A fascination with an artwork's materiality remains one of the hallmarks of the visual arts and modernism during the 20th century. This critical text examines the role of materiality primarily within the context of modernist painting, focusing on those instances in which paintings come to be defined by their physical means. The book encompasses a number of different historical and artistic contexts including the Russian avant-garde, Clement Greenberg's aesthetic positivism, the significance of gesture in Abstract Expressionism and the art criticism of Michael Fried.