Literature Review Two - March 2025

Rosalind Krauss, “Grids.” October 9 (January 1, 1979): 50

Rosalind Krauss’ seminal essay ‘Grids’ first appeared in the journal October in 1979.  In it she rails against the dominance of the grid in twentieth century painting since its rise to prominence during the 1920s. She denounces it as a Modernist emblem, impervious to change, and shutting down all other discourse on contemporary plastic arts, as well as its persistence in sticking around.

The grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse. As such, the grid has done its job with striking efficiency. The barrier it has lowered between the arts of vision and those of language has been almost totally successful in walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defending them against the intrusion of speech.[1]

The grid epitomised the new, an aesthetic cleansing from what has gone before, with no vestiges for nineteenth century art to hide. It had become a secular form of belief with mythical power. The success of the grid, she argues, is quantitative, qualitative and ideological; it dominates twentieth century art, has actually been responsible for some very good art and carries with it an ideology of what it is to be modern. However, it is the grid’s contradictions which she highlights throughout her essay.

The grid is not a modern construct. In 2018, scientists in South Africa discovered a cave drawing of a red cross-hatched grid pattern believed to be 73,000 years old.[2] Weaving and woven textiles, which depend upon the integrated warp and weft grid, date back 27,000 years. The spatial division of objects in a grid with converging lines, was evident in theatre scenery discovered on villa walls in ancient Greece. The grid existed in town planning and architecture in Roman times.[3] Later in Italy, linear perspective was introduced by architect Brunelleschi in 1400s and employed by pre-renaissance artists thereafter.  The artists’ canvas is in fact a weave support, which makes an underlying grid. Paintings are hung in public galleries (white cubes) and private houses that have rectangular rooms and windows. The grid was ubiquitous before its ascendancy in twentieth century art but perhaps the structure was not so obvious as it still contained the noise of narrative. What perhaps was modern was the attempt to remove the story from the structure, to separate the sacred from the secular, and the spiritual from the temporal.[4]

The Modernist grid, pioneered by Piet Mondrian, elevated itself to be something less concerned with what happens “below on the concrete”, but derived instead from a utopian ideal of what art should be.[5] Mondrian coined the term Neoplasticism, pure plastic art, meaning a non-representational art which looked towards a purified process of art making through a series of rules. He thought this necessary to create art of universal beauty and presented his grid paintings as just that, a barrier between art and reality. This was the wall of elitist visuality that Krauss was writing about but perhaps these were barriers erected by the patriarchy and women artists would show alternative uses for the grid.

The grid doesn’t have to disappear. By making it their subject, female and feminist artists analyse and question the hold it has on the way we act and see the world, on how value systems are created, how art gets made, and how arbitrary rules become convention.[6]

While Mondrian was painting his grids, a British artist, Marlow Moss was also painting her grids. Both moved to Paris and were in correspondence at the time of the grid paintings. Marlow introduced the double grid line to Mondrian in 1934, which presented a very different element to the grid. Moss’s partner, author AH Nijhoff, points out that Mondrian’s “single lines split up the canvas so that the composition falls apart into separate planes”, whereas the double lines provide an interrelated rhythm that allow the different planes to relate to each other.[7] There is a knitting together rather than a dividing apart, transforming the barriers of the grid into the warp and weft of a weave. The centrifugal becomes the centripetal and the inter-relational creeps back in.

Agnes Martin (1912-2004) purposely chose the non-representational, non-biographical structure of the grid in her early paintings. She described The Tree, 1964, as her first grid painting, although she had been marking grids into her paintings for a decade. Krauss described the grid as “what art is like when you turn your back on nature” and yet in an interview, Martin said that when she first made a grid she happened to be thinking of the ‘innocence of trees’ and thought that the grid represented innocence. Martin also describes turning her back on the world to paint.

Emphatically ambiguous, they refuse artistry, reducing painting to the simplest of mark-making procedures at the same time as exceeding themselves with grandeur of scale and brave beauty. The longer you look, the more impressive their insistent neutrality becomes. Forget confessional art. This is withholding art, evading disclosure, declining to give itself away.[8]

Martin’s repetitive markings within the rectangles of the grid undermine the strength of the grid and in fact do provide a narrative, albeit a “structuralist mode of analysis, by which the sequential features of a story are rearranged to form a spatial organisation”.[9] How can you avoid enquiring after the narrative in works such as ‘Little Sister’, 1962, with all those little brass nails neatly hammered into place. They become meditative markings which lull you into the mental environment in which they were conceived and contain a spiritual discourse. Like notes on a musical score, they do hum a quiet tune. Often the grid has concealed the narrative, but it hasn’t gone away.

Artwork that is completely abstract – free from any expression of the environment – is like music and can be responded to in the same way. Our response to line and tone and colour is the same as our response to sounds. …It holds meaning for us that is beyond expression in words.[10]

Krauss concludes that the grid serves as a paradigm for the anti-developmental, anti-narrative, and anti-historical. However, digital artists are increasingly using coding matrices, technological platforms, and software, where the evolution of the grid is apparent. In this context, the pixel has become the primary method of visual communication. The grid continues to play a pivotal role in the development of digital art.

The contradictions that exist within use of the grid in art is possibly where its popularity lies. The grid can appeal to many different artistic temperaments. It offers up a structure upon which to hang ideas, proffering an innate stability, and neutrality, for an artist to either work with or disrupt. It can be concerned with the surface, the spatial, the integral and the infinite and within these choices lies the narrative. Krauss explains that by virtue of the grid, any work of art is presented merely as a tiny fragment arbitrarily cropped from a larger piece of fabric. It is impossible therefore for art to stand alone and not be affected by what happens below on the concrete. The ideology that the grid embodied, all that was modern, may be true in the sense that at the turn of the last century, the artist turned the canvas around and exposed the support as a grid in all its nakedness.

[1]  Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Guard and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: MIT Press, 1986), 9.

[2]  Ian Sampler, “Earliest known drawing found on rock in South African cave,” The Guardian, September 12, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/12/earliest-known-drawing-found-on-rock-in-south-african-cave

[3] Jonathan Janson, “The History of Perspective,” Essential Vermeer 5.0 Website, March 2025,  www.essentialvermeer.com

[4] Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Guard and Other Modernist Myths, 9.

[5]  Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Guard and Other Modernist Myths, 10.

[6]  Robin Hauck, “Grid Lock: The Modernist Grid and its Influence on the Art of Women”, Misstropolis, August 28, 2004, https://www.misstropolis.com/home/on-the-grid

[7] Jessica Schouela, “Marlow Moss: Transgender and the Double Line,” Women’s Art Journal, (Fall/Winter 2008): 34-42.

[8]  Tiffany Bell (co-curator at the Tate Retrospective 2015) as cited by Olivia Lang, “Agnes Martin: the artist mystic who disappeared into the desert,” The Guardian, May 22, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/22/agnes-martin-the-artist-mystic-who-disappeared-into-the-desert

[9]  Levi-Strauss, as cited by Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Guard and Other Modernist Myths, 13.

[10] Agnes Martin, as cited by Lang, “Agnes Martin: the artist mystic who disappeared into the desert.”