Leo Steinberg—what a charmer!

For no particular reason, I recently happened to pick up a copy of "Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art" by art critic and historian Leo Steinberg (pictured above). Written mostly during the 1960s, the essays in Steinberg’s 1972 book focus on modern artists like Picasso and Jasper Johns whose work frequently remained close to the representational concerns of pre-twentieth century painting. Recognizing this traffic in representation is critical to understanding what Steinberg seems to have in mind when he talks about “other criteria.” For, at the time when "Other Criteria" appeared, representation had a very lowly place in the reigning narrative of modern art. According to that hegemonic narrative, modernist art consolidated in the avant-gardes of later nineteenth century France through a series of renunciations.



As in work like "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère," Manet did away with—or at least radically reduced—the mixture of colors that had long been the pride of the painter’s art. Cezanne eliminated the Florentine one-point perspective that had made pictures “windows on to the world.” And in each renunciation, so this narrative claimed, modernist painting was spurred by self-critical reflection upon its own essential nature. Thus, in renouncing representation, painting was shaking off the influence of literature and becoming ever more concerned with the conditions of its own form and medium. The heroes of this “formalist” narrative (as expounded most influentially by American art critic Clement Greenberg) were Abstract Expressionists like by Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis whose work seemed to eliminate reference outside of themselves in favor of exploration of “medium-specificity”—that is, the potentialities of paint on a surface of untreated canvas.

While it is clear that Steinberg has little time for this claim that all significant modernist painting eliminates representation, he is also critical of the authoritarianism and self-righteousness associated with formalism. Rather than the either-you-get-it-or-you-don’t posture of Greenberg’s “preventive aesthetics”, the essays in Other Criteria explore how frustrating new art can be. Is it an important advance or is it just charlatanism? Steinberg articulates the bafflement caused by new art in the following way:

"A work of art does not come like a penny postcard with its value stamped upon it; for all its objectives, it comes primarily as a challenge to the life of the imagination, and ‘correct’ ways of thinking or feeling about it simply do not exist. The grooves in which thought and feelings will eventually run have to be excavated before anything but bewilderment and resentment is felt at all." (23)

Perhaps this tempered attitude to new art is a product of Steinberg’s affinity for the Renaissance; he would subsequently go on to publish several books on Renaissance art.

In any event, Steinberg’s substantive charge against Greenberg’s modernism is precisely that it creates its narrative form by making a straw man of all art that is not modern. For anyone familiar with Rembrandt, he argues, it simply won’t do to claim that the tension between pictorial illusion and the flatness of the picture surface (say) was discovered by Manet in the 1860s. Rather, serious engagement with early modern art shows that the supposedly modernist discoveries of medium-specific properties had long been operative within artistic practice. Thus, he argues, if this putative opposition of modernism and the Old Masters becomes unstable, “modernism may have to be redefined—by other criteria.” (68)

So far, what I have told you about "Other Criteria" would make it sound like it is only a critique of Greenberg’s formalist narrative. But, there are some gem-like insights as well. Most famous of these is Steinberg’s reading of the “flatbed picture-plane” of 1960s art. Traditionally, he argues, the vertical surface of the canvas created the expectation that points on the picture-plane could answer to or tell us about some seen object in the world—or in some fictional world. However, what happens in the 1960s art of (say) Robert Rauschenberg is that the picture-plane is effectively turned horizontally—made like a freight car or a cluttered desk. It becomes a “receptive surface on which objects are scattered, data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed.” (84)



Rauschenberg’s “paintings” frequently combine all kinds of different elements—stuffed animals, silk-screened photographs, found objects, and even his own bed. Do they mean anything? This, Steinberg wants us to see, is the wrong question. For, what was needed in the art of the 1960s, so he claims, was not a singular picture-plane in which unified visual experience could be evoked or expression visualized, but a flatbed surface on which information could all be plunked down. In a brilliant formulation, Steinberg proposes that Rauschenberg thus invented “a pictorial surface that let the world in again” (90)—it provided a format for re-introducing reference outside of itself (and even real objects), which had been renounced by Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s-50s. And yet, the world Rauschenberg let back in was no longer seen through a window (as per the Renaissance conceit), but received from television, databanks, newspapers, and gathered together onto the flatbed surface. What a delightful conceit!