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

Yet despite the rich variety suggested by this long roster of artists, the exhibition also revealed the very narrowness of Greenberg's vision. One can never forget how much he rejected or ignored during the years spanned by this collection, from Pop art and Minimalism to photo-based art and appropriation decades later. His dogged commitment to the superior worth of Post-Painterly Abstraction earned him a reputation for rigidity, and was such that even in the 1980s, Greenberg could still proclaim Olitski the best living painter.

Within the limited esthetic defined by "A Critic's Collection," the rationale for that provocative contention can be fully explored. These objects inhabit a world of nuances, of technical refinements and formal flourishes. Entering that Greenbergian world requires a surrender to visual pleasures and the stuff of connoisseurship, a receptivity to subtleties of color and composition and sensuous, tactile associations. With regard to painting, moreover, Greenberg's theory, cogently set forth in his 1961 essay "Modernist Painting," that the self-criticism of the discipline served "to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence" is amply illustrated here. (4) A preoccupation with the medium itself, above other concerns, is on display not only in Olitski, but also in Stanley Boxer, Dan Christensen, Friedel Dzubas, Robert Goodnough and many others.

Belle peinture thus governs the collection, an emphasis on the materiality of the medium and a search for painterly effects. An investigation needs to be made into the historical intersection of Greenberg's theories and the roughly contemporaneous introduction of acrylic resins, which were developed in the 1930s but only became commercially available to artists in the 1950s. More than 75 percent of the paintings in the collection are acrylics, exploiting the new possibilities in color, consistency and flexibility that made synthetic paints popular after World War II. Magna, a mineral-spirit acrylic favored by Louis and Noland, appeared on the market in 1949, advertised as "the first new painting medium in 500 years." (5) The water-based acrylic known as Liquitex followed in 1954; it helped Frankenthaler solve the problem of unctuous halos around the pools of color she had initially produced using oil paint thinned with turpentine. For those artists pursuing the ideal of flatness, surfactants reduced the surface tension of paint on unprimed canvas and permitted better absorption, as in Noland's fluid Double Fragment (1958). Alternatively, because it was faster drying than oil and less prone to cracking, acrylic allowed sequential layers to be applied more efficiently, a technique effectively exploited by Larry Poons in his six densely veiled paintings in Greenberg's collection, or by Achimore in his beautiful Color in the Creek (1987).

The exhibition offers a comprehensive inventory of application processes in both acrylic and oil--brushing, spreading, smearing, scumbling, scraping, daubing, combing, pouring, spraying. Since the commercial development of additives such as levelers and thickeners, pumice gel for grit, airbrush extenders and molding paste, artists have been able to achieve an unprecedented range of textures and sheen. One of the most unusual acrylic experiments in "A Critic's Collection" has to be Olitski's stunning Noble Regard (1989), an easel picture that lends new meaning to the term "thick impasto." Olitski employed iridescent water- and oil-based acrylic to build a crowded, swirling, allover network of huge, fat strokes; outsized and sculptural, they give an intriguing impression of mutant gigantism.