For a while it seemed that one of the central projects of modernist artmaking had fallen off the map. From Manet until the late 1950s, the goal of displaying the process of artistic fabrication, of showing the making of art out of its raw materials, had been taken up as the selfconscious goal of artmaking itself; aesthetic appearances were distorted and fractured by the attempt to force what resisted aesthetic figuration to appear as unfigured. A paradoxical, perhaps impossible project, teetering unstably between the jubilant overcoming of aesthetic appearance and its sublimely pleasurable incompleteness, but a project renewed over and again in the face of, perhaps even by means of, its paradoxical nature. However, with the interconnected losses of faith in the very idea of unmediated "material" raw at the moment of artmaking and the heroic activity of the artist confronting it, postmodern art damped the eruptive fire at the heart of modernist pictoriality and replaced it with a cool detachment from appearance itself. Among its defining features, postmodern art rejected, also over and again, the modernist dialectic of matter and appearance. It is no wonder, then, that painting, the peerless art of appearance, went into eclipse in the 1960s and 70s.