Influential Critics

BERNARD BERENSON (1865–1959) When Berenson went to Europe in 1887, there were no notable American art collections. It was his work of attribution and connoisseurship—and the critical volumes he produced—that led the Gilded Age’s robber barons to buy Renaissance art and build America’s great public museums.

Berenson practiced criticism at its most advanced, using eyes, brain, and memory to organize and elucidate the remains of a culture—in his case, determining who had painted the surviving works of the Italian tercento and quattrocento. Though he has been derided for his commercial dealings, his work is still among the few towering American intellectual achievements. CLEMENT GREENBERG (1909–1994) Greenberg’s Art and Culture is the best book of art criticism ever written by an American; the prose has a knock-down power that hasn’t diminished over a half century. What counts in the influence race, though, is that by 1943, Greenberg had already recognized David ...