AHIS10002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Clement Greenberg, High Modernism, Medium Specificity

• School: University of Melbourne
• Department: Art History
• Course: AHIS10002
• Professor: Anthony G White

Document Summary

A theory about modernist art emphasizing its progressive development. A focus on the formal and material. Ealisti(cid:272) illusio(cid:374)ist is (cid:272)o(cid:374)(cid:272)eali(cid:374)g (cid:449)hat(cid:859)s a(cid:272)tually u(cid:374)i(cid:395)ue a(cid:271)out a pai(cid:374)ti(cid:374)g. Modernism has never meant anything like a break with the past. It(cid:859)s a (cid:272)o(cid:374)ti(cid:374)uatio(cid:374: not a totally disruptive, just interpreting in modern context. Many factors thought to be essential to the making and experiencing of art have been shown not to be so by the fact that modernist art has been able to dispense with them. The resonance of the idea of flatness both pollock and greenberg celebrated flatness and pictorial aspects of a painting, that it should be viewed as a picture first, not for bourgeois fantasies of perspective. Nothing else on the canvas can draw our attention away from the art itself. True to the fact that we are only looking at a two-dimensional painting self- reflexive: by looking at an obscure painting we might think regard to ourselves.