Why is Modern Art Flat? Part 2

Gotham News by Willem de Kooning, 1955, oil on canvas

Today I will finally get a chance to see the art exhibit "Action/Abstraction" at the St. Louis Art Museum. These abstract paintings epitomize what it means for a painting to be flat. Since experts consider both "flat" and "abstract" to be wrong for art in healthcare I thought it might be useful to explore what those terms mean and where they came from.

Richard Lacayo's recent blog post explored this: 

Greenberg took the dialectic, the idea of an historically inevitable path, and applied it to painting. He saw (and urged on!)... a final distillation of developments he identified as having been in motion since Manet. Those were chiefly the expulsion of all representational imagery and an advance towards pure flatness, the basic condition of "the picture plane", also known as the canvas. No more paintings as "pictures", as windows into a scene. From now on paintings would be arrangements of color and form on a flat surface.

This quote is from Time Magazine's blog "Looking Around" which reviewed the art exhibit "Action/Abstraction".

There is an excellent article reviewing this exhibit in the September issue of Art in America. It is called "Guardians of the Avant-Garde" and was written by Richard Kalina.

The question "Why is Modern Art Flat?" was also covered on a post in the summer of 2007. To read it, click here.