Integrity of The Picture Plane
A well-known phrase has accompanied many discussions of painting during the period of modernism. Coined by the influential art critic Clement Greenberg in his essay called "Modernist Painting", the phrase "integrity of the picture plane" has come to denote how the flat surface of the physical painting functions in older as opposed to more recent works. That phrase is found in the following sentence in his essay:
"The Old Masters had sensed that it was necessary to preserve what is called the integrity of the picture plane: that is, to signify the enduring presence of flatness underneath and above the most vivid illusion of three-dimensional space."
Greenberg seems to be referring to the way painting relates to the picture plane in both the modern period and the "Old Master" period.
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Famous quotes containing the words integrity of, integrity, picture and/or plane:
“I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.”
—Harper Lee (b. 1926)
“Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market.
He has no time to be anything but a machine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When you’ve been blind as long as I have, you learn to see through your senses. I can’t explain it exactly, but you get a feeling about people when you meet them. You see a picture of them in your mind. Not just what they look like, but what they really are. You see them much more clearly than you do with your eyes. Maybe that’s why they say looks are deceptive.”
—George Bricker. Jean Yarbrough. Helen Page (Jane Adams)
“Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . . I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.”
—Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)