“It is worth nothing that Greenberg fully endorses the thought that the vitality of an avant-garde practice depends on its remaining progressive, transforming itself by more fully exploring its conventional constitution, risking more in reducing itself to its essential features, which conversely have to be more explicitly observed, more rigorously adhered to, the further the limits are pushed back. Literature and music have passed the point of dynamic progress. They are exhausted as forms of resistance to rationalized society. That painting could suffer the same fate is conceded by analogy with the cases of literature and music. As de Duve narrates the tale, correctly i think, the progressive analysis of art unraveled rather rapidly in the face of the 1959 exhibition of Frank Stella’s black stripe paintings…

…It is as if, with these paintings of Stella, painting had suddenly broached its limiting conditions, that it no longer had conventions it could expend, that the energy of negation has been depleted at one go. What is surprising in this is Greenberg’s surprise, his denial and beleaguered resistance. Imagine a room with three large canvases: a late Clyfford Still all black with just a few bark-like crevices of red; a Newman; and a Rothko. Seeing these together, one’s astonishment would have the form of near disbelief that these painters had avoided the monochrome; thought of together and in retrospect, their art appears to be an abandonment to the claims of the monochrome while nonetheless avoiding it, just the slightest inflection - ragged crevice, zip, contrasting colors of paint soaked into the canvas - separating their pictures from the zero point of the monochrome (with the blank canvas forever lurking behind…). But painting did not have to wait till this point to appreciate that somewhere in the history of negations that comprise the advance of modernist painting in its abstract phrase there stood the iron gate of the monochrome, since almost simultaneous with the birth of abstract painting we have the examples of Malevich’s Black Square and Rodchenko’s red, yellow, and blue triptych. Is there anything in music, or literature, like the monochrome is being so identifiable as an end (it is, after all, the telos of the progress of negations) and exhausted limit…?”

J. M. Bernstein: Against Voluptuous Bodies