Why Are Paintings Rectangles?

Why Are Almost All Paintings Rectangles and Squares?

Why not circles or triangles?

Clement Greenberg was the most influential art critic in history and through him his philosophy of art became dominant in the mid-twentieth century. That philosophy had precisely to do with rectangles and squares.

It was Greenberg's philosophy that each of the arts should distill out its essentials, those things that it had and that the others didn't, and concentrate on advancing those differences.

For painting, and Greenberg was almost exclusively a "painting," not an "art," critic it was the canvas and the physical characteristics of the paint itself that should be emphasized, to the exclusion of figuration and beauty for example.

So with so much attention that got, and still gets paid, to the physical properties of painting art, why do we almost exclusively have paintings on parallelograms?

One can see how the format for painting would have evolved from cave walls to canvases by the demands of art's benefactors, the royal court, and later an aristocracy and still later a prosperous bourgeoisie, none of whom would want to trudge off to a cave to look at his likeness.

But that doesn't account for the shape. Mirrors were ovals, windows were sometimes; the circle had philosophic symbolism of eternity going for it. The triangle's solidity and stability was celebrated by the Egyptians in their greatest monuments.

In Philosophizing Art, Arthur Danto, a ying to Greenberg's yang, convincingly explains why so many paintings of the "New York School" were so huge:

"More likely, living as they did in lofts, out of necessity then rather than fashion, artists in their natural sensitivity to such matters must have felt a discrepancy between the size of their studios and the disproportionately reduced dimensions of the easel painting, and since nobody was going to buy things anyway, why not make things more suitably sized?"

Voila, sometimes the simplest explanations are the right ones.

But with so much experimentation going on at that time, when you had artists dripping paint onto canvasses lain on the floor of a barn, when you had artists making gargantuan sized works, to say nothing of what was to follow in the '60's,when you had all these rules being questioned and broken, why didn't someone think, "Wonder how this'd look in a circle?"

To state the obvious, I'm not talking about the odd painting here and there that may have been painted on a circular or oval canvas, although I've thought about it and I can't think of one prominent one, but I'm talking about a "school" or a "movement" that caught on, however briefly.

I don't think it exists. Whatever else they were doing they were doing it on parallelograms damn it.

The only other art of a culture other than the west that I'm even passingly familiar with is that of China and there of course you have the hanging scroll format. There may be simple reasons, involving ease of rolling for example, to explain why scrolls are rectangular rather than circular, but even Chinese canvas painting is still four-sided.

Talk about the need to "think outside the box." What would account for this?

-Benjamin Harris