Abstract

The period of formalist dominance in art criticism and art history spans the middle two quarters of the twentieth century, as is particularly evident in the work of three American critics, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Clement Greenberg, and Michael Fried. At the expense of close reading, careful periodization, and an exploration of the roots of the central ideas of their critical modus operandi, analyses of these critics have usually been limited to polemical debates over issues of postmodernism. ;The philosophical heritage of formalism is explored in the nineteenth and back into the eighteenth century in the works of Lessing, Karl Phillip Moritz, Kant, Schiller, and Schopenhauer. Formal concepts such as disinterestedness, the autonomy of art, medium-based criticism, and a denigration of subject matter first appear in their. Conrad Fiedler, Heinrich Wolfflin, and Roger Fry in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century translate these philosophical concepts to applications in art theory, art history, and modern art. ;Alfred Barr, first director of the Museum of Modern Art, formulates the first English-language, comprehensive map of modern art history based on formal principles derived from Wolfflin. He arranges and organizes exhibitions and the organizational structure of the museum according to medium development and generally in favor of abstraction between 1927 and 1945. Clement Greenberg's work is divided into four stages. Early Theory includes his Trotskyite-tinged essays situating the avant-garde and abstraction in an historical and political matrix. Greenberg's Early Criticism applies principles from Early Theory to the material nature of modern art in a Lessing-derived criticism. In Late Criticism , Greenberg focusing on justifying purely abstract art, and justifying it on aesthetic grounds that become explicitly Kantian. Finally, in his Late Theory Greenberg abdicates the contemporary scene and concentrates entirely on aesthetic problems, coming to an increasingly pessimistic and relativistic definition of art. Michael Fried's criticism of the 1960s responds primarily to the growing "literalism" of contemporary art and its address to the beholder. In response to the "object" character of Minimalism, Fried asserts the instantaneous and aesthetic character of formally abstract modernist painting