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skill there then became an urge for something new, to go beyond this way of working and to challenge the material and process of painting. Greenberg described this repetition as 'Alexandrianism' that he defined as a motionless academism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involved debate, and in which creative activity dwindles to skill in the small details of form with all larger questions being decided by the standard of the old masters, therefore with this nothing new is produced. [1] From this Greenberg defines the cultural importance of Avant-garde culture as stated:

It has become amongst the signs in the midst of the decay of our present society that we - some of us - have become unwilling to accept this last phase of our own culture. In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore: - Avant-garde culture. [2]

Western societies were still recovering from World War one amid the Great Depression, with Nazism rising in Germany and the beginning of World War two approaching. Western societies at this time were stuck between two wars in a depression that followed a large increase in unemployment and bankruptcy. This 'decay of society' heavily influenced artists and their paintings during the avant-garde movement.

Modernist painting opened up art to all social classes and was a revolutionary art form that created the avant-garde culture. Painting before the modernist movement had been typically aimed at the upper class and only available for the bourgeoisie to view. The bourgeoisie is the class of people who owned and still own the means of production in the country capitalist, who exploit labourers for their own capital gain. The avant-garde artists' abstract paintings scandalised the bourgeoisie by not displaying things as they are. Instead paintings were progressive, moving on from traditional realist painting and chose to use innovative forms of expression. [3] Artists began questioning the medium of painting and started producing works that formed a language of its own. Using painting they could visualise the subconscious and depict the world around them on canvas in a way that had never been done before.

Although artists were opposed to the bourgeoisie capitalist values, they relied on these people for art funding. The avant-garde's stable source of income was provided from privileged among the ruling class, from which it thought of itself to be cut off. Greenberg described this as an umbilical cord of gold that has always remained attached. (Cite art in theory pg 542) Today artists find themselves in a similar position where they are often reliant on funding from galleries and the art establishment in order to produce and promote their artwork. This can lead to the artist's work being restricted by gallery guidelines or what critics, collectors and the power figures of western art deem fashionable in contemporary art.

Later in Greenberg's writing ''Modernist Painting'' written in 1960 he refines his definitions and explores themes further. Greenberg promotes in this essay the purity in painting in which he explores the restrictions of the medium of painting. The idea of purity in art and painting is that the 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。