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Re-Created Flatness: Hans Hofmann’S Concept Of The Picture Plane As A Medium Of Expression, Michael Schreyach

Michael Schreyach

For Hans Hofmann and Clement Greenberg, flatness--more specifically, “re-created flatness,” a term Greenberg adopted after hearing it used in the painter’s important 1938– 39 lectures--became a key term in their accounts of pictorial meaning. In this paper, I articulate what is significant about that idea and draw out its implications for understanding what Hofmann meant by artistic expression. Ultimately, I suggest that the concept of re-created flatness, and its pictorial realization, implies or entails a certain view of expression: namely, that what is expressed by an artwork is the artist’s meaning (in contradistinction to the arbitrary meanings that may be …