From After Abstract Expressionism – Clement Greenberg


Like so much of painterly art before it, Abstract Expressionism has worked in the end to reduce the
role of colour: unequal densities of paint become, as I have said, so many differences of light and
dark, and these deprive colour of both its purity and its fullness. At the same time it has also
worked against true openness, which is supposed to be another quintessentially painterly aim: the
slapdash application of paint ends by crowding the picture plane into a compact jumble – a jumble
that is another version, as we see it in de Kooning and his followers, of academically Cubist
compactness. Still, Newman, and Rothko turn away from the painterliness of Abstract Expressionism
as though to save the objects of painterliness – colour and openness – from painterliness itself.
This is why their art could be called a synthesis of painterly and non-painterly or, better, a
transcending of the differences between the two. Not a reconciling of these – that belonged to
Analytical Cubism, and these three Americans happen to be the first serious abstract painters, the
first abstract painters of style, really to break with Cubism.

Clyfford Still, who is one of the great innovators of modernist art, is the leader and pioneer
here. Setting himself against the immemorial insistence on light and dark contrast, he asserted
instead colour’s capacity to act through the contrast of pure hues in relative independence of
light and dark design. Late Impressionism was the precedent here, and as in the late Monet, the
suppression of value contrasts created a new kind of openness. The picture no longer divided itself
into shapes or even patches, but into zones and areas and fields of colour. This became essential,
but it was left to Newman and Rothko to show how completely so. If Still’s largest paintings, and
especially his horizontal ones, fail so often to realize the monumental openness they promise, it
is not only because he will choose a surface too large for what he has to say; it is also because
too many of his smaller colour areas will fail really to function as areas and will remain simply
patches – patches whose rustic-Gothic intricacies of outline halt the free flow of colour-space.

With Newman and Rothko, temperaments that might strike one as being natively far more painterly
than Still’s administer themselves copious antidotes in the form of the rectilinear. The
rectilinear is kept ambiguous, however: Rothko fuzzes and melts all his dividing lines; Newman will
insert an uneven edge as foil to his ruled ones. Like Still, they make a show of studiedness, as if
to demonstrate their rejection of the mannerisms which have become inseparable by now from rapid
brush or knife handling. Newman’s occasional brushy e dge, and the torn but exact one left by
Still’s knife, are there as if to advertise both their awareness and their repudiation of the easy
effects of spontaneity-Still continues to invest in surface textures, and there is no question but
that the tactile irregularities of his surfaces, with their contrasts 0 f m att and shiny* Paint
coat and priming, contribute to the intensity of his art. But by renouncing tactility, and detail
in drawing, Newman and Rothko achieve what I find a more positive openness and colour. The
rectilinear is open by definition: it calls the least attention to drawing and gets least in the
way of colour-space. A thin paint surface likewise gets least in the way of colour-space, by
excluding tactile associations. Here both Rothko and Newman take their lead from Milton Avery, who
took his from Matisse. At the same time colour is given more autonomy by being relieved of its
localizing and denotative function. It no longer fills in or specifies an area or even plane, but
speaks for itself by dissolving all definiteness of shape and distance. To this end – as Still was
the first to show – it has to be warm colour, or cool colour infused with warmth. It has also to be
uniform in hue, with only the subtlest variations of value if any at all, and spread over an
absolutely, not merely relatively, large area. Size guarantees the purity as well as the intensity
needed to suggest indeterminate space: more blue simply being bluer than less blue. This too is why
the picture has to be confined to so few colours. Here again, Still showed the way, the vision of
the two- or three-colour picture . . . being his in the first place (whatever help towards it he
may have got from the Miro of 1924-1930).

But Newman and Rothko stand or fall by colour more obviously than Still does. (Where Newman often
fails is in using natively warm colours like red and orange, Rothko in using pale ones, or else in
trying to dram, as in his disastrous ‘Seagram’ murals.) Yet the ultimate effect sought is one of
more than chromatic intensity; it is rather one of an almost literal openness that embraces and
absorbs colour in the act of being created by it. Openness, and not only in painting, is the
quality that seems most to exhilarate the attuned eyes of our time. Facile explanations suggest
themselves here which I leave the reader to explore for himself. Let it suffice to say that by the
new openness they have attained Newman, Rothko, and Still point to what I would risk saying is the
only way to high pictorial art in the near future. And they also point to that way by their
repudiation of virtuosity of execution.

Elsewhere I have written of the kind of self-critical process which I think provides the
infra-logic of modernist art (‘Modernist Painting’). [. . .] As it seems to me, Newman, Rothko, and
Still have swung the self-criticism of modernist painting in a new direction simply by continuing
it in its old one. The question now asked through their art is no longer what constitutes art, or
the art of painting, as such, but what irreducibly constitutes good art as such. Or rather, what is
the ultimate source of value or quality in art? And the worked-out answer appears to be: not skill,
training, or anything else having to do with execution or performance, but conception alone.
culture or taste may be a necessary condition of conception, but conception is alone decisive.
Conception can also be called invention, inspiration, or even intuition (in the usage of Croce, who
did anticipate theoretically what practice has just now discovered and confirmed for itself)- It is
true that skill used to be a vessel of inspiration and do the office of conception, but that was
when the best pictorial art was the most naturalistic pictorial art.

Inspiration alone belongs altogether to the individual; everything else, including skill, can now
be acquired by any one. Inspiration remains the only factor in the creation of a successful work of
art that cannot be copied or imitated. This has been left to artists like Newman and Mondrian to
make explicit (and it is really the only thing Newman and Mondrian have in common). Newman’s
pictures look easy to copy, and maybe the\ really are. But they are far from easy to conceive, and
their quality and meaning lies almost entirely in their conception. That, to me, is self-evident,
but even if it were not, the frustrated efforts of Newman’s imitators would reveal it. The onlooker
who says his child could paint a Newman may be right, but Newman would have to be there to tell the
child exactly what to do. The exact choices of colour, medium, size, shape, proportion – including
the size and shape of the support – are what alone determine the quality of the result, and these
choices depend solely on inspiration or conception. Like Rothko and Still, Newman happens to be a
conventionally skilled artist – need I say it? But if he uses his skill, it is to suppress the
evidence of it. And the suppression is part of the triumph of his art, next to which most other
contemporary painting begins to look fussy. [. . . ]

First published in Art International, VI, no. 8, Lugano, October 1962.