Afterlives, MODA Critical Review, Issue 7
Writing
05.03.2026
Art historians have long struggled to make sense of works that defy linguistic clarity. Though artists’ suspicion of language has done little to dissuade interpretation, critics of both form and content fail to fully account for the viewing experience. While formalism isolates visual properties to produce an analysis emptied of external significance, socio-historical approaches locate meaning in politics, ideology, and identity, often missing the work’s affective charge. The former is orthodox and ahistorical, while the latter fails to adequately decode aesthetic encounters.
Immanuel Kant, writing in the eighteenth century, anticipated this problem: how can artwork think without concepts, mean without representing? Kant theorized aesthetic judgement as grounded in feeling, imagination, and nonconceptual thought. Clement Greenberg, acolyte of Kant and apostle of Abstract Expressionism, similarly viewed form and content as co-constitutive. Despite this, both Kant and Greenberg are remembered as staunch formalists, elevating form for its own sake. [1] This interpretive mistake has sanctioned the thinning of their philosophies into a form of anemic criticism that deadens the visual encounter.
Kant’s aesthetic philosophy––particularly his concept of “aesthetic ideas,” which he defines as nonconceptual representations that “animate the mind” and awaken us to our own imaginative capacity—offers a compelling account of how art generates meaning. [2] Reading Greenberg as a critic working in a fundamentally Kantian register reveals that criticism has obscured the phenomenological force of his own aesthetic theory. Freed from the strictures of modernist teleology, a Kantian-Greenbergian aesthetics emerges as a richer and more coherent framework, one that restores the centrality of feeling and imaginative play to visual encounters.
Like many critics writing in the late 1930s, Greenberg was deeply anxious to reinvigorate a culture “dumbed down” by academicism, commercialism, and oppressive ideology. [3] He found two threats particularly troubling: kitsch––an impoverished cultural form made to appease the masses––and Alexandrianism––a stagnant, bourgeois deference to tradition. [4] Under historical pressure, Greenberg turned formalism, his remedy to the flattening of culture, into a conservative dogma. Far from transgressive, he viewed the avant-garde as the last remaining defense of tradition. He offered a historical account of the movement, arguing that beginning in the mid-nineteenth century the arts were “hunted back to their mediums,” where they were then “isolated, concentrated and defined.” [5] From Manet to Brancusi, Greenberg saw a shared tendency among so-called “great artists” to emphasize the singularity of their respective mediums. He deduced that in emphasizing unique traits, each art would “be rendered ‘pure,’ and in its ‘purity’ find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence.” [6] In other words, each art’s “indispensability” became synonymous with its “irreducibility”––by calling attention to the formal properties exclusive to each medium, the avant-garde insulated itself from corruption, securing both its autonomy and survival.
“Modernist Painting,” Greenberg’s notorious treatise on the raison d’être of modernism, further entrenched this doctrine of purity. He argued that a self-reflexive investigation into the essential nature of painting pointed to the “ineluctable flatness of the surface”; by replacing illusory three-dimensional space with the flatness of a picture plane, viewers would experience “a Modernist picture as a picture first.” [7] Greenberg wanted to prove that a canvas, void of every readable link with nature, could nevertheless be coherent and historically legible. Under this rubric, pure form, optical flatness, and medium-specificity were the sole criteria by which a work of art’s quality was determined.
To understand Greenberg primarily through the teleological sweep of “Modernist Painting”—with its genealogy of purification, its ascent toward flatness, its faith in disciplinary self-criticism—is to take him at his most programmatic, anxious, and defensive. It is this notion of modernism, underwritten by strict formal conventions, that has yielded such widespread criticism of Greenberg’s theory of art. By many accounts, Greenberg deliberately severs the sensory, rhetorical, and affective registers of art from its morphology and reduces painting to an empirical logic of purity. But are Greenberg’s modernism and formalism indivisible? While a dehistoricized reading of Greenberg’s work may support this thesis, a closer examination of his aesthetic philosophy undermines it. Greenberg’s historically determined formalism deliberately severs the rhetorical and affective registers of art from its morphology and reduces painting to an empirical logic of purity. Yet his later writings, once separated from this historicist project, understand form as the sensuous vehicle of content.
Once extricated from a deterministic model of art historical progress, Greenberg’s aesthetic theory proves far closer to Kant than his detractors have allowed. As early as “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” he asserted that content should be “dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.” [8] What Greenberg actually meant by formalism is aesthetic experience.
