Modernism and Anti-Modernism
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Clement Greenberg's enormously influential definition of modernism embodies a teleological approach to art that was rejected by the Pop artists, among others, who constituted part of the reaction to 'modernism' (or, at least, to Greenberg's modernism) that began in the 1960s. Greenberg made an initial distinction between art, which took in "advanced painting," and kitsch, the German word for "disposable, poorly-designed consumer objects" that had been flooding the world in the wake of the Industrial Revolution (Stiles 2). Such objects fed the popular taste for illusionist representation, sentiment, anecdote, and decoration that was, Greenberg believed, beneath consideration for true art. In his view the European avant-gardes of the pre-1940 era embodied this disdain for the popular and a concern with the higher purposes of art. Greenberg's theory of modernism developed as an explanation of the trend that he believed he saw in those avant-gardes. He saw the increasing abstraction of the schools of twentieth-century art as a continuum on which the next, and more advanced, school of painting would move to greater abstraction and tried to explain this seeming forward movement in painting as somehow being inherent in art itself. In his view each movement embodied a more radical critique of painting within itself and each artistic medium became increasingly "self-referential, divested of all extraneous elements including narrative and illusion" and would, thereby, eventually
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the art in which "distortion was used as a device whereby the artist could create symbols" (Newman 25).
The artist, whether primitive or living in New York in 1943, understood the difference between "abstraction and the art of the abstract" and was not interested in geometric form for its own sake but in "creating forms which by their abstract nature carry some abstract intellectual content" (Newman 25). Some had tried to explain New York abstract painting as Surrealist in nature but Newman also firmly rejected the idea that true abstract art had anything to do with the artist's "own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality" (25). Instead, Newman claimed (echoing Greenberg's notion of the teleological nature of art) that the artist of abstraction aimed to "penetrate into the world mystery [and] to that extent his art is concerned with the sublime" (24-25). All creation is chaos and the artist attempts to delve into the unconscious and produce new, abstract forms through which the artist "tries to wrest the truth from the void (Newman 26).
Newman's Cathedra (1951) is an example of how he tried to put these ideas into action. The painting, which is oil on canvas, is eight feet tall and nearly eighteen feet long an
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Approximate Word count = 1777
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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