Modernist Painting and Formal Criticism
Author(s): MICHAEL FRIED
Source: The American Scholar, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Autumn, 1964), pp. 642, 644-648
Published by: The Phi Beta Kappa Society
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Modernist Painting and Formal Criticism
MICHAEL FRIED
. . . vous n'êtes que le premier dans la décrépitude de votre art.
-Baudelaire to Manet, 1865
For twenty years or more almost all the
best new painting and sculpture in the
world have been done in America; I am referring
to the work of artists such as Pollock,
deKooning, Kline, Motherwell, Newman,
Still, Frankenthaler, Rothko, Gottleib,
Hofmann, Louis, Noland, Olitski, Frank
Stella and David Smith, to name only some
of the best. I think it could be argued, in
fact, that the flowering of painting and, to a
much lesser degree, of sculpture that has
taken place in this country since the end of
the Second World War is comparable to
that which occurred in American poetry in
the two decades after 1912, regarding both
the quality of the work produced and what
might be called its intrinsic difficulty. The
new poetry, however, found the criticism it
deserved relatively soon, in the work of men
like Blackmur, Ransom, Täte and others,
while the critical essays of Eliot and Pound,
although often not dealing with the new
poetry itself, expounded many of its fundamental
assumptions.
It is one of the most important facts
about the contemporary situation in the
visual arts that the fundamental character
of the new art has not, in spite of the essays
of Clement Greenberg, been adequately understood.
This is not altogether surprising.
Unlike poets, painters and sculptors rarely
practice criticism, and the job of writing
about art has tended to pass by default to
men and women who are in no way qualified
for their profession. Moreover, the
visual skills necessary to come to grips with
the new painting and sculpture are perhaps
even more rare than the verbal skills demanded
by the new poetry.
But if the inadequacy of almost all contemporary
art criticism is not surprising, it
is undeniably ironic, because the visual arts
- painting especially - have never been
more explicitly self-critical than during the
past twenty years. In this essay I want to
attempt an exposition of what, to my mind,
are some of the most important characteristics
of the new art. At the same time I will
try to show why formal criticism, such as
that practiced by Roger Fry or Mr. Greenberg,
is better able to throw light upon the
new art than any other approach. To do
this, I will have to consider more than once
the development over the past hundred
years of what Mr. Greenberg calls "modernist"
painting, because the work of the artists
mentioned above represents, in an important
sense, the extension in this country of
a kind of painting that began in France
with the work of Edouard Manet. Sculpture
is, to a certain extent, another story, and for
reasons of space and simplicity I will not
consider it here.
Roughly speaking, the history of painting
from Manet through Synthetic Cubism
and Matisse may be characterized in terms
of the gradual withdrawal of painting from
the task of representing reality - or of reality
from the power of painting to represent it in
favor of an increasing preoccupation
with problems intrinsic to painting itself.
One may deplore, if one chooses, the decision
of critics such as Mr. Fry and Mr.
Greenberg to concentrate their attention
upon the formal characteristics of the works
they discuss; but no one can doubt that the
painters whose work they most esteem on
formal grounds - Manet, the Impressionists,
Seurat, Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Matisse,
Léger - are among the finest painters of the
past hundred years. This is not to imply
that only the formal aspect of their paintings
is worthy of interest. On the contrary,
because recognizable objects, persons and
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THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
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places are never entirely expunged from
their canvases, contextual criticism can add
significantly to our understanding by investigating
the role these play in their art.
But contextual criticism has shown itself to
be unable to make convincing discriminations
of value among the works of a particular
artist; and in this century it often happens
that those paintings that are most full
of explicit human content can be faulted
on formal grounds - Picasso's "Guernica" is
the most conspicuous example - in comparison
with others virtually devoid of such
content.
It is worth adding that there is nothing
binding in the value judgments of formal
criticism. All judgments of value begin in
experience, or ought to, and if someone
does not feel that Manet's "Déjeuner sur
l'herbe," Matisse's "La Leçon de Piano" or
Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm" are fine paintings,
there is nothing in the arguments of
formal criticism that will force him to feel
it. On the other hand, one's experiences of
works of art are always informed by what
one has come to understand about them;
and it is the special burden of the formal
critic both to objectify his intuitions with
all the intellectual rigor at his command,
and to be on his guard against enlisting a
formalist rhetoric in the defense of merely
private enthusiasms.
