Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Beacon Paperback): 0212

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Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection by Bruce Guenther, Karen Wilkin (Editor) ( ISBN 0-691-09049-1) Our contemporary world, though, is primarily an artificially produced world—in other words, it is produced primarily by human work. However, even if today’s wider populations produce artworks, they do not investigate, analyze, and demonstrate the technical means by which they produce them—let alone the economic, social, and political conditions under which images are produced and distributed. Professional art, on the other hand, does precisely that—it creates spaces in which a critical investigation of contemporary mass image production can be effectuated and manifested. This is why such a critical, analytical art should be supported in the first place: if it is not supported, it will be not only hidden and discarded, but, as I have already suggested, it would simply not come into being. And this support should be discussed and offered beyond any notion of taste and aesthetic consideration. What is at stake is not an aesthetic, but a technical, or, if you like, poetic, dimension of art. The first extended study of Greenberg’s modernist ideas and of his significance as an art critic. Written at a time when Greenberg’s theories of modern art were under fire from a variety of quarters, the book presents an account of Greenbergian modernism that fails to distinguish between the early and late writings. Building on Lessing’s essay, Greenberg’s ideas outlined a historical rationale describing where the origins of modern painting had come from and where it was now headed. He argued that painting had been growing increasingly flattened since historical times, moving beyond narrative or literary content towards an emphasis on abstract pattern and surface, writing, “But most important of all, the picture plane grows shallower and shallower, flattening out and pressing together the fictive planes of depth until they meet as one upon the real and material plane which is the actual surface of the canvas.”

Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg. Boston: MFA Publications, 2006. Though they were extreme, Clement Greenberg’s ideas reflected the spirit of the times and they had a marked influence on the leading artistic developments of the 1960s. The simplified, saturated Colour Field paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Jules Olitski are synonymous with Greenberg’s ideas today, defining the pinnacle of the Modernist era with a ruthlessly strict, analytical attitude towards form, color, texture, scale, and composition. Greenberg curated an exhibition titled Post-Painterly Abstraction in 1964 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which included works by thirty-one different artists; it was so successful that Post Painterly Abstraction is now recognized as a movement in its own right.The standard exhibition leaves an individual visitor alone, allowing him or her to individually confront and contemplate the exhibited art objects. Moving from one object to another, this visitor necessarily overlooks the totality of the exhibition space, including his or her own position within it. An art installation, on the contrary, builds a community of spectators precisely because of the holistic, unifying character of the space produced by the installation. The true visitor of the installation is not an isolated individual, but a collective of visitors. The art space as such can only be perceived by a mass of visitors—a multitude, if you like—and this multitude becomes part of the exhibition for each individual visitor, and vice versa. The visitor thus finds his or her own body exposed to the gaze of others, who in turn become aware of this body. Jones, Caroline A. Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Many of Greenberg’s ideas initially came from Karl Marx, particularly the belief that abstract avant-garde art was a bold and revolutionary move away from oppressive political regimes led by the Nazis or Communists. Another major influence on Greenberg’s ideas was the German artist and educator Hans Hofmann. In 1938 and 1939 Greenberg went to several of Hoffmann’s lectures which emphasized the importance of a “formal” understanding in art, where color, line, surface, and the relationship between planes on a flat surface were deemed more important than figurative or literary content.

In 1960 Greenberg published the most complete articulation of his basis for aesthetic judgment in an essay titled “ Modernist Painting.” This essay returned to themes that he initially had broached in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” praising the ongoing development of an art that entrenches itself in its “areas of specialization”—i.e., that focuses on the intrinsic qualities of the media of its creation, such as oil and canvas, rather than on “content.” From Greenberg’s perspective, the history of Western art in the 20th century could be seen as an almost positivistic march—from Paul Cézanne’s experiments with flatness and colour at the beginning of the century through the Abstract Expressionists’ gestural canvases—toward abstract art. This understanding of a progression toward pure abstraction left no room for influential conceptual movements such as Dada and Pop art, both of which he dismissed. In 1961 Greenberg published Art and Culture, a collection of his essays that codified what had become his persuasive and coherent criticism of 20th-century art. Greenberg attended Erasmus Hall High School, the Marquand School for Boys, then Syracuse University, graduating with an A.B. in 1930, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. [2] After college, already as fluent in Yiddish and English since childhood, Greenberg taught himself Italian and German in addition to French and Latin. During the next few years, Greenberg travelled the U.S. working for his father's dry-goods business, but the work did not suit his inclinations, so he turned to working as a translator. Greenberg married in 1934, had a son the next year, and was divorced the year after that. In 1936, Greenberg took a series of jobs with the federal government, from Civil Service Administration, to the Veterans' Administration, and finally to the Appraisers' Division of the Customs Service in 1937. It was then that Greenberg began to write seriously, and soon after began getting published in a handful of small magazines and literary journals. [3] "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" [ edit ] Greenberg cannot be summed up in a single phrase because he never did likewise with his subjects. The only things worth writing about, he believed, were the things that couldn't be easily solved, or solved at all. Puzzles are what fascinated him, and he believed that all great art can be experiential - it's an experience not only of what consumes the canvas, but what consumes the artist, and no truly great artist lives in a vacuum. Great art, and the artists who create it, are living and breathing vessels of the art that came before them. To experience great art is to experience the greatness of civilization.Greenberg expressed mixed feelings about pop art. On the one hand he maintained that pop art partook of a trend toward "openness and clarity as against the turgidities of second generation Abstract Expressionism." However, Greenberg claimed that pop art did not "really challenge taste on more than a superficial level." [7] Along with his many activities in the arts, Greenberg organized several iconic and influential exhibitions. In 1963 he curated Three New American Painters: Louis, Noland, Olitski, at the University of Saskatchewan. He also organized Post Painterly Abstraction, 1964, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 31 artists were selected including Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. Such was the success of the exhibition, it paved the way for Color Field Painting, and the term Post Painterly Abstraction is now even recognized as a bona fide art term. Anatoly Rykov. Clement Greenberg and American theory of contemporary art in the 1960s, in Art History, Journal of the Russian Institute of Art History. 2007, no. 1-2, pp.538–563. Through the 1960s, Greenberg remained an influential figure on a younger generation of critics, including Michael Fried and Rosalind E. Krauss. Greenberg's antagonism to " Postmodernist" theories and socially engaged movements in art caused him to become a target for critics who labelled him, and the art he admired, as "old fashioned".

