Rosenberg, Harold

Rosenberg, Harold (1906–1978). American writer, lecturer, and administrator, one of the most influential critics in the field of contemporary art from the 1950s until his death. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied at City College, New York, 1923–4, then at St Lawrence University, graduating with a law degree in 1927. From 1938 to 1942 he was art editor of the American Guide series published for the Works Progress Administration (see FEDERAL ART PROJECT) and he later held various other government posts. Early in his career he wrote poetry and essays on literary and general cultural issues (his first book was a collection of poems entitled Trance Above the Streets, 1943), and it was not until 1952 that he published his first important work devoted to the visual arts—an essay in Art News in which he coined the term Action Painting. This label became particularly associated with Jackson Pollock, but the artist Rosenberg most favoured among the Abstract Expressionists was Willem de Kooning. This was one of the many ways in which he differed from the other great spokesman for Abstract Expressionism, his rival Clement Greenberg. Whereas Greenberg came to be concerned only with formal values, Rosenberg had an ethical and political conception of art, believing that the critic should less ‘judge it’ than ‘locate it', subordinating visual analysis to intellectual understanding. He thought that authentic modern art should be perpetually disruptive (see AVANT-GARDE) and he attacked the manipulative fashions created by both the market-place and the museum—Pop art, for example, he treated with disdain.

Rosenberg was art critic of the New Yorker magazine from 1968 until his death, and he also wrote for a wide range of other journals, from Encounter to Vogue. He was a visiting lecturer or professor at several universities and won various academic awards. His numerous books include collections of essays, notably The Tradition of the New (1959), critical works, among them The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks (1972), and monographs on de Kooning (1974), Arshile Gorky (1962), Barnett Newman (1978), and Saul Steinberg (1978).