Other Criteria

5 ideas

1. The flatbed picture plane replaces the window

   From the Renaissance through Abstract Expressionism, pictures assumed an upright viewer facing a vertical surface that stood in for a view of the world. Beginning with Rauschenberg and Dubuffet, the picture surface began to work like a horizontal receptor, such as a tabletop, studio floor, chart or bulletin board, on which objects, images and data are laid down. The picture's reference shifts from nature to culture, and it stops imitating vision and becomes a surface for gathering information.

2. The critic's shock at Johns's 1958 show

   In "Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public," Steinberg reports that his first sight of Jasper Johns's flags, targets and plaster casts in 1958 left him depressed and resentful. He felt that the familiar values of painting had been taken away and that he did not know what the work demanded of him. He uses his own discomfort as evidence that new art first registers as a loss, and that the professional critic's anxiety is the same anxiety the lay public feels.

3. Formalism's flatness criterion is too narrow

   Steinberg attacks the formalist account in which Modernist painting advances by self-critically reducing itself to its essential medium, flatness. He argues that Old Master painting was also constantly aware of its own surface and conventions, so self-reference does not distinguish Modernism. Making one formal property the test of all progress rules out whatever a work is actually doing when that falls outside the chosen property.

4. Let each work supply its own criteria

   Instead of measuring a new work against criteria fixed in advance, the critic should ask what problem the work poses and what terms it sets for its own success. Disorientation is a sign that the governing criteria have shifted, not a sign that the work is bad. The critic's job is to remain in that discomfort until the work's own logic becomes visible.

5. Picasso's quest to see front and back

   Steinberg traces Picasso's decades-long effort, culminating in the 1954–55 "Women of Algiers" variations after Delacroix, to show a single body from front and back at once without cutting it apart. He shows this most clearly in reclining and sleeping figures, whose bodies Picasso twists so that belly and spine, breasts and buttocks, are visible together. Steinberg's reading presents Picasso's distortions as the solution to a specific problem of possessing the whole body in one view, rather than as arbitrary stylization.

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