Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Beacon Paperback): 0212

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Alice Goldfarb Marquis, "Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg", MFA Publications, Boston, 2006, pp. 7–9, 12–13 Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection by Bruce Guenther, Karen Wilkin (Editor), Portland: Portland Art Museum, 2001. ( ISBN 0-691-09049-1) For Greenberg, avant garde art was too "innocent" to be effectively used as propaganda or bent to a cause, while kitsch was ideal for stirring up false sentiment. If criticism is in dialectical relationship with the art it studies, and analytic understanding is a kind of negation of the object understood, as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel thought, then the abiding problem of art criticism is to restore the art object to concreteness and particularity. There is no question that the strength of formalist thought such as Greenberg’s is the attention it pays to the material particularity of the art object. He was able to determine an object’s place in art history on a purely formal-material basis. Criqui, Jean-Pierre, and Daniel Soutif, eds. Special Issue: Clement Greenberg. Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 45–46 (1993).

Greenberg first achieved prominence with the publication of an essay titled “ Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in the fall 1939 issue of Partisan Review. In this essay Greenberg, an avowed Trotskyite Marxist, claimed that avant-garde Modernism was “the only living culture that we now have” and that it was threatened primarily by the emergence of sentimentalized “kitsch” productions—“the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture.” For Greenberg, kitsch was endemic to the industrial societies of both capitalism and socialism, and in his view it was the duty of art and literature to offer a higher path. Griffiths, Amy (March 2012). From Then to Now: Artist Run Initiatives in Sydney, New South Wales (Master of Arts Administration). College of Fine Arts, University of Sydney. pp.60–61 . Retrieved 23 January 2023– via All Conference. PDF

Through the 1960s, Greenberg remained an influential figure on a younger generation of critics, including Michael Fried and Rosalind E. Krauss. Greenberg's antagonism to " Postmodernist" theories and socially engaged movements in art caused him to become a target for critics who labelled him, and the art he admired, as "old fashioned". Though they were extreme, Clement Greenberg’s ideas reflected the spirit of the times and they had a marked influence on the leading artistic developments of the 1960s. The simplified, saturated Colour Field paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Jules Olitski are synonymous with Greenberg’s ideas today, defining the pinnacle of the Modernist era with a ruthlessly strict, analytical attitude towards form, color, texture, scale, and composition. Greenberg curated an exhibition titled Post-Painterly Abstraction in 1964 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which included works by thirty-one different artists; it was so successful that Post Painterly Abstraction is now recognized as a movement in its own right. Along with his many activities in the arts, Greenberg organized several iconic and influential exhibitions. In 1963 he curated Three New American Painters: Louis, Noland, Olitski, at the University of Saskatchewan. He also organized Post Painterly Abstraction, 1964, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 31 artists were selected including Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. Such was the success of the exhibition, it paved the way for Color Field Painting, and the term Post Painterly Abstraction is now even recognized as a bona fide art term. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: The New Press, 1999, pp. 158, 199, 255, 258, 275, 277. Indeed, at least since Duchamp’s readymades, artworks that only exist if they are exhibited have emerged. To produce an artwork means precisely to exhibit something as art—there is no production beyond exhibition. Yet when art production and exhibition coincide, the resulting works can very rarely begin to circulate on the art market. Since an installation, by definition, cannot circulate easily, it would follow that if installation art were not to be sponsored, it would simply cease to exist. We can now see a crucial difference between sponsoring an exhibition of, let’s say, traditional art objects and sponsoring an exhibition of art installations. In the first case, without adequate sponsorship, certain art objects will not be made accessible to the wider public; nevertheless, these objects will still exist. In the second case, inadequate sponsorship would mean that the artworks, understood as art installations, would not come into being at all. And that would be a pity at least for an important reason: artistic and curatorial installations increasingly function as places that attract filmmakers, musicians, and poets who challenge the public taste of their time and cannot become a part of the commercialized mass culture. Philosophers, too, are discovering the art exhibition as a terrain for their discourses. The art scene has become a territory on which political ideas and projects that are difficult to situate in the contemporary political reality can be formulated and presented.

A wide-ranging and ambitious study describing how Greenberg’s subjectivity was related to broader patterns within American modernization and modernity, particularly to regimes of bureaucratization and the visual. The book aims to produce an archaeology of American modernism with Greenberg at its center.

Introduction

Greenberg wrote some of the 20 th century’s most iconic essays on modern art. These include Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939), Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940), Abstract Art (1944), The Crisis of the Easel Picture (1948), and, perhaps most famously, American Type Painting (1955). While each of his critical essays made their own individual arguments, the overall outlook was the same – Greenberg believed it was the natural progression of painting to move into an increasingly flat, abstract language that emphasized the objectivity of art. In 1961, Greenberg published an extensive collection of 37 essays under the umbrella title Art and Culture, which brought together all his ideas for the first time. de Duve, Thierry. Clement Greenberg between the Lines: Including a Previously Unpublished Debate with Clement Greenberg. Translated by Brian Holmes. Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1996. Fernand Léger, Ballet Mécanique, 1924. Film still of the mechanized, animated Chaplin which opens and closes the film.

in one? Are the dissimilarities better in the other? Even if we were to come to definitive answer, is the other even bad in the first place?Tekiner, Deniz. "Formalist Art Criticism and the Politics of Meaning." Social Justice, Issue on Art, Power, and Social Change, 33:2 (2006). He Was Also a Curator Three New American Painters, exhibition organized by Clement Greenberg for the University of Saskatchewan, 1961, image courtesy of Tate, London In 1960 Greenberg published the most complete articulation of his basis for aesthetic judgment in an essay titled “ Modernist Painting.” This essay returned to themes that he initially had broached in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” praising the ongoing development of an art that entrenches itself in its “areas of specialization”—i.e., that focuses on the intrinsic qualities of the media of its creation, such as oil and canvas, rather than on “content.” From Greenberg’s perspective, the history of Western art in the 20th century could be seen as an almost positivistic march—from Paul Cézanne’s experiments with flatness and colour at the beginning of the century through the Abstract Expressionists’ gestural canvases—toward abstract art. This understanding of a progression toward pure abstraction left no room for influential conceptual movements such as Dada and Pop art, both of which he dismissed. In 1961 Greenberg published Art and Culture, a collection of his essays that codified what had become his persuasive and coherent criticism of 20th-century art.