Jan Baetens in Modernism's 'ut pictura poesis' mentions that modernism represents a rupture of the ut pictura poesis (word +picture) tradition. This is the core of the Greenbergian view of modernism in painting (and, to a lesser extent, in literature), which places an emphasis on a medium's specificity. Modernism's history is a history of purity.

Judith Harvey says:

In his 1940 essay, “Towards a Newer Laocoön,” Clement Greenberg changes the terms of the dialogue by investigating abstract art as a reaction to a confusion of the arts, and how it might deal with that confusion. “There has been, is, and will be, such a thing as a confusion of the arts." .. He surveys the history of art as artists attempting mimic the dominant prototype of art, which serves to unite or combine (his word is “confuse”) the arts. Mimesis is attainable by artistic ability to create the illusion that their representation is real, an illusion fundamentally based in literary values. According to Greenberg, we can find in abstract art a rejection of earlier artistic denial of the materiality of painting. ... He argues that value of art lies in emphasizing and the possibility of overpowering the medium.

Harvey adds that W.J.T. Mitchell in “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and Language” dealt with the question of whether abstract art has in fact escaped all traces of verbal form and what it means if it has. Mitchell argued that there is sno purely visual or verbal art. Harvey says:

While criticizing Tom Wolfe’s superficial reading of abstract art, Mitchell builds on his recognition that abstract art does depend on a sort of “verbal contamination” in the form of theory. .... The notion that art rests on theory is not a new one, and Mitchell traces it from early artists (such as Turner, Blake and Hogarth) to early European and later American abstract painters. He deftly answers potential objections that theory is outside the realm of the painter by presenting two answers; even figurative art depends on viewers knowing a narrative that exists outside the painting and abstract art still has content and subject, though representations may be absent.