Clement Greenberg's essay "Modernist Painting" is an explication and justification of the self-identifying, self-critical project of modernist painting of the late-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. This historically based undertaking addressed the essential, inherent qualities of easel painting. In the course of this process flatness and two-dimensionality were identified as the unique attributes of the art form and--as non-essential elements such as narrative, the illusion of space, and figurative representation were stripped away--the culminating identification of painting-as-painting was accomplished in Abstract Expressionism.
The modernist project, which extended to most human activities, began with the philosopher Kant who identified the limits of logic through logical means. This was the essence of modernism, "the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself" (67). Once the demand arose in the nineteenth century for the justification of all social activities each art undertook the task of identifying its own irreducible properties and its special competence. In painting these qualities proved to be inherent in the medium itself and Manet was thus the first modernist painter because he was the first to insist on the surface on which he painted.
While the painters of the Western tradition had always recognized the importance of preserving the picture plane, their works drew attention first to what the picture contained and only secondly to the flatness of the surface, i.e., to the painting-as-painting. But the modernists developed an art in which the flatness of the picture's surface was the viewer's first experience. They imposed this as "the only and necessary way" of seeing their paintings (70). How this was accomplished was an open question for many decades and adhering to the limits of the flat surface and two dimensions eventually led to the elimination of repr...