Untitled: Red, Gray, Blue

Untitled: Red, Gray, Blue
8" x 5"
Original Pastel
July 1st, 2007
Casey Klahn

Remember we were talking (in my post: Color Field Painting) about Rothko and the Abstract Expressionist's desire to take their art to the final or ultimate expression of art. The critic Clement Greenberg was an influential voice for the art movement that would take abstraction to absolute and near-absolute expression.

The Encyclopedia Britannica offers some insight here into Greenberg's reasoning for going whole hog into abstraction:

The intellectual justification for his approach had been articulated a few years earlier in two essays published in Partisan Review. "The Avant Garde and Kitsch" (1939) was a manifesto in which Greenberg made a sharp distinction between "true culture" and "popular art." He asserted that quality in a work of art had nothing to do with contemporary social and political values. "Retiring from the public altogether," he wrote, "the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing it and raising it to the expression of an absolute…." This was necessary, he argued, because of the ways in which modern society had debased high art into kitsch. In "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (published in Partisan Reviewin [sic] 1940) Greenberg explained the necessity for avant-garde artists to break away from the traditional dominance of subject matter and place a new emphasis on form.

We're still emphasizing form, or formal qualities of art, today. I was talking with another artist the other day who takes after Andrew Wyeth, and he was extolling the abstract values in all styles of painting that succeed. My friend, Stan Miller, was saying that one of the great artist's patrons insists on hanging a large Wyeth upside down. The abstract composition is that good, even though it's a "realist" work.