Modernism is the encompassing movement accounting for most 20th century art. It began as a break with tradition by a few radical nonconformists in Paris in the 1860s. The central group of breakaway artists became known as the Impressionists, after Monet's painting, Impression: Sunrise, 1872. In their preoccupation with the effects of light on the landscape, the Impressionists assumed a reductive strategy that disregarded art's traditional milieu. For the Modernist, the value of art was relative to the response it elicited from the viewer in and of itself.

Modern art found an audience in the developing bourgeoisie. The new art became the symbol of the new social order. As Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art displaced that of the academy in galleries and museums, Modernism gained momentum. Through the striking stylistic innovations of Modernism, artists developed a new market as they searched for the source of the aesthetic response. Within a few years, the reductive quest of avant-garde artists eliminated representative subject matter from their compositions completely, leaving only formal elements. For them, art became a formal language that developed in the process of painting.

As an explanation for the aesthetic response in Modern art, the Formal aesthetic developed early in the 20th century through the insights of Clive Bell. As he pondered the quality of experience shared by the windows of Chartres, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets and a painting by Cezanne, he concluded the existence of 'significant form.' It was significant form that inspired the aesthetic response. Bell had substituted his concept of significant form for the concept of beauty in an aesthetic adaptation of Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism.

The apprehension of significant form was based on sensitivities distinct from analytic reasoning. The viewer sought significant form through transcendent inquiry. For the Formalist, the painting created a matrix between the empirical and spiritual, and between the rational and symbolic. In an insight missing from much of the Formalist rhetoric that followed, Bell described the aesthetic response as the "expression of that emotion which is the vital force in every religion." (Bell, "Art," 1914) In the study of the perception of form, the Formalist aesthetic isolated the spiritual enigma in Modern art.

After World War II, the center of avant-garde activity shifted from Paris to New York. The increased drama and life-size scale of postwar Abstract Expressionism by American and expatriate European artists commanded a greater presence on the gallery wall than the relatively muted imagery of European Modernism. Just as with the art of the Impressionists, the intense presence of Abstract Expressionism was apprehended as an attribute of form.

The innovations of Abstract Expressionism, and of Jackson Pollock's Action paintings in particular, set the agenda for Modern art and aesthetic discourse for decades to come. Clement Greenberg, the influential critic and theorist of high Modern, adapted Bell's theory of significant form to explain the importance of Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg was quick to recognize that Pollock's innovative and provocative drip paintings were important to the avant-garde. But his narrow view glossed over the subjective nature of the aesthetic response and ignored the semiotic implications of the drip paintings as signifiers in the structural analysis of art.

Pollock's Action paintings mark a significant juncture in the development of both Formalism and postmodern Structuralism. With the drip paintings we enter into a contemporary view of art -- one that includes both gesture and process. The paintings demonstrate that process and semiotic structure, as well as aesthetic response and significant form, were subjects of aesthetic inquiry. Revolutionary in their simplicity, the Action paintings exposed new ground for art.

Pollock reenacted the Dionysian drama in his method. When he stepped up to the unstretched canvas spread out on the floor, he may have had a notion as to what he expected but he came otherwise unrehearsed. The resulting image was the direct expression of the unconscious (undirected) mind. The drips were the symptomatic tracing of unconscious desire. Pollock effectively reduced art to the cosmic dance of the primitive. He intended to strip away the facade and reveal the unknown self. The Action paintings were an extrapolation of experience designed to strike the emotive chords of aesthetic perception. Aware of Jungian psychology, Pollock adapted automatic writing as the vehicle for the transcendent expression of unconscious symbol formation.

While praised for their significant form, Pollock's drip paintings followed the Dada course of automatism. In the Dada spirit Pollock offered a conceptually bracketed activity as art. By restricting the spectator's frame of reference to the painting process, the Action painter, with one eye toward history and another toward the psychology of the art experience, reduced art to the recording of an unconscious (undirected) aesthetic act. He took the underlying potential for metonymic symbolism apparent in the indexing of the photograph and in the Impressionist's attention to surface and texture, and made it the primary concern. Action painting was no less symbolic than previous art, but the strategy was relation by causation (indexing) rather than metaphoric similarity. Pollock's drip paintings would become symbols of unconscious expression in art.

In the art that followed, the heated aggression and emotive content of Abstract Expressionism cooled to become Color Field. In time, the avant-garde would deny any relation to the spiritual or the symbolic (Rothko is the notable exception). The aesthetics of high Modern espoused flatness, reduced shape and reduced surface. Art rid itself of excess baggage. Color Field painters attempted to eliminate everything save reference to the painting. 'Significant form' became the guiding concept for Color Field painters. How removed from the emotional intensity of Abstract Expressionism were the austere rarefactions of Color Field.

As a concept of the Modern paradigm, the term was appropriately applied to Pollock's drip paintings. Significant form provided a discursive context for examining the process by which the mind mediates new experience. The subtle apprehension of significant form was an awareness of the symbol forming process as it encodes experience. The symbol is the enigmatic source of formal perception. The symbolic function determines form as an instrument of thought. Significant form is symbolic form. It is symbolism clarified of non-perceptual concerns and structured in the context of the Formalism. The Formalist's aesthetic response was the transcendent apprehension of the symbol. The accompanying feelings and emotions were the result of the non-discursive content of the symbolic experience.

After Color Field established itself as a movement in the Modern tradition of continuous innovation, where was it to go? It became evident there was no final statement, no final metaphor, no checkmate, no consciousness-negating reduction and no a priori form. Freed from the subject, freed from all but the format, Modernism had no choice but to fulfill its reductive logic and eliminate the rectangular image and self-referential meaning. As Greenberg's flock played out its final solutions, the Color Field painter reduced image to 'objectness.' In an at first subtle shift in direction from the perceptual preoccupations of Color Field to the conceptual concerns of Minimal art, the painting became a shallow relief object. The primary object was all that was left, and it was still recognizable as art. Structuralism ensued.