Clement Greenberg began pronouncing his aesthetic judgements in the 1930s, inaugurating a personal Golden Age that lasted into the '50s. During these decades, Greenberg wrote clearly and perceptively about Modernist art, serving as the editor of Partisan Review and as art...
[more]Clement Greenberg began pronouncing his aesthetic judgements in the 1930s, inaugurating a personal Golden Age that lasted into the '50s. During these decades, Greenberg wrote clearly and perceptively about Modernist art, serving as the editor of Partisan Review and as art critic for the Nation. The author of many influential essays, he drew a sharp distinction between the deliberate difficulty and contentious innovations of contemporary art and the degraded yet accessible products of mass culture (particularly in the piece "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"). He championed Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting for their inspired marriage of content to form. Laboring to explain the aesthetics of these new movements, he coined the phrase "post-painterly abstraction," where "painterly" is defined as the blurry and imprecise. He emphasized the pure formal elements of abstract painting, such as its flat space, monumental scale, and patches of undiluted color. As a consultant for French and Company, he organized a series of one-man shows that exhibited the works of Barnett Newman, David Smith, Jules Olitski, and Friedel Dzubas -- primarily Color Field painters.
Greenberg anointed several other artists for greatness, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Kenneth Noland. His nod of approval became popular opinion, as the art establishment worshiped the man who claimed he could judge the artistic merit of a piece by an intuitive inventory of its formal principles (artists' intentions passed under the radar of his high brow). Central to Greenberg's aesthetic theory is a notion of self-reference: each painting that enters the continuum of art history is a critique of painting.
Greenberg's influential Formalism attracted a coterie of artists to Bennington College, known popularly as Greenbergian Formalists. Greenberg enjoyed his influence over the group, serving them as teacher, adviser, and reportedly, as lover. With the rise of Pop and Conceptual art in the '50s and '60s, Greenberg's cult of the eye came under attack from artists and critics interested in meaning. The resurrected spirit of Marcel Duchamp hung around Greenberg's neck like a readymade albatross, a reminder of the primacy of artistic intent and a warning that his notions of quality and purity could seem conservative and self-preserving. Greenberg continued to write about art well into the 1990s; three years before his death he penned "The Notion of Post-Modern." While much of post-Greenberg art criticism is dedicated to dismantling his ideas, the contemporary critic Matthew Collings insists, "He should be anybody's favorite American art critic."
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