In uncoupling Greenberg’s formalism from his modernism, a much more coherent, defensible, and Kantian Greenberg comes to the fore. Formalism emerges less programmatic and instead articulates the conditions that produce aesthetic experience. In a 1971 essay, “Necessity of ‘Form’,” Greenberg writes: “Quality, esthetic value originates in inspiration, vision, ‘content,’ not in ‘form’ … ‘form’ not only opens the way to inspiration; it can also act as means to it; [it] can generate or discover ‘content’ … yet that ‘content’ cannot be separated from its ‘form.’” [9] Far from propping up form for its own sake, Greenberg comprehends the nonconceptual, intangible nature of aesthetic judgement, for which form becomes requisite to understanding. For Greenberg, evaluations of art “[come] out like results and answers that have swallowed their causes and questions. By a similar circularity, content and form disappear into one another.” [10] Per Greenberg, because we experience works of fine art first and foremost through vision, form becomes the vehicle through which content is absorbed; far from being devoid of content, it is inseparable from it.
Like Kant, Greenberg understands aesthetic experience as a negotiation between imagination and understanding that at once activates cognition and transcends its limits. For Greenberg no less than for Kant, aesthetic judgment names a state in which cognition is fully activated without conceptualization. In this schema, form becomes the vehicle for nonconceptual content. Thus, while Greenberg’s writings centered on flatness, opticality, and medium-specific purity have understandably drawn accusations of formalist dogmatism, his reflections on the nature of visual experience reveal a very different thinker—one for whom meaning is intuited through form. Greenberg echoes Kant by restoring the centrality of feeling to criticism, using visual analysis to articulate the way art moves, challenges, and enlarges us.
[1] Despite the widespread condemnation of his formalist program, Greenberg’s texts remain canonical. When I began writing this paper, I was convinced that Greenberg not only advocated for an empiricist theoretical program, but misread Kant. His dogmatic convictions about the importance of medium-specificity, flatness, opticality, and purity seemed unequivocally conservative and outdated. Upon closer reading, however, I realized that Greenberg-the-empiricist is but one facet of his contribution; his larger oeuvre, particularly his late lectures, is in fact very open to interpretation, and advocates for an idea of formalism in diametric opposition to the one many critics have associated him with.
[2] Kant draws a sharp distinction between “aesthetic ideas” and “rational ideas,” which act as counterparts: while the former cannot be expressed in language or made intelligible through “any determinate thought,” the latter is “a concept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate.” Both find their principles in reason yet neither can become cognition––aesthetic ideas exceed what can be conceptually articulated, rational ideas exceed what can be sensibly intuited. Aesthetic and rational ideas reveal each other’s limits, and it is this dialectical tension that Kant sees as the locus of art’s potential, for which “imagination, understanding, spirit and taste are requisite.” Aesthetic ideas are expressions of Spirit (Geist), which Kant describes as the vital principle that stimulates reflection beyond what can be conceptually grasped. Unlike science or philosophy, they invite but never exhaust interpretation, “[animating] the mind by opening up for it the prospect of an immeasurable field of related representations.” Art endowed with Spirit fortifies the mind by allowing it to feel its own capacity of contemplation; art lacking Spirit will feel lifeless, no matter how technically perfect, well organized, or charming it may be. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2000): 102.
[3] The modernist paradigm was beginning to be conceptualized by the late 1930s. By the late 1940s, a deradicalization of the American Left was accompanied by a desire for art to adopt an apolitical aesthetic. Greenberg was not the only thinker to take stock of this moment. Adorno similarly viewed the avant-garde as the only viable alternative to a culture industry ravaged by industrial capitalism. Though they stared down the same barrel, Greenberg remained somewhat optimistic about the potential of cultural output, and unlike Adorno, laid claim to a rigid, narrow understanding of what that avant-garde could be.
[4] There is not enough space in this paper to address the numerous issues posed by Greenberg’s first polemic. I will, however, point to an important and explicit error that underwrites his argument: the tension drawn between avant-garde and kitsch is presented as antithetical rather than dialectical. Throughout art history, the avant-garde has drawn from or flat out appropriated popular art. For further unpacking of this argument, see Thierry de Duve, “Silences in the Doctrine,” in Clement Greenberg Between the Lines: Including a Debate with Clement Greenberg (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 43–45.
[5] Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian (University of Chicago Press, 1988), 42. Originally published in Partisan Review 7, no. 4 (July–August 1940): 296–310.
[6] Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Arts Yearbook 4 (1961), 103.
[7] Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 104.
[8] Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Beacon Press, 1961), 6.
[9] Clement Greenberg, “Necessity of ‘Formalism,’” New Literary History 3, no. 1 (1971), 174–5.
[10] Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (Oxford University Press, 2000), 70.