The Flatbed Picture Plane Steinberg Summary

The second half of Leo Steinberg’s Other Criteria focuses on the differences between past artists and modern artists. Steinberg introduces the reader to the idea of having many objects merge into each other, instead of having many distinct objects in the piece with distinct lines and colors. He also brings up the idea of the flatbed picture plane. Instead of composing a piece with the idea of human posture in mind, these “flatbed” pieces are composed more like a worktable or a bulletin board.
Beginning the second part of the article with “The Corporate Model of Developing Art”, Steinberg compares modern artists to engineers and research technicians because they are often presented tasks or problems that require solutions. The strength of an artist is
Many of the planes were created with respect to the human posture, the top of the picture corresponds to where we hold our heads up; while the lower edge corresponds to where we place our feet. Many different pieces use this concept from varying style and date backgrounds. “Pictures by Rothko, Still, Newman, de Kooning, and Kline are still addressed to us head to foot—as are those of Matisse and Miró.” Something happened around 1950, per Steinberg, in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Dubuffet. Their pictures no longer simulated vertical fields, they simulated opaque flatbed horizontals. They no longer rely on correspondence with the human posture, much like a newspaper. The flatbed picture plane uses allusions to hard surfaces (tabletops, studio floors, charts, etc.) to present its information. “The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes. This change expresses a shift in the subject matter of art, a shift from nature to