It is also imperative that the formal critic
bear in mind at all times that the objectivity
he aspires toward can be no more
than relative. But his detractors would do
well to bear in mind themselves that his
aspirations toward objectivity are given
force and relevance by the tendency of the
most important current in painting since
Manet to concern itself increasingly and
with growing self-awareness with formal
problems and issues. When Mr. Hilton
Kramer, writing in Arts Magazine (October,
1962) the most intelligent and serious review
of Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture
that I have seen, complains that:
In Mr. Greenberg's criticism, the impersonal
process of history appears in the guise of an
inner artistic logic, which has its own immutable
laws of development and to which works of art
must conform if they are not to end up on the
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THE ARTS IN AMERICA, 1964
historical ash heap. This inner artistic logic is
purely a matter of the relations that obtain
among abstract forms arranged in a decorative
pattern. . . .
it is not entirely clear whether he is objecting
more to a style of argument or to the
modernist painting that Mr. Greenberg admires.
In any case, his characterization of
the former seems to me mistaken at several
crucial points.
Nowhere in Art and Culture does its
author appear to have forgotten that history,
works of art, and essays in art criticism
are all made by men, who live at a particular
moment in history and whose perceptions
and values are, therefore, no more
than relative. There is, in a sense, "an
inner artistic logic" in Mr. Greenberg's
view of the history of modernist painting
in France and America; but it is a "logic"
that has come about as the result of decisions
made by individual artists to engage
with formal problems thrown up by the
art of the recent past - decisions and formal
problems that Mr. Greenberg has done
more than any other critic to elucidate.
Moreover, the element of internal "logic"
in the development of modernist painting
can be perceived only in retrospect, and I
can think of no passage in Art and Culture
that so much as hints at the existence of
"immutable laws" that govern its unfolding.
If a critic thought such laws existed,
he would surely use them to predict what
the modernist art of the future is going
to look like. But there are no predictions
in Mr. Greenberg's book, only repeated
attempts - the most successful of which are
exemplary - to objectify his experience of
painting and sculpture in terms that derive
from these media alone.
Elsewhere in his review Mr. Kramer
maintains that Mr. Greenberg has employed
"a principle of historical development
drawn from Marx" to defend "a
point of view which is completely hostage
to the New York School." My own impression
is rather that, starting from his experience
of the works of Pollock, deKooning,
Newman and others, Mr. Greenberg
has come increasingly to perceive their relation
to the modernist painting that preFROM
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THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
ceded them. But I think there is an insight
in Mr. Kramer's reference to Marx which
deserves some discussion.
Starting with Heinrich Wölfflin, critics of
style have tended to rely on a fundamentally
Hegelian conception of art history, in
which styles are described as succeeding
one another in accord with an internal
dynamic or dialectic, rather than in response
to social, economic and political
developments in society at large. One of
the stock objections, in fact, to exclusively
stylistic or formal criticism of the art of
the past - for example, of the High Renaissance
- is that it fails to deal with the influence
of nonartistic factors upon the art
of the time, and as a result is unable both
to elucidate the full meaning of individual
works and to put forward a convincing
account of stylistic change. Such an objection,
however, derives the real but limited
validity it possesses from the fact that painting
and sculpture during the Renaissance
were deeply involved, regarding patronage
and iconography, with both the Church and
State. But by the late nineteenth century
and the early twentieth, advanced artists
were being forced to survive on virtually
no patronage or sales whatever, and it was
probably inevitable that, having been
abandoned by society, their imagery became
more and more personal and their
art more and more concerned with problems
and issues intrinsic to itself.
All this has, of course, been recounted
before. But what has not been sufficiently
recognized is that in the face of these developments
the same objections that are
effective when directed against exclusively
formal criticism of Italian High Renaissance
painting lose almost all their force
and relevance. In comparison with what
may be said in precise detail about the
relations between High Renaissance art
and the Church and State, only the most
general statements - such as this one - may
be made about the relation between modernist
painting and modern society. In a
sense, modernist art in this century finished
what society in the nineteenth began: the
alienation of the artist from the general
preoccupations of the culture in which he
is embedded, and the prizing loose of art
itself from the concerns, aims and ideals
of that culture. With the achievements of
Cubism in the first and second decades of
this century, if not before, painting and
sculpture became free to pursue concerns
intrinsic to their respective media. Stylistic
change within modernist art can now be
adequately accounted for by the decisions of
individual artists to engage with particular
formal problems thrown up by the art of
the recent past; the fundamentally Hegelian
conception of art history that is at work in
the writings of Wölfflin and Greenberg,
whatever its limitations may be when applied
to the art of the past, corresponds
remarkably well with the actual development
of modernism in the visual arts, painting
especially.
I am arguing, then, that something like
a dialectic of modernism has in fact been
at work in the visual arts, painting more
than sculpture, for roughly a century now;
and by dialectic I mean what is essential
in Hegel's conception of historical progression,
as expounded in this century by the
Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs in his
great work, History and Class Consciousness,
and by the late Maurice MerleauPonty
in numerous books and essays. More
than anything else, the dialectic in the
hands of these men is an ideal of action as
radical criticism founded upon as objective
an understanding of one's present situation
as one is able to achieve. There is nothing
in the least teleological about such an
ideal: it does not aim toward a predetermined
end, unless its complete incarnation
in action can be called an end. But such
an incarnation would mean the establishing
of a condition of perpetual revolution,
perpetual radical criticism of the existing
state of affairs.
