widely employed, retrospectively, as an explanation of the pre-1945 avant-gardes, it also became the guiding principle for post-1945 gestural expressionists (2). In terms of an explanation of the avant-gardes of 1900-40 this was, to say the least, inadequate. It ignored those artists' concern with social engagement and critique, among other aims, and it tried to enforce a chronological, teleological framework on a great diversity of art movements that often had little relation to the movements that supposedly preceded or followed them in the relentless progress of art toward its ultimate goal as envisioned by Greenberg. But in the art of many of the painters of the period 1940-60 Greenberg's ideas were extremely important. Artists of the period frequently relied on Greenberg's basic claim that, "it has been established by now, it would seem, that the irreducibility of pictorial art consists in but two conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness" (quoted in Stiles 2). The painters assumed, therefore (more or less consciously, but always aided by Greenberg's criticism) that, since art had reached this stage in its development, there was nothing to explore but flatness and this was the only starting point available to them.
This, of course, overstates the artists' positions somewhat and a great deal of Greenberg's influence had as much to do with his power as a critic-reviewer as with the powerful attraction of his ideas. But thoughtful painters such as Barnett Newman took in Greenberg's basic notion of painting's progress, and the important role o
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