Flatness is the quality by which a picture asserts the two-dimensionality of its surface rather than producing the illusion of recession.
A flat picture refuses or minimises the conventional cues for depth — overlap, perspective, modelling, atmospheric falloff — and lets shapes, colours, and marks read as events on the plane. Flatness can be achieved by uniform colour fields, by frontal silhouettes, by patterning that organises the whole surface evenly, or by mark-making that draws the eye to the paint itself rather than what the paint depicts. The term carries a particular weight in twentieth-century criticism, where flatness was identified as the condition modernist painting was working toward; but flatness is older and broader than that, present in icons, frescoes, and printed images long before it became a programme.
See also
- picture-plane — what flatness affirms
- depth — what flatness refuses
- figure-ground — the relation that often goes ambiguous as flatness increases