Rosa Gabriella Gonçalves
Federal University of Bahia, Brazil
The urge to act guided by a method was something absolutely indispensable for the American art critic Clement Greenberg. Even before having become an art critic, Greenberg claimed that certain artists, like Rouault, Kandinsky, Soutine, Van Gogh, and many others could not be considered truly modern because they did not have a method. The aim of this paper is to discuss how Greenberg’s method as an art critic was built as a synthesis of Cubist aesthetics, understood by him as the aesthetics of flatness. While the Impressionists cared only about purely visual sensations, the Cubists were mainly concerned with generalized forms and the relationship between surfaces and volumes, describing and analyzing them in a simplified way, omitting the color and the accidental attributes of the objects that served as models. Inspired by Cezanne, they aspired to define structure of things which inevitably remain under the accidents of momentary appearance, and in doing so, cubists violated the standards of appearance to show the same object from more than one point of view on the same picture plane. So, instead of having discovered a way to fully describe the objects on a flat surface, they start to rethink the whole structure of a painting.
In the modernist art the notion of space as a space that connects things rather than separates them did appear. At this point, a picture surface started to be perceived as a material object, which resulted in the need to give an aesthetic form to its irreducible planarity as an object. Consequently, the planarity became the most important premise of the modernist painting. Picasso and Braque started this process when they began to deconstruct both objects, such as the background, and plans which were becoming increasingly frontal. As these faceted plans were not closed, the objects and the background began to interpenetrate, resulting in a lack of distinction between empty spaces and occupied spaces. Around 1912 or 1913, the synthesis replaced the analysis, the faceted planes gave way to larger forms, and gradually the object or parts of it began to resurface in the flat surface of what we might call “background”. The planarity of the surface came to be affirmed in a new and more radical way: the object is not crumbled under the pressure of a shallow space, but is opened in a flat surface.