Clement Greenberg, the influential art critic, promoted the term Modernism for new art that, in his

view, reinforced the ideal of art for art's sake. He asserted that painting should concentrate on its essential flatness. An associated notion, Formalism, emphasized the formal aspects of painting and deemphasized the role played by extrinsic content, or subject matter. Formalism holds that visual forms incite aesthetic responses or feelings. The eye is supreme, and "taste" develops through direct experience with artworks. The notion of essence, the idea that a select few elements are intrinsic to painting, led Greenberg and his adherents to stress flatness in painting. But this emphasis is problematic, as texture and literal objecthood were being investigated by painters. Minimalism Minimalism proceeds logically from Modernism's stress on intrinsic or essential elements. Even though several modernist critics disavowed Minimalism as the logical progression of Modernism, Minimalism carried the idealism set in motion by the early abstract painters who set out to create a "purified" painting. Minimalist or reductive painting has theatricality. W h e n the viewer encounters such a work of art, he or she meets up with it at "center stage" and intimately engages with it in a room (a "theater") with no distractions. The present-ness of a reductive painting makes it immediate. This immediacy echoes the effect that early Renaissance naturalism must have had when it made a religious image powerfully "present" to viewers who had no previous exposure to realistic painting. Almost by definition, this reductive style was not a highlv fertile arena for painters. It came to signal, for some, a dead end.

Art critic and historian Pwi Halasz: "There's . . . a very tough, gritty quality in the way those little pats of paint are ever so gently savaged onto the canvas, and the overall forms nailed in. It's this union of tough and sweet that is so unsettling and exciting."

John Adams Griefer. 2004, acrylic (181.6 x 135.9 c~ . 71.5 x 53.5 - " e s

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