4 Leo Steinberg

4 Leo Steinberg Pop, “Post-Modernist” Painting and the Flatbed Picture Plane eo Steinberg was born in Moscow in 1920. Formal study included that undertaken in England at the Slade School of Art and the Uni- L versity of London for which he received a diploma (fine arts) in 1940. He arrived in the United States in 1945, the country in which he would henceforth reside and, later, take out citizenship. Further study followed at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, for which he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1960. It was not until 1953, the year in which he turned thirty-three, that Steinberg published his inaugural essay on twentieth- century art.1 Over the following eighteen years, however, he amassed a considerable body of writing on art from this period. This comprised es- says and to a lesser extent reviews, the latter being a legacy of his ten- month stint as a reviewer for Arts magazine during part of 1955 and 1956. It was of a size and substance sufficient to warrant publication in 1972 in the form of the anthology entitled Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. In retrospect, Steinberg’s writings on both modern and contemporary art were only an adjunct to those produced in his primary vocational role of academic and historian of sixteenth- and sev- enteenth-century Italian art.2 They provide, nonetheless, valuable insights into the critical consciousness of the sixties and shortly thereafter, the time span of this study. During this period Steinberg was a sought after and au- thoritative commentator on new developments in art, as witnessed by his inclusion on the panel assembled by the Museum of Modern Art for its symposium on pop art held on 13 December 1962. Steinberg’s invitation to par- ticipate, it must be speculated, followed on from the publication of his both comprehensive and pioneering account of Jasper Johns’s early work in the same year,3 one that he later described as an attempt to stay with the “enigma” represented by Johns’ art and so “stave off the psychology of avoidable middle age for a while.”4 Copyright @ 2001. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 96 EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/23/2019 4:44 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES AN: 73971 ; Harrison, Sylvia.; Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism Account: undeloan.main.ehost Leo Steinberg Steinberg’s relevance to this study rests principally on a single but nev- ertheless important essay entitled “Other Criteria.” Although not published until 1972 in the previously mentioned anthology, it was based on a lecture that had been delivered at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in March 19685 and drew upon ideas present in Steinberg’s writings on contemporary art throughout the previous two decades. The most significant of these concerned his perception of both the centrality of representation in the “aesthetic function” of all art, including modern abstract art6 and the anti- illusionist premises underlying the relationship between subject and art object in Jasper Johns’s art.7 In “Other Criteria,” Steinberg formulated the concept of the “flatbed picture plane”: the characteristic picture plane of sixties’ art, including the greater part of pop art. The flatbed picture plane symbolizes any firm “surface” upon which items are dispersed and information is recorded. “Flatbed,” Steinberg explained, is derived from the printing press of the same name – “‘a horizontal bed on which a horizontal printing surface rests’ (Webster).” This same surface, although worked upon by the artist, does not correspond to optical knowledge of the natural world (at least that derived from first-hand experience of it), but, rather, to “operational processes.” As it concerned the “psychic address” of images impressed upon the pictorial surface, the symbolic repositioning of the picture plane from upright to horizontal corresponded to a marked change in the major theme of art, a change “from nature to culture.”8 Steinberg’s linkage of the flatbed picture plane to key characteristics of post-war society, notably mass communications, although an understated aspect of Steinberg’s argument, is central to the concerns of this study, those which, following the lead of the sociolog- ical model described by David Lyon and Zygmunt Bauman, postulate a direct relationship between the “cultural” (post-modernism) and the “social” (post-modernity). Steinberg’s argument concerning the flatbed picture plane was con- ceived as a repudiation of formalist theories of modern art, above all that represented by Greenbergian formalism that dominated New York art during the sixties. In its denunciation of formalism it did not waver from the position that Steinberg had signalled in his initial publication on both modern and contemporary art: “The Eye is a Part of the Mind” (1953). At its in- ception, “Other Criteria” was intended as a withering, if belated, critique of Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” (the 1965 version), and also, if more veiled, of Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” (1967) and its re- vision of the essentialist premises of Greenberg’s modernist argument. Steinberg identified the flatbed picture plane as that of “post-Modernist Copyright @ 2001. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 97 EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/23/2019 4:44 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES AN: 73971 ; Harrison, Sylvia.; Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism Account: undeloan.main.ehost Part Two. “Social” Critics painting,”9 which, in the course of his critique of “Modernist Painting,” he distinguished from the representational character of both modern and pre-modern art. Steinberg considered that “post-Modernist painting” signalled a radically revised relationship “between artist and image, image and viewer,”10 a relationship that was largely predicated on the ability of mass communications or media to create a mediate world of culture, one that is distinct from and, necessarily, distances man from the organic world. The prime catalyst for Steinberg’s “Other Criteria” was the negative evaluation of innovative art, including pop, by formalist critics in the sixties because of its stubborn refusal to be assimilated to the formalist par- adigm of modern art.11 Steinberg’s recommended critical approach to distinctly new art was to put aside standards and “taste” moulded by the experience of earlier art, thereby delaying evaluation of it before the “intention” of the work had become sharply defined.12 The reference, here, is to a method of evaluation that had been long-employed in the field of lit- erary criticism. This concerns the establishment of “intention” – “design or plan in the author’s mind” – as a pre-requisite for judging the work.13 In theory at least, the establishment of authorial intention also establishes an “objective truth” and thus a means of judging the “legitimacy of different interpretations.”14 The nature of this “truth,” however, varies in accord with the authorial intention of each work. It is precisely the absence of this flexibility in evaluative criteria that Steinberg objected to in formalist theory. Steinberg would say of formalist critics that he was wary of their disregard of those aspects of art that could not be measured by the formalist gauge and that he was opposed outright to their attempt to proscribe what the artist should not do and what the viewer should not see.15 Apart from doubting that the aesthetic value of art can be perceived as separate from, for example, the artist’s “expressive intention,” “culture,” “irony,” and “iconography,” or, for that matter, can be segregated by critical evaluation – thus questioning the validity of formalism’s tool for measuring quality at all – Steinberg was critical of the effect of measuring quality in a manner that led to the wholesale dismissal of a movement or style without taking into account the value or merit of indi- vidual examples. This last point is made specfic to pop.16 Steinberg’s liberal, even relativist, attitude towards unorthodox art was initiated, prior to the advent of pop, in response to the work of Jasper Johns. In a retrospective study about the critical challenges posed by Johns’s art, written in 1961, Steinberg noted the futility of responding to it with preconceived ideas about “the needs of art,” particularly those deter- Copyright @ 2001. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 98 EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/23/2019 4:44 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES AN: 73971 ; Harrison, Sylvia.; Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism Account: undeloan.main.ehost Leo Steinberg mined by formalism with its blatant disregard for subject-matter.17 His critical position on distinctly new art was tested in December of the following year, at the previously mentioned symposium on pop art, in the course of which Steinberg admitted to disliking Roy Lichtenstein’s version because the subject-matter existed for him “so intensely” that he had been “unable to get through to whatever painterly qualities there may be.” He was un- prepared, however, to declare it as either art or non-art, despite declaring it a part of the social and psychological history of art, on the grounds that “if there is a general principle involved in what makes a work of art, we have yet to establish it.”18 The focus of Steinberg’s attack in “Other Criteria” was the focal and al- lied tenets of Greenberg’s formalist theory of modernism: self-definition and self-criticism.

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