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clement greenberg: art critic | |||||
Clement Greenberg was born in the Bronx to Russian immigrants in 1909. He burst onto the art scene as an unknown critic in 1939 with his landmark essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch. In the years that followed he presided over New Yorks ascendancy over Paris as the worlds art capital. He was the first art critic to recognize the importance of Jackson Pollock, calling him the most powerful painter in America, and championed his career, as well as those of David Smith and other artists of the period.
Robert Rosenblum, professor of fine arts at New York University, told The Art Newspaper that Greenberg represents the purest, most absolute statement of a formalist viewpoint. And since the visual is finally the core of art, what he declared had the sense of absolute truth, and that was in part responsible for his papal position, part of his grandeur. He had an extreme and coherent position and you had to deal with it, either by becoming a disciple or rejecting it. One of the astonishing things about him was the psychological power he had as the dictorial father to a whole generation of critics who either followed him slavishly or rebelled against him, and who very often tried to be, themselves, Clement Greenberg. The
picture [painting] has now become an entity belonging to the same order
of space as our bodes; it is no longer the vehicle of an imagined equivalent
of that order. It may be
that we cannot yet see far enough around the art of our own day; that
the real and fundamental source of the dissatisfaction we may feel with
abstract painting lies in the not uncommon problems offered by a new language. Greenberg was the first to treat New York modern artists as a collective school rather than as so many provincial followers of high European modernism. He took the term abstract expressionism, which had been used to describe German painters of the previous generation, and helped affix it to this school, which he then relentlessly promoted in his reviews and essays. In the work of such artists as Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Willem de Kooning, and especially Pollock and the sculptor David Smith, he saw a vitality and jauntiness absent from the art of postwar Europe. In his writings, the artists' colony that huddled around grimy Eighth Street became nothing less than the churning center of a new international movement. [Art, Politics & Clement Greenberg by Michael J. Lewis, Commentary, June 1998] Art is a
matter strictly of experience, and what counts first and last is quality;
all other things are secondary. He was also an influence on many art historians and critics including T.J. Clark, Michael Fried, Thomas Hess, Rosalind Krauss, Max Kozloff, Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Harold Rosenberg, and Robert Goldwater. He was the editor of Partisan Review from 1940 to 1942 and wrote on art for The Nation from 1942 to 1949 with a plain, but impassioned, style geared toward a general reader. In 1965 Greenberg wrote Art and Culture: Critical Essays, followed by the four-volume Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism in 1986. Ms. Van Horne also edited the recently published Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste and The Harold Letters, 1928-1943: The Making of an American Intellectual.
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