Clement Greenberg: A Life - Review

Yet she assigns Alfred Barr, Meyer Schapiro, Harold Rosenberg, Thomas B. Hess, Robert Goldwater, and other comparably significant contemporaries supporting roles in the drama of Greenberg's singular achievement, and she reduces their complex contributions to their differences with her hero. Thus, for example, she quotes Louise Bourgeois at length on the social and professional profile Greenberg cut in the high cultural circles she and her husband, Robert Goldwater, frequented in the forties and fifties, detailing in particular with Bourgeois's impressions of Greenberg's jealousy of Barr. But Rubenfeld neglects to mention the art critical confrontation with Goldwater that Greenberg attempted to provoke in 1963 in his self-serving explanation of "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name" or the follow-up attack he made in 1967, to which Goldwater finally answered with a polite but damaging rejoinder. Greenberg, it would seem, was jealous of everyone in the art world's upper reaches. More problematic still is Rubenfeld's tendency to view Barr as an overly accommodating pluralist with a conservative preference for figurative over abstract art. This is in contrast to Greenberg, the clairvoyant spokesman of forward-looking nonobjective painting and sculpture (despite the fact that he patronized, as well as praised, Piet Mondrian and dismissed Kasimir Malevich, both of whom featured prominently in Barr's seminal exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Art," mounted at The Museum of Modern Art in 1936, three years before Greenberg wrote his first essay on art). In light of this curious equation, consider what the museum's collections of prewar modernism would have looked like if Greenberg had been in charge instead of Barr - less Mondrian, scant Malevich or Rodchenko, no Duchamp, and so on (not to mention the skewed perspective we would have had on postwar, especially post-1960 art - no Johns, no Rauschenberg, but Louis, Noland, and Olitski in even greater quantity than is already included).

The point is not just that Barr got it "right" and Greenberg got it "wrong," but that Barr's method, which permitted a wide margin of error, was empirical and inclusive and as such wide open to the revelatory tensions works of art exert on one another, while Greenberg's was essentially exclusive and, in the end, simply incapable of responding to the divergent, often contradictory directions taken by the artists of his time. Where unavoidable, Rubenfeld concedes Greenberg's "incidental" mistakes - for example, his notoriously inattentive description of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie (misidentified by Greenberg as New York B-W - and repeated by Rubenfeld [74]; such lapses do not inspire trust). But by and large Rubenfeld feels it incumbent on her to take Greenberg's part against his art world detractors, who are usually described in the aggregate - "Clembashers" she calls them at one point - and whose arguments are rarely detailed, much less specifically answered.

In the final analysis Rubenfeld offers no fresh insights into the reasons for Greenberg's alternately prescriptive and prescriptive approach to modernism. Nor does she offer any original critique of his role or opinions. She cites his antipathy to Pop but leaves it unexamined, while she barely mentions Minimalism, the major challenge to Greenberg-type art from within the formalist camp. "Neither pop nor minimalism was concerned with 'quality,' by which Greenberg meant the ability to nourish the human spirit at its deepest levels" (283), Rubenfeld declares, and that is where she leaves the matter. For the rest, the chapters that propose to ground Greenberg's opinions in his milieu or ideological moment are an unconvincing patchwork of literary profiles and critical synopses featuring Immanuel Kant, Irving Babbit, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and other sources that read more like book reports than a fully integrated exposition of either their ideas or his. When it comes to the vicissitudes of Trotskyism and Stalinism in the thirties and forties and Greenberg's marginal Marxism, Rubenfeld is simply in over her head.