ABSTRACT
Clement Greenberg's way of resolving the tension between what he took to be the necessary commitment to flatness and the equally necessary violation of that commitment was by way of a distinction between two kinds of illusions painting made possible. Michael Fried himself would describe his difference from Greenberg with respect to opticality as a response to what he understood as the "double role" that concept played in Greenberg's writing. The intimacy of these two readings is visible in Fried's characterization of "the emphasis Louis places on the bare canvas in the unfurleds, the sheer primacy he gives it". Fried gives that question a kind of psychological answer with respect to Jackson Pollock, the painter who, in his refusal of drawing, Fried thinks of as closest to Louis. Perhaps the most visible alternative to Monroe Beardsley's anti-intentionalism at the time was the kind of intentionalism represented by the work of the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto.
