Greenberg, Clement

Greenberg, Clement (1909–1994). American art critic, born in New York. He was his country's most influential writer on contemporary art in the period after the Second World War when American painting and sculpture first achieved a dominant position in world art, his only serious rival being Harold Rosenberg; in particular he was a major champion of Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg studied at the Art Students League and Syracuse University; before he became a full-time writer he worked as a clerk for the US Customs. He was regular art critic for the Nation from 1942 to 1949 and wrote for several other journals, including Arts Digest and New Leader. Some of his early writing in the left-wing Partisan Review, notably the article ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939), was concerned with the social and political role of art, but he later became strongly associated with a formalist approach to criticism. He argued that in each of the arts there was an urge towards ‘purity'—dissociation from other arts—and that in painting this resulted in a progressive emphasis on the flatness of the picture surface and the rejection of any form of illusionism: ‘The history of avant-garde painting is that of a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resistance consists chiefly in the flat picture plane's denial of efforts to “hole through it” for realistic perspectival space’ (‘Towards a Newer Laocoon', Partisan Review, July–August 1940). Although he claimed he made ‘disinterested aesthetic’ appraisals of art, Greenberg's early contacts with Marxism gave him a strong sense of history having an order and purpose, and this enabled him to endow his verdicts with a claim for historical certainty: ‘in a period in which illusions of every kind are being destroyed the illusionist methods of art must also be renounced … Let painting confine itself to the disposition pure and simple of color and line, and not intrigue us by associations with things we can experience more authentically elsewhere’ (‘Abstract Art', The Nation, 15 April 1944).

Greenberg wrote on many of the leading Abstract Expressionists, but he is particularly associated with Jackson Pollock. He praised his first one-man show in 1943, and in 1945 he wrote: ‘ Jackson Pollock's second one-man show … establishes him, in my opinion, as the strongest painter of his generation.’ The artists he later championed included the sculptors David Smith and Anthony Caro and Post-Painterly Abstractionist painters such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, whose emphasis on pure flat colour was perfectly in line with his theoretical outlook. In contrast, he rejected the work of artists such as Rauschenberg as mere ‘novelty'. Greenberg's influence was at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, and he was unusual among critics in that artists valued his advice (in such matters as the cropping or hanging of paintings). A collection of his essays, Art and Culture (1961), was one of the best-known aesthetic texts of the time, as is shown by John Latham's ceremonial destruction of a copy in 1966 as a protest against the dominance of its ideas. In the 1970s, however, Greenberg's influence waned in the face of developments such as Conceptual art and New Figuration. The way in which he divorced art from social and ethical considerations was suspect to many younger writers, but his essays are still frequently reprinted as exemplifying a certain type of modernist criticism. In his later years he devoted himself to lecturing rather than writing. His Collected Essays and Criticism were published in four volumes in 1986–93. Greenberg also wrote monographs on Miró (1948), Matisse (1953), and Hofmann (1961). See also MODERNIST PAINTING.