Specificity of Medium in Modernism

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Modernist ideology in art revolves around the dichotomy between limitation and freedom. The avant-garde movement in the early to mid-20th century manifested this concept by breaking suppositions and typical expectations regarding a specific art form from within the boundaries themselves. A way in which this was achieved was by creating works that were bound within the limitations of their medium, but self-reflectively so, explicitly referencing its material and art medium. There are limits to what art within a specific medium can do; for example, no matter how much depth appears to be shown, a painting is flat by the nature of its medium of paint on canvas. Instead of attempting to hide these limitations modernist artists glorified them and made these limits one of the focal points of their work. In doing this the artist does not undermine the medium but expands on it instead, encouraging reinvention and subsequently ‘purifying’ (Greenberg, 1960) it rather than presenting yet another idealized version of reality that disregards it. The specific way in which a piece or work addresses its own unique medium that separates one art form from another - or a work’s ‘medium specificity’ - may be examined in modernist painting where the medium of expression is clear, but problems arise when this consideration is applied to literature. This paper will primarily discuss the way in which two great modernist artists, Pablo Picasso and Ezra Pound, approached their respective media through experimentation will also attempt the question of how medium specificity can be explored in fields other than the visual arts.
By nature the medium of painting involves the placement of paint on a flat surface. Typically, paintings in prior art movements (such as the Romantic and Realist periods) attempted to hide their medium by presenting an image that carried both depth and the illusion of

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