Clem's Cache: last year, the Portland art museum acquired an extensive art collection assembled by the late Clement Greenberg. The public recently got its first chance to view the critic's holdings, a time capsule of Greenberg's taste during his most influential decades

Art in America, Nov, 2001 by Sue Taylor

In 1956, his influence as an art critic still on the rise, Clement Greenberg married writer Janice Van Horne. Although divorced in 1977, the couple remarried 12 years later. Since Greenberg's death at 85 in 1994, Van Home has proved a dedicated and capable custodian of his legacy. After arranging the sale of the critic's papers to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 1995, she edited and published Greenberg's lectures on taste and value in Homemade Esthetics, as well as his youthful correspondence, spanning nearly two decades, with his college friend Harold Lazarus [see A.i.A., Dec. '00]. (1) Her next task was to find a museum repository for her late husband's private art collection, a visual document of his enthusiasms and, because the works were gifts to him, of his intense friendships with artists of several generations.

The new owner of 159 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures amassed by Greenberg is Oregon's Portland Art Museum. Built on an initial 1895 acquisition of plaster casts of antique sculpture, the museum has developed impressive concentrations in Northwest Coast Native American art, Asian art, English silver, 18th- and 19th-century European and American painting and sculpture, and German Expressionist graphics, but has only recently turned to more contemporary material. Thus director John Buchanan, Jr., moved decisively when he learned through Portland art dealer Tracy Savage that the Greenberg collection was available. During his yearlong negotiations with Van Horne, Buchanan was able to call on museum patrons Tom and Gretchen Holce and Carol and John Hampton, who agreed to underwrite the acquisition. (A contract with Van Horne prohibits disclosure of the exact price, but Buchanan has acknowledged to the press that the sum was several million dollars.) The purchase was announced in October 2000, and remarkably, within just eight months, "Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection" went on display, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. The exhibition, organized by newly appointed chief curator Bruce Guenther, will travel internationally in an abbreviated form after its Portland debut. Closing a significant gap in the museum's holdings, the works on display also illuminated a historical moment, when Greenberg's observations about the formal trajectory of painting seemed affirmed in the practice of a number of American artists he admired.

In all, 59 artists are represented in the collection, with works dating from 1935 to 1990. The assortment is a surprising mix of major names and relative unknowns, including a number of talents now entirely forgotten. Color Field painting predominates, as one might expect, with no fewer than 23 works by Kenneth Noland and 21 by Jules Olitski. A veritable retrospective could be mounted with the paintings and drawings by Noland, which include his very first target, No. One (1958), as well as a lozenge, a pair of diamond needles, tondos, polygons, plaids, stripes and a chevron. In contrast, the earlier generation of Abstract Expressionists that Greenberg promoted is only present with single works on paper by Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb and Theodoros Stamos. A lively little oil-and-gouache drawing from 1948 by Hans Hofmann indicates that the admiration Greenberg felt for the artist (whose development the critic considered "incoherent" but punctuated by masterpieces (2)) was mutual; like many objects in the exhibition, the drawing bears a personal inscription to Greenberg. A signature piece by Seymour Lipton, Tower (1952), illustrates the sculptor's devotion to the motif of the caged figure, expressive of the haunting violence of a world war. With its tormented sheet-lead form entwined in a rigid wooden armature, the powerful 11 1/2-inch assemblage belies its own small scale--and reminds us, too, of the pervasive influence of Alberto Giacometti on postwar American sculpture.

Not every sculpture Greenberg owned was as diminutive as Tower or other pedestal pieces like Robert Jacobsen's whimsical welded-steel Poupees (1958) or Day Schnabel's untitled bronze of curling, ribbon-like forms (1960). Among the eight examples by Anthony Caro in the collection are the monumental Square Feet Flat (1974), over 9 feet tall and resembling a flattened grand piano with its lid raised, and the steel "sawhorse" titled Strip Stake (1971-74), whose horizontal beam extends 12 feet. These imposing objects complement more intimate and elegant tabletop sculptures by Caro from the 1960s. His meeting with Greenberg in London in 1959 was one of the signal events in Caro's career; the indebtedness felt by the artist to the critic is evinced in the unusual bronze portrait bust Caro fashioned of Greenberg in 1990, a varnished steel floor piece he dubbed Greenberg's Dream (1978), the 1987 nude study he inscribed "for Clem with gratitude and affection" and not least in the reminiscence he contributed to the exhibition catalogue.

Caro's female nude is one of six by various artists in the collection. Others are an etching by Richard Diebenkorn (1961); a juicy acrylic by Darryl Hughto, Love Note (1988); two charcoal drawings by Olitski (both 1965); and an oil by Horacio Torres (1975). Except for the Hughto, which is emphatically painterly and only barely hints at the figure, these images seemed anomalous in an exhibition ruled by abstract artists more typically involved with Greenbergian preoccupations, namely, formal experimentation and the particular qualities of their mediums. Visually jarring as they were, however, the lonely nudes were reminders of Greenberg's own insistence that the esthetic quality for which he searched so single-mindedly was never a matter of abstraction per se. "The presence or absence of a recognizable image," he asserted in 1954, "has no more to do with value in painting or sculpture than the presence or absence of a libretto has to do with value in music." (3) In this light, the one still life in the exhibition, Fish and Shrimps (1945) by Buffie Johnson, also makes sense, as do the handful of land- or seascapes by Helen Frankenthaler, Henri Hayden, Dorothy Knowles (a Canadian realist whom Greenberg actually dissuaded from pursuing abstraction), Ernest Lindner, Pat Service and even a self-taught British painter, Alfred Wallis.