Zoë Wray
Modern Art Final Exam Take-Home Essay
5/18/13
Modernism and Meaning: The New Approach to Art
The advent of Modernism definitively turned the purpose and meaning of art asunder.
Artists no longer merely depicted objects or figures with representational goals in mind. Instead,
the meaning and focus of art shifted to its identity as an object as opposed to its identity in terms
of its subject matter. With this shift of attention, artists began to use art to examine its definition
and the significance of using formal elements such as line, light, color, and space, among others,
to create art. Modernism essentially represented art’s first look inward, its first introspection
aimed at understanding how artists have used timeless formal conventions to create the art
object. As Clement Greenberg asserted, “Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the
procedures themselves of that which is being criticized.”1 Three articles that supplemented this
course sought to examine the different truths that Modern art has attempted to reach utilizing
age-old materials in a radically innovational manner: Alan C. Birnholz’s “Forms, Angles, and
Corners: On Meaning in Russian Avant-Garde Art,” Clement Greenberg’s chapter on “Modernist
Painting,” and Kenneth E. Silver’s “Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and
the Rise of Pop Art.” All three articles shed light on artworks studied in class in that they
pondered how Modern art still communicates meaning or contains symbolism in the way that
representational art did, and whether this meaning is now forever different in kind by virtue of
Modern art’s innovative use of formal tools.
Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Forum Lectures (Voice of America), 1960; print version (1965) republished in
Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 85-94. Moodle PDF.
1
In Birnholz’s article, he proposes that the Russian avant-garde art of the early twentieth
century possesses more meaning that simply the aesthetic quality of pure geometric shapes and
abstraction, adding a thoughtful supplementary consideration to the Suprematist and
Constructivist Russian art that we studied in class. As Birnholz explains, Russian artists “shared
the widespread view that for their art to be most modern it must no longer contain a relic of the
past like recognizable subject matter…they wanted their public to look at the art object in a fresh
and a new way, not simply for what the work might allude to outside of itself.”2 These artists
desired to make their status as vanguards of Modern art as clear as possible, trying their best to
disconnect themselves from older art.
In class, we discussed these feelings on the part of these artists to achieve transcendence
and aesthetic liberation via pure forms, hence Malevich’s definition of Suprematism as “the
supremacy of pure feeling in creative art.”3 This article elaborates on what we discussed in class
by offering the possibility that these artworks with simple shapes and unblended swaths of color
could have other meanings as well. Birnholz presents El Lissitzky’s 1919-20 poster, Beat the
Whites with the Red Wedge, as an example. In a detailed analysis of the shapes and colors of the
painting, Birnholz reaffirms an already existing theory that the painting symbolizes “the battle
between the Bolsheviks and the counterrevolutionaries with the impending victory of the
Bolsheviks made clear.”4 Birnholz concludes that while “we have a good idea of how this art
arose and how it developed,” it is necessary for art historians to now ask what “did this art
mean?”5 This gives us another dimension to the study of Modern art history that builds upon
Birnholz, Alan C. “Forms, Angles, and Corners: On Meaning in Russian Avant-Garde Art,” Arts Magazine 51:6
(February 1977), 101-9. Moodle PDF.
3
Ibid., 103.
4
Ibid., 101.
5
Ibid., 108.
2
what we learned in class and introduces us to concepts that we would not have been intellectually
prepared to comprehend had we not known the historical background information.
Silver’s article introduces us to the deeper dimensions of another period of art history,
discussing how the homosexual identity of Andy Warhol interacted with his identity as a
commercial artist and Pop artist, as well as how other Pop artists such as Jasper Johns reacted to
his multiple identities. While we didn’t discuss in class how his homosexuality affected his art
making, Silver’s analysis fleshes out our understanding of the meaning of Warhol’s art similarly
to how Birnholz’s writing contributed to our understanding of the Russian avant-gardists.
Interestingly, Silver concludes that the reason Johns believed Warhol was too “swishy,”
according to a conversation Warhol had with his friend Emile De Antonio, was because he
collected art. Because he was a collector, he was also a consumer, and in the days of the 1960s
when women did the shopping while men provided the money, to be a consumer was to “have
taken on the attributes of a woman.”6 As a result, he didn’t quite fit in with the men of the art
world, but since he wasn’t actually a woman, he couldn’t have fit in with female artists either.
