Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg 1909-94, American art critic, b. New York City. Greenberg's criticism was primarily concerned with art produced after abstract expressionism . This art, now known as color-field painting , he termed post-painterly abstraction, reflecting Heinrich Wölfflin's theory that painterly and linear styles alternate through the ages. In his essay collection Art and Culture (1961), Greenberg argued that the essence of modern art, especially painting, lies in its purely visual content. Greenberg's philosophy of art was outlined in a series of lectures posthumously published as Homemade Esthetics (1999).

Bibliography: See biography by F. Rubenfeld (1998).

Greenberg, Clement (1909–94). American art critic. With Harold Rosenberg he was his country's most influential writer on contemporary art in the post-war years when American painting and sculpture first achieved a dominant position in world art. His approach to criticism is sometimes described as formalist, and the artists to whose works he gave the most powerful advocacy were chiefly uncompromising abstractionists—most famously Jackson Pollok and David Smith, and later the Post-Painterly Abstractionists (Greenberg coined this term) and the British sculptor Anthony Caro. In painting he laid particular stress on the flatness of the picture surface and the rejection of any kind of illusionistic modelling, and he opposed the mere ‘novelty’ art of painters such as Rauschenberg. Although he regarded aesthetic judgements as autonomous, he also believed that history possessed order and purpose (the result of early contacts with Marxism) and this allowed him to endow his ‘disinterested aesthetic’ verdicts on art with a claim for historical certainty. His influence was at its height in the 1950s and 1960s, but thereafter it waned in the face of such developments as Conceptual art and New Figuration. His best-known book is probably Art and Culture (1961), an anthology of his writings; his other books include monographs on Miró (1948), Matisse (1953), and Hofmann (1961).