Spring 2000
Volume 26, Number 3

There is an anxious footnote written by the eminent art historian Michael Fried in 1966, when this scholar of nineteenth-century French painting was still deeply engaged with the art of his own time. In the context of an essay about the shaped canvases of contemporary artist Frank Stella, Fried cited Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970), using it not to talk about science, but about Modernism.1 This transfer is characteristic of both Fried and the moment. In the present essay, I will argue against the customary reading of Kuhn's theories as instigators of postmodernism to suggest, by contrast, that Kuhn's philosophy of science was used by art historians, critics, and philosophers during the late 1960s primarily to enforce a particular reading of ModernismÑindeed, to protect that reading from the attacks of those who would be celebrated as postmodernists in the decades to come.

It is during this precise historical span, during the decade from 1960 to 1969, that the concept of Modernist art (as distinct from "the modern" or "modern art" or "the avant-garde") became the subject of particular anxiety and heated debate. My effort here will be to demonstrate the ways in which Kuhn, despite the care he took to describe multiple modes of doing science (while shielding himself from charges of relativism), became associated in the artworld with a narrow view of artistic practice that held Modernist painting to be not one among many paradigms, but the only viable paradigm governing contemporary art. In part, my aim is to historicize the word and the concept of the paradigm, so that its continued deployment today may be informed by some knowledge of the role it has played in Modernist polemics since the 1960s.

1. See Michael Fried, "Shape as Form: Frank Stella's Irregular Polygons" (1966), Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, 1998), p. 99 n. 11; hereafter abbreviated "SF." This essay was first published in Frank Stella: An Exhibition of Recent Paintings (exhibition catalog, Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, Calif., 18 Oct.Ð20 Nov. 1966), pp. 3Ð39. It was revised and reprinted in New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940Ð1970, ed. Henry Geldzahler (exhibition catalog, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1969). Interestingly, in the Geldzahler reprinting, the word modernist is capitalized throughout. (My use of [M] will indicate such variation.) For the 1998 anthology Fried has returned to a lowercase modernism, while keeping other changes made for the Geldzahler publication. For the purposes of my own polemics, I have capitalized Modernism and Modernist painting throughout. Quotations contain the capitalization of the original; occasionally I have noted when that capitalization seems to have shifted (polemically?) over time. See Fried's own note in his preface to Art and Objecthood, p. xvi.