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 justificat
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