Painting I / The Pictorial Language
Practice question · Put in order

Arrange these moments in the pictorial language in the order they happened.

Hints
  1. One of the six is nearly five centuries before the rest.
  2. The two 1960s texts are seven years apart and argue for opposite things.
Show the answer
  1. Alberti defines the picture as a window opened onto the subject, 1435
  2. Hilma af Klint makes the first of the series she would order sealed, 1906
  3. Kandinsky publishes Uber das Geistige in der Kunst, 1911
  4. Malevich shows Black Square at the 0,10 exhibition, 1915
  5. Greenberg argues in Modernist Painting that flatness is painting's own, 1960
  6. LeWitt publishes Paragraphs on Conceptual Art in Artforum, 1967
Why

The two texts at the end are worth setting against each other. Greenberg wants painting to occupy the one thing only painting can do, and LeWitt wants the idea to be the work and the execution to be delegated. Both are answers to the same question about what is essential, and they point in opposite directions.

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