From the beginning of a drawing, a mankind wanted to express an interesting image (animals on the cage’s wall), or depict a historical moment (victory in a war) or create a pattern of unreal world (another world). Since this moment the interest was around the object which could represent a clear idea as political, religious or decorative support. This object was rather flat physically and pictorially till the moment artist started to create a three-dimensional picture on the two-dimensional surface. Then, since the moment, which needed to be identified additionally, critics started to question necessity of these subjects and the methods of reaching it and artists started experimenting and challenge absolutely everything.
One of the biggest challenges was about the nature of painting and drawing. How should it look and what it should be about? Clement Greenberg in Modernist Painting 1960 offered the method of definition and separation this types of work from all different kinds of art. He declares that the only unique characteristic of a drawing and painting can be a two-dimensional flat surface. The object became flat officially. A flatness, which was before only a natural fact in the painting, now transferred to a main hero of the artwork.
But an artist was “thinking” about flatness on the canvas long before that. Cezanne in his still life 1895 depicted flatness on the background of the Cupid. In 1915 Kazimir Malevich created a “Black Square”. He used a simple flat form which supports the two-dimensionality of the painting. But this was not the only way to explore the “utter flatness”.
Then “Pollock, Rothko and Newman applied paint in such ways that viewers' eyes were not drawn to any particular central point on the canvas, but rather offered multiple perspectives. The flatness of the canvas was for them a surface in which to create an infinite space, seemingly with no discernable beginning or end.” [THE ART STORY, [Online] Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/definition-flatness.htm [Accessed 16/08/18]
Frank Stella “The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II” (1959) deleted in his work all that is irrelevant from the surface. He “prompts the viewer's recognition of it as a flat surface covered with paint, rather than a depiction of something else, upending the centuries-long concept of painting as window onto illusionistic three-dimensional space.” [THE ART STORY, [Online] Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/artist-stella-frank.htm [Accessed 14/08/18]. Paint lines and lines in a shape of canvas exploit the idea of flatness.
Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol used mechanize patterns or industrial materials for repeating or/and creating a flat image in Pop art. They used plane colours of the figurative image or dots of colour, no shadows and perspective, applying texts on the painting to emphasise the flatness.
“Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, emphasized the planar field of the canvas by balancing autonomous forms that never overlap.” [THE ART STORY, [Online] Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/definition-flatness.htm [Accessed 16/08/18]
Someone can put on a gallery wall a mirror or black brilliant TV screen but some can think that it is an everyday object. In their narrative, they are simple flatforms, without any pictorial central point. Nevertheless, they are as flat in their nature as a canvas or sheet of paper, unless something three-dimensional appears on their surface.
Bibliography and references
Flatness (art) [Online] Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatness_(art) [Accessed 16/08/18]
Definition Flatness [Online] Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/definition-flatness.htm [Accessed 16/08/18]