The Technological Approach

Thus, in his view, painting (or any art) includes a meaningful dimension only insofar since it is transcendent, i.e., headed toward this ultimate expression of, or accomplishment of, universal essence.

His view of advanced painting, therefore, was that it "progressed from greater to lesser complexity" and, despite what Stiles calls "the poverty of his version of modernism," this view of art was not just widely employed, retrospectively, as an explanation with the pre-1945 avant-gardes, it also became the guiding principle for post-1945 gestural expressionists (2). In terms of an explanation on the avant-gardes of 1900-40 this was, to say the least, inadequate. It ignored individuals artists' concern with social engagement and critique, in between other aims, and it tried to enforce a chronological, teleological framework on a excellent diversity of art movements that often had small relation on the movements that supposedly preceded or followed them within the relentless progress of art toward its ultimate goal as envisioned by Greenberg. But from the art of numerous of the painters on the period 1940-60 Greenberg's ideas had been really important. Artists on the period usually relied on Greenberg's basic claim that, "it has been established by now, it would seem, that the irreducibility of pictorial art consists in but a couple of conventions or norms: flatness and also the delimitation of flatness" (quoted in Stiles 2).

This, of course, overstates the artists' positions somewhat and a whole lot of Greenberg's influence had as much to complete with his power as being a critic-reviewer as of the powerful attraction of his ideas. But thoughtful painters just like Barnett Newman took in Greenberg's straightforward thought of painting's progress, and also the essential role of higher or lesser degrees of abstraction in that progress, and applied these ideas in their work. (Others, of course, who had been less theoretically inclined largely had their jobs mentioned for them by Greenberg or some other critic.) Newman, however, continued Greenberg's concept in the advanced art-kitsch split in his discussion of the differences among art and decoration. In Newman's view significantly abstract art in the 1940s was simply decoration. According to a misconception of primitive art as an art that tended toward abstraction, he argued, artists have been misled into considering that a picture surface "broken up in geometrical fashion" was an advance in abstract painting, whereas this sort of work had simply "reduced painting to an ornamental art" (Newman 25, 24). But primitive groups had usually strictly observed the difference between decorative geometric designs and also the art exactly where "distortion was applied as a device whereby the artist could produce symbols" (Newman 25).

refore (more or much less consciously, but usually aided by Greenberg's criticism) that, due to the fact art had reached this stage in its development, there was absolutely nothing to explore but flatness and this was the only commencing factor obtainable to them.

Newman's Cathedra (1951) is an illustration of how he tried to put these ideas into action. The painting, that's oil on canvas, is eight feet tall and nearly eighteen feet extended and consists of a surface covered with deep blue paint which is as practically uniform as hand-painting can make it. Just short of halfway across the canvas there is a white stripe, several inches wide, that runs from top to bottom.

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