Greenberg, Clement

(b. 16 January 1909 in the Bronx, New York; d. 7 May 1994 in New York City), art critic whose influential but often controversial essays on contemporary culture introduced the work of the painter Jackson Pollock and established abstract expressionism as the dominant movement in mid-twentieth-century American art.

The oldest of three sons of well-to-do Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, Joseph Greenberg, a merchant, and Dora Brodwin, Greenberg moved at the age of five to Norfolk, Virginia, where his father had established a business. At the age of eleven, Greenberg and his family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he attended public schools. From early childhood he liked to draw; when he was sixteen he took a life-drawing class from 1924 to 1925 at the Art Students League in New York City. Languages and literature, however, were his major subjects at Syracuse University, where he received his A.B. degree with honors in 1930 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. For the next two years, before going to work for his father, he devoted himself to perfecting his languages (later he did several German translations), reading extensively, and visiting art museums.

In 1934 he married Edwina Ewing. They had one son and were divorced in 1936. After a series of clerical jobs with the Civil Service Commission, Greenberg worked from 1937 to 1942 for the U.S. Customs Service, but found time to write stories and poetry (largely unpublished) and to attend lectures at Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Arts in New York, an experience that stimulated his interest in modern painting. A letter Greenberg wrote to Dwight Mac-Donald, editor of Partisan Review, led to an invitation to write an article for the journal. The article, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” ran in the fall 1939 issue. An authoritative discussion of elitist “high art” compared to mass culture (kitsch), it made Greenberg’s reputation in New York intellectual circles. The article was reprinted six months later in the British periodical Horizon. Greenberg published his first review in the winter of 1939, a comment on Berthold Brecht’s “Penny for the Poor.”

From 1940 to 1942 Greenberg was one of the editors of Partisan Review, for which he continued to write essays on literature, art, and sociopolitical matters (often informed by his then-Trotskyist viewpoint). When the Bollingen/Library of Congress Prize for poetry was awarded in 1948 to Ezra Pound for The Pisan Cantos —Pound’s pro-Fascist, anti-Semitic stance notwithstanding—Greenberg made a famous protest (Partisan Review, May 1949) against excusing an artist’s moral failings on the grounds of aesthetic autonomy. His last article for Partisan Review, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” was written in 1955. Considered the definitive statement on abstract expressionism and extensively anthologized, it roused much controversy over Greenberg’s omission of the second-generation abstract artists in favor of the new color-field painters. During this period—from 1942 until he resigned around 1950, protesting what he claimed was the magazine’s pro-Soviet sympathies—he served also as the first regular art critic at the Nation.

Writing and editorship, however, were suspended for eight months in 1943 when Greenberg served in the U.S. Army Air Force before receiving a medical discharge. Shortly thereafter his championship of Jackson Pollock began, with a review in the Nation (27 November 1943) of that artist’s first solo exhibition. Four years later in “The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture” (Horizon, October 1947), Greenberg proclaimed Pollock to be the “most powerful” painter of the day, thus contributing to his phenomenal popularity and alienating supporters of Pollock’s rival, Willem de Kooning. Chief among these was Greenberg’s one-time friend, the New Yorker critic Harold Rosenberg. As for relations with de Kooning, Greenberg—as pugnacious in person as he was in his writing—got into a fistfight with the artist in a Greenwich Village bar in 1961; the altercation is now part of the Greenberg legend.

In August 1944 he became managing editor of the Contemporary Jewish Record. When the bimonthly Record was replaced by Commentary, Greenberg was named associate editor, but he was fired in 1957 after a confrontation with a fellow editor, Norman Podhoretz. From then on the focus of Greenberg’s activities changed. He participated more directly in art-world affairs: consulting with museum curators and art dealers throughout the United States and Canada; writing exhibition catalogs; visiting artists’ studios (where he often gave advice on work in progress); and teaching. Greenberg was chosen to conduct the prestigious Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism at Princeton University in 1958 and 1959, and in 1962 he gave his first seminars at Bennington College, where from the early 1950s he had maintained close ties with the art department, organizing exhibitions and critiquing student work. In 1964 Greenberg was guest curator of the landmark show Post Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was then appointed by the U.S. Department of State to accompany the exhibition Two Decades of American Art and give lectures during its tour of Japan and India in 1966 and 1967.