It is no wonder this ideal could not be
achieved in the realm of politics; but it
seems to me that the entire development
of modernist painting has been toward a
state of affairs that could be described in
these terms. This development has not been
toward any particular style of painting, although
at any moment - including the present
one - one particular kind of painting
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THE ARTS IN AMERICA, 1964
is more advanced, more radical in its criticisms
and will prove more fecund in its
results than any other kind. The chief function
of the dialectic of modernism in the
visual arts has been to provide a principle
by which painting can change, transform
and renew itself, and by which it is enabled
to perpetuate virtually intact, and sometimes
even enriched, through each epoch of selfrenewal,
those of its traditional values that
do not pertain directly to illustration and
representation. Thus modernist painting
preserves what it can of its own history, not
as an act of piety toward the past but as a
source of value in the present and future.
For this reason it is especially ironic that
modernist art is often described as nihilistic
and its artists characterized as irresponsible
charlatans. In fact, the strains under which
they work are enormous, and it is no wonder
that, in one way or another, many of
the finest modernist painters have cracked
up under them. This tendency toward
breakdown has been intensified in the past
twenty years by the quickening that has
taken place in the rate of self-transformation
within modernism itself - a quickening
that, in turn, has been the result of a general
increase in formal and historical selfawareness
on the part of modernist artists.
The work of such painters as Barnett Newman,
Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella
not only arises out of their personal interpretations
of the particular situations in
which advanced painting found itself at
crucial moments in their respective developments;
their work also looks to present and
future developments in modernist painting
to provide what will be either its justification
or a demonstration of its irrelevance.
"History, according to Hegel, is the maturation
of a future in the present, not the
sacrifice of the present to an unknown future,
and the rule of action according to
him is not to be effective at any price, but
above all to be fecund," Merleau-Ponty has
written (the translation is mine). In exactly
this sense, the ultimate criterion of the
legitimacy of a putative advance in modernist
painting is its fecundity.
But if one seeks to apply this formulation
to the art of the recent past, one must
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THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
bear in mind that the finest contemporary
painting - the work of Noland, Olitski and
Stella, among others - testifies to the fecundity
not only of the art of Barnett Newman
around 1950, but to that of Abstract
Expressionism, and that this is the case
because of, not in spite of, the fact that
Newman's art amounts to the most radical
criticism imaginable of the latter.
One upshot of the foregoing is that modernism
in the visual arts has gone a long
way toward effacing the traditional distinction
between problems in morals and problems
in art formulated by Professor Stuart
Hampshire in his essay "Logic and Appreciation"
as follows: "A work of art is gratuitous.
It is not essentially the answer to a
question or the solution to a presented
problem." Whereas "action in response to
any moral problem is not gratuitous; it is
imposed; that there should be some response
is absolutely necessary. One cannot
pass by a situation; one must pass through
it in one way or another."
Professor Hampshire's distinction holds
good, I think, for all art except the kind
I have been trying in this essay to define.
Once a painter who accepts the basic premises
of modernism becomes aware of a
particular problem thrown up by the art
of the recent past, his action is no longer
gratuitous, but imposed. He may be mistaken
in his assessment of the situation.
But as long as he believes such a problem
exists and is important, he is confronted
by a situation he cannot pass by and that,
in some way or other, he must pass through;
and the result of this forced passage will
be his art.
This means that while modernist painting
itself has increasingly divorced itself
from the concerns of the society in which
it precariously flourishes, the actual dialectic
by which it is made has taken on more
and more of the denseness, structure and
complexity of moral experience, that is, of
life itself, but life lived as few are inclined
to live it: in a state of continuous intellectual
and moral alertness.
In this sense, the formal critic of modernist
painting is also a moral critic, not
because all art is at bottom a criticism of
life, but because modernist painting is at
least a criticism of itself. And because this
is so, criticism that shares the basic premises
of modernist painting can play a role
in its development only somewhat less important
than that of new paintings themselves.
Not only ought the formal critic to
expound the significance of new painting
that seems to him genuinely exploratory,
and to distinguish between such painting
and work that seems merely to exploit the
formal innovations of prior modernists, but
in discussing the work of painters he admires,
he can point out flaws in putative
solutions to particular formal problems; he
is even justified in calling the attention of
modernist painters to formal issues that, in
his opinion, demand to be grappled with.
It may be argued that this is an intolerably
arrogant conception of the critic's job of
work, and perhaps it is. But it has the virtue
of forcing the critic who takes it up to
run the same risks as the artist whose work
he criticizes. In view of this last point it is
not surprising that so few critics have
chosen to assume its burdens.
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