed a new vocabulary with which to express it. Thus he referred back to Wölfflin once again.66
It is telling that the 1964 show he curated in Los Angeles was titled "Post-Painterly Abstraction." While Greenberg acknowledged the importance of the painterly to abstraction, he now acknowledged that the painterly existed in different forms, and that now it alone was not enough to ensure a steady, natural progression of the avant-garde. Now Greenberg began looking at some of Wölfflin's other concepts, particularly the openness within the Baroque, as well as Classical clarity. These concepts he believed would most acutely express the mood of his times, and would further push the avant-garde into new forms, away from the purely painterly ones that had been appropriated by de Kooning and other mannerists.
Wölfflin wrote that "the style of open form always suggests something beyond itself and wants to appear unbounded."67 Openness emphasized the movement inherent in the Baroque, and the painterly, and thus, for Greenberg, accentuated the most important qualities of the painterly which needed to be retained and pushed further, leading him to declare that "openness, and not only in painting, is the quality that seems most to exhilarate the attuned eyes of our time."
However, Greenberg took the concept of unbounded form more literally. To give the impression of unbounded form, the new abstract art required increasingly massive canvases, featuring huge planes of colour to ensure the purity, or clarity, of colour. "Size guarantees the purity as well as the intensity needed to suggest indeterminate space: more blue simply being bluer than less blue."
Thus Greenberg began to favour a new crop of artists, particularly Barnett Newman (fig.6), Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. What was most accentuated in the openness of the canvas, the illusion of "unbounded form;" was that there was no longer a clear delineation between the wall and the canvas. Yet, in spite of his concerns over the decorative, wall-paper- like potential lurking in all-over painting, Greenberg believed this to be a good thing: if a work of art was truly a good work of art, it did not need to rely on a clear separation from the wall; its separateness as an art object should be inherent in it as a work of art in and of itself.
Thus Greenberg, again, appropriated new Wölfflinian terms, re-working their broader meanings to suit his own specific needs. Openness, rather than just the illusion of unbounded form potentially encroaching upon the viewer's space, as Wölfflin describes it, was represented in Greenberg's aesthetic as truly unbounded forms, comprised of vast, engulfing fields of pure colour, giving no illusions about where the space physically ended. Greenberg's notions of openness were based again on the opticality of the experience, the optical confrontation between the viewer's field of vision and an expanse of pure colour.
Yet this effect was still totally reliant on the body and the physical space of the viewer. Should the viewer engage with the canvas from a short distance, their field of vision becomes filled with pure colour. However, should they step back, the effect is completely different - yet the proximity to the viewer's body with the work is never something Greenberg acknowledges.
While Wölfflin indeed emphasises the opticality of the Baroque in the Principles, he is still aware of the moving gaze of the viewer, and thus the viewer's body as something that contributes to the movement in the Baroque, particularly in sculpture and architecture-the work of art is constructed to manipulate the gaze of the viewer from a certain position, and thus manipulates the placement of the viewer's body to engage with the work from the "correct" viewpoint. 71 It is entirely possible, then, that, in re-examining the requirements for an avant- garde aesthetic and likely re-assessing Wölfflin's Principles for his own use, Greenberg decided to more consciously repress the bodily aspect which, like the decorative, was lurking in the margins of abstract expressionism.
"Not everything is possible at all times"
While Greenberg appreciated that the avant-garde work of art "acknowledge[s] its physical reality," he would not do the same of the viewer.72 The viewer, and the public space, was the ultimate destination for the work of art, yet to acknowledge or strive for a reaction from in "bad" art. Greenberg semi-acknowledged this problem in 1948, writing that, "while the painter's relation to his art has become more private than ever before because of a shrinking appreciation on the public's part, the architectural, and presumably, social location for which he destines his product has become, in inverse ratio, more public. This is the paradox, the current contradiction in the master-current of painting."73 This was the problem of his age: the public was larger, more demanding, and less informed. The artist, relying on patronage to sustain themselves, could easily produce kitsch to satisfy the viewer (or consumer); yet this conscious appropriation of forms broke the natural laws of the progression of forms and thus art itself; laws which Wölfflin had posited and Greenberg wholeheartedly believed in.
Thus Greenberg, in order to protect art from itself, championed the dominant art form he believed was the natural successor to Cubism. He did so quintessentially as a critic; his career was built upon explaining why abstract expressionism was good and why everything else was bad. Through qualitative statements, Greenberg hoped to right the course of art history, and prevent high art from falling into decay in his "rather corrupt and declining age.
Greenberg used Wölfflin's name to validate his own arguments, his own reputation, and to help demonstrate a continuity of forms within modernism, appropriating his terms and his reputation to boost his own. Yet, in understanding Wölfflin's terms as the base of his own formalism, Greenberg also used them as Wölfflin intended, to situate recent art historical epochs within history.
It was primarily on the basis of the intuitive, unconscious creation of forms as self- expression, against consciously deviating from the laws of the natural, forward progression of art that Greenberg made his value judgements. Thus, as Greenberg appropriated so many Wölfflinian terms, these terms were an expression of the deeper belief Greenberg shared with Wölfflin at his core: not everything is possible at all times.