For a short while between 1958 and 1960, Greenberg had served as a consultant to French & Co., a New York gallery, choosing pictures and arranging exhibitions. Although he earned no commissions and did not deal directly with clients, it was rumored that he was improperly involved in the art market, and there was speculation about his behind-the-scenes influence on artistic reputations. Following these rumors and speculations, Greenberg’s own reputation declined. His book. Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961), a collection of revised versions of thirty-seven of his critical essays, generated little interest at the time. Many artists and fellow critics, responding to his article “After Abstract Expressionism” in Art International (25 October 1962), labeled him a dictatorial elitist for his rejection of postmodern movements such as pop art and minimalism. An article by Rosalind Krauss damaged him further. In “Changing the Work of David Smith,” published in Art in America (September 1974), Krauss claimed that after Smith’s death, Greenberg, who was one of the sculptor’s executors and a frequent visitor to his studio, removed the polychrome finish from several of Smith’s huge steel sculptures. Greenberg never defended himself from the charge of tampering with the integrity of works of art. But in an interview with his biographer Florence Rubenfeld in 1991, he did admit that “maybe I should have just laid off instead of making his sculpture better.”

Greenberg’s second marriage, to Janice Elaine Van Home in 1956, ended in divorce in 1977; they had one daughter. Until 1988, when he returned to his New York City apartment, Greenberg lived in his home in Norwich, New York, lecturing at colleges, making his customary studio visits, and writing a book based on the Bennington seminars he gave in 1971, eventually published as Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (1999). He died of emphysema in Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan after a four-year illness.

Much reviled by some for his dogmatic opinions, Clement Greenberg was regarded by others as unquestionably the greatest critic of twentieth-century Western art. He was respected for his real passion for art and for his accessible writing style: a concise, fluid prose that was the result of constant rethinking and reworking. Owning to the influence of the philosopher Immanuel Kant and the poet T. S. Eliot (both concerned with the relationship of thought and feeling), Greenberg himself was concerned with discovering how the formal, visible elements of a painting or sculpture “work” to produce an effect, rather than with what a work of art “means.” For this reason he is often credited with having introduced the aesthetic approach known as formalism to the study of art.

Clement Greenberg’s papers are housed in the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Some of his papers are located at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian. In addition to his periodical articles, the critic wrote three short monographs: Joan Miró (1948); Henri Matisse (in the Pocket Library of Great Art series, 1953), an example of his analyses of how paintings “work”; and Hans Hofmann (1961). His last book, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (1999), has a foreword by Janice Van Home Greenberg explaining the composition of the work, which presents both Greenberg’s text and excerpts from the Bennington seminars on which it was based. Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life (1998), is a detailed, candid, balanced account of his place in the art world, but there is no bibliography or chronological summary of his lengthy, complex career. John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols. (vols. 1 and 2, 1986; vols. 3 and 4, 1993), provides the texts of Greenberg’s articles from 1939 to 1969, bibliographies of works with reference to the critic, and chronologies. Analyses of Greenberg’s opinions are found in Donald Kuspit, Clement Greenberg, Art Critic (1979), and J. D. Herbert, The Political Origins of Abstract-Expressionist Art Criticism: The Early Theoretical and Critical Writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg (1985). Janice Van Home, ed., The Harold Letters, 1928–1943: The Maying of an American Intellectual (2000), is a collection of letters that Greenberg wrote to Harold Lazarus, a classmate at Syracuse. The article on Greenberg in World Authors: 1900–1950 (1966), revised and updated as of 1992, reprints the critic’s autobiographical sketch provided for the 1955 edition of Twentieth Century Authors. Adam Gopnik, “The Power Critic,” New Yorker (16 Mar. 1998), gives a present-day critic’s rather dismissive assessment of Greenberg’s mid-century contributions and his diminished standing at the end of the century. Obituaries are in the New Yor/(Times (8 May and 9 May 1994; several inaccuracies were corrected in the 9 May edition), the Washington Post (10 May 1994), Los Angeles Times (11 May 1994), and Chicago Tribune (15 May 1994).

Eleanor F. Wedge