Warhol’s dual citizenship as a commercial and fine artist also made him a black sheep among the
Modernists; as Silver cogently summarizes, Warhol’s dual identities in this realm “wreaked
havoc on the kinds of binarisms—social, economic, sexual, aesthetic, and political—that
structured, and still do to a large extent, the discourse of art.”7 Warhol’s destruction of the artistic
binary—another way of questioning what makes art art—serves as a microcosm for the larger
role that Modernism played in the course of art history. In Warhol’s straddling between the
worlds of commercial and fine art, he was self-critical of the processes to which he devoted his
Silver, Kenneth E. “Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art,” in HandPainted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62 (Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art), 178-203.
Moodle PDF.
7
Ibid., 195.
6
life in the same way that all Modern artists stepped back from the canvas and reconsidered just
what it was that they were creating.
In Greenberg’s article, he examines Modern art as a whole and how it contrasted with
pre-Modern art in terms of its objectives. The main shift that occurred between pre-Modern art
and Modern art existed in how each age used art: “Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the
medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.”8 Whereas the preModernists made every attempt to obscure the evidence of their hands at work on the canvas and
make its surface as smooth and glass-like as possible, Modern artists deliberately made their
presence in their artwork obvious, doing away with pristine canvas surfaces and illusion. This
change in the attitude towards art was prevalent in nearly all of the paintings we studied in class,
starting with the painterly, energetic brushwork of the Impressionists. Greenberg’s article
reminds us of the big picture of Modern art and its main goals, which made it more significant
than merely depicting the French bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century as in the case of the
Impressionists; “it was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface that remained,
however, more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which pictorial art criticized
and defined itself under Modernism.”9
As Greenberg points out, however, Modern art is not completely disconnected from the
art that came before it. Even as Modern art became less representational and more abstract, with
the work of artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian among dozens of others removing any
recognizable subject matter from their art, it was still fundamentally bound to and dependent on
past art in order to develop. “Art is—among other things—continuity, and unthinkable without
8
9
Greenberg. “Modernist Painting,” 86.
Ibid., 87.
it,”10 as Greenberg puts it. Although this class only taught Modern Art history and subsequently
started in the late eighteenth century, it is important to remember that Modern Art could only
exist because of pre-Modern art history. Otherwise, Modern art would have simply been unable
to emerge as it did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because if it is ultimately self-critical
as I think Greenberg rightly defines it, then without the past it would have nothing to criticize.
All the frankly bizarre products of the myriad artistic movements that ran their courses in the
twentieth century would ring hollow and seem foolish if they did not have the deeper purport of
truly deciphering art’s definition.
While Modern art always shocked the viewers of the day when it first appeared, these
articles provide evidence that Modern artists were not simply in the business of surprising the
public. While the wow factor of their works was a necessary consequence in order to get the
public and the art critics to pay attention to their art, Modern artists essentially desired to make
art a more thoughtful, intellectual pursuit. They wanted it to have a higher purpose than merely
to mimic nature; they wanted it to be truly creative and communicate ideas and emotions that
other manifestations of creativity could not express. Birnholz, Silver, and Greenberg’s articles
demonstrate that even when one discusses Modernism as a whole, its dozens of permutations that
appeared throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries all have unique characters, unified
under the umbrella of thoughtful self-criticism. Modernists believed in the beauty and
importance of art, but they also knew that art deserved to have artists shine a scrutinizing light on
it in order to help it reach its full expressive potential. The countless movements and artists that
have arose during the Modernist epoch and beyond prove that art’s potential is infinite.
10
Ibid., 93.
Works Cited
Birnholz, Alan C. “Forms, Angles, and Corners: On Meaning in Russian Avant-Garde Art,”
Arts Magazine 51:6 (February 1977), 101-9. Moodle PDF.
Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting,” Forum Lectures (Voice of America), 1960; print
version (1965) republished in Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 85-94.
Moodle PDF.
Silver, Kenneth E. “Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop
Art,” in Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62 (Los Angeles, Museum
of Contemporary Art), 178-203. Moodle PDF.