Just one year later, Clement Greenberg published the second of his instrumentally important essays: Towards a Newer Laocoon, 1940. The text was a continuation of Gotthold Lessing’s famous article Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry , published in 1766. Lessing had begun making distinctions between different artistic mediums including poetry, painting, and sculpture, arguing how each had its own distinct language of development which we should recognize and appreciate.Beyond such speculation, which is admittedly schematic and abstract, I cannot go. … But at least it helps if we do not have to despair of the ultimate consequences for culture of industrialism. And it also helps if we do not have to stop thinking at the point where Spengler and Toynbee and Eliot do. 5 Criqui, Jean-Pierre, and Daniel Soutif, eds. Special Issue: Clement Greenberg. Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 45–46 (1993). Roger Kimball, Collected Essays and Criticism, by Clement Greenberg, edited by John O'Brian [ permanent dead link], Commentary, December 1987

In our society, if we speak about the elite, we understandably refer to the financial elite. Thus, if somebody suggests art to be “elitist,” it would seem to imply that this art is made for spectators coming from the affluent and privileged classes of our society. But, as I have already tried to show, the contrary is true in the context of installation art. Affluent, privileged art collectors buy expensive art objects that circulate in the international art market, and are not as interested in installation art, which functions primarily as part of public art exhibitions and cannot be easily sold. And it is usually the case that, after stating that advanced installation art is elitist, the responsible authorities will invite wealthy collectors to show their private collections inside a public space. The notion of the elite thus becomes completely confusing, for no one can understand who this “elite,” implied by accusations of elitism, is actually supposed to be. Clement Greenberg was born in the borough of the Bronx, NYC, in 1909. His parents were middle-class Jewish immigrants, and he was the eldest of their three sons. Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a young adult, when he began to focus on literature. Griffiths, Amy (March 2012). From Then to Now: Artist Run Initiatives in Sydney, New South Wales (Master of Arts Administration). College of Fine Arts, University of Sydney. pp.60–61 . Retrieved 23 January 2023– via All Conference. PDF Essays in French by an international group of Greenberg scholars. The focus is on Greenberg’s aesthetics and criticism as well as on his overall legacy, especially as they relate to France and the United States. de Duve, Thierry. Clement Greenberg between the Lines: Including a Previously Unpublished Debate with Clement Greenberg. Translated by Brian Holmes. Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1996.Greenberg first achieved prominence with the publication of an essay titled “ Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in the fall 1939 issue of Partisan Review. In this essay Greenberg, an avowed Trotskyite Marxist, claimed that avant-garde Modernism was “the only living culture that we now have” and that it was threatened primarily by the emergence of sentimentalized “kitsch” productions—“the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture.” For Greenberg, kitsch was endemic to the industrial societies of both capitalism and socialism, and in his view it was the duty of art and literature to offer a higher path. For Greenberg, avant garde art was too "innocent" to be effectively used as propaganda or bent to a cause, while kitsch was ideal for stirring up false sentiment. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2019-03-30 05:03:03 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA1154023 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set trent External-identifier Eventually, Greenberg was concerned that some Abstract Expressionism had been "reduced to a set of mannerisms" and increasingly looked to a new set of artists who abandoned such elements as subject matter, connection with the artist, and definite brush strokes. Greenberg suggested this process attained a level of "purity" (a word he only used within scare quotes) that would reveal the truthfulness of the canvas, and the two-dimensional aspects of the space (flatness). Greenberg coined the term Post-Painterly Abstraction to distinguish it from Abstract Expressionism, or Painterly Abstraction, as Greenberg preferred to call it. Post-Painterly Abstraction was a term given to a myriad of abstract art that reacted against gestural abstraction of second-generation Abstract Expressionists. Among the dominant trends in the Post-Painterly Abstraction are Hard-Edged Painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella who explored relationships between tightly ruled shapes and edges, in Stella's case, between the shapes depicted on the surface and the literal shape of the support and Color-Field Painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, who stained first Magna then water-based acrylic paints into unprimed canvas, exploring tactile and optical aspects of large, vivid fields of pure, open color. The line between these movements is tenuous, however as artists such as Kenneth Noland utilized aspects of both movements in his art. Post-Painterly Abstraction is generally seen as continuing the Modernist dialectic of self-criticism.