Content provided in partnership with

Clement Greenberg: A Life - Review

Art Journal, Spring, 1999 by Robert Storr

Florence Rubenfeld. New York: Scribner, 1997. 336 pp., 42 b/w ills. $42.

For the past fifty years a specter has haunted the art world. Among name-droppers of older generations he was known as "Clem," and referring to him in that familiar manner associated the speaker with power. In truth, only a fraction of those who invoked his totemic presence - and later on his absence - in this fashion were intimately acquainted with his ideas. Yet, for a cluster of artists, critics, and curators of the forties through the sixties who were willing, for longer or shorter periods and usually at high personal cost, to submit to his will, Clem was an aesthetic godhead and worldly provider. And for a wider circle of collectors, students, and lay readers his declarations bespoke an authority rivaled by no other art writer of his day. To many who came into their own after 1970, this gray eminence was known as "Greenberg" - no first names necessary - and was generally assumed to be the elusive force behind conservative taste in contemporary art, the Phantom of the Opera who haunted the institutions of U.S. modernism. But they too based their belief on the handful of concepts ascribed to the master that could be heard echoing down the corridors of power.

Most Popular Articles in Arts: Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism; Free-standing cardboard sculpture; What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...; Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...; Tino Sehgal at the ICA; More »

In fact, with the exception of what was preserved in his influential 1961 anthology Art and Culture and a spasmodic flow of essays, interviews, contributions to symposia, and grapevine dicta that between the early seventies and his death in 1994 dwindled to strange, remote, often self-contradictory echoes of past pronouncements, Clement Greenberg's actual contributions to art discourse were largely unknown, or forgotten along with the yellowing of the small-circulation periodicals to which his thoughts had been consigned. In the meantime, rumors of his corruption, cruelty, and dissipations circulated among people who had never met the man, or met him only once - at a party, on a panel, or during one of his many studio visits - and claimed membership in his entourage on that slim basis, while true insiders kept silent out of respect, fear, or both.

Giving substance to this specter has been one of the pressing problems of criticism for more than a decade, insofar as much of the debate over the status of modernism and the claims of postmodernism have hinged on fleshing out the record of Greenberg's writing and examining the social, political, and aesthetic assumptions embedded in it. Indeed, to a considerable extent postmodernism in the United States - as distinct from the various postmodernisms proposed by Continental theorists - means what comes after modernism as Greenberg defined it. This, depending on your views regarding the comprehensiveness or narrowness of that definition, implies one of two things: either an abrupt transcendence or repudiation of the traditions of advanced culture during the past century and a half or a resumption of a more complex dialectic of modernity antedating Greenberg's commanding but always questionable interventions. (I take the second position and as a consequence use the term postmodern only to identify a body of self-declared art and opinion, not as an historical designation, since it is impossible even for the most far-sighted of vanguardists to be living within a period and thinking "after" it.)

The cornerstone of this effort to restore Greenberg to his full measure - whether to argue his case with greater subtlety or to attack his doctrines with greater accuracy - has been John O'Brian's well-edited Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, the first two volumes of which were published by the University of Chicago Press in 1986, and the last two of which appeared in 1993. At long last it is possible to review Greenberg's "in the text" - including original versions of essays reworked for Art and Culture. The emerging literature on mid-century U.S. art and politics is much the richer for O'Brian's scrupulous and scholarly enterprise.

Given the nature of Greenberg's aggressive, bluffing, take-no-prisoners approach to criticism, the character of the man himself is as much at issue in these debates as his ideas. The matter in dispute is not his talent. About that there can be little doubt. Although far from infallible, he did have an "eye." More to his credit, he managed with little in the way of literary or journalistic apprenticeship to temper a flexible prose style that allowed for vivid if sometimes misleading description, broad if historically skewed social speculation, street-smart if too-often summary insights into the character of the artists about whom he wrote, genuinely provocative if fragmentary personal revelation, and striking aesthetic inferences, some of which - like his characterization of "American-type painting" - have survived his tendentious application of them. In the best sense, and in the worst, he fit to a tee Charles Baudelaire's description of the modern critic as "partial, passionate, and political." The heated controversy that still swirls round him concerns the way he deployed these undeniable gifts as artistic early-warning post, defender of the avant-garde, and all-purpose cultural polemicist. In particular they hinge on the way he used or abused the power he earned with his pen and the degree to which his "liberal" Leftist politics and ostensibly "disinterested" Kantian judgments on aesthetic matters were compromised by presumption or opportunism in struggles that preoccupied the fractious cadres of New York intellectuals from the thirties through the sixties, and his active involvement in the professional and private lives of the artists and art critical acolytes he gathered around him.

Clement Greenberg: A Life - Review

Art Journal, Spring, 1999 by Robert Storr

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Health

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts