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

Product Information

The first extended study of Greenberg’s modernist ideas and of his significance as an art critic. Written at a time when Greenberg’s theories of modern art were under fire from a variety of quarters, the book presents an account of Greenbergian modernism that fails to distinguish between the early and late writings. Many of Greenberg’s ideas initially came from Karl Marx, particularly the belief that abstract avant-garde art was a bold and revolutionary move away from oppressive political regimes led by the Nazis or Communists. Another major influence on Greenberg’s ideas was the German artist and educator Hans Hofmann. In 1938 and 1939 Greenberg went to several of Hoffmann’s lectures which emphasized the importance of a “formal” understanding in art, where color, line, surface, and the relationship between planes on a flat surface were deemed more important than figurative or literary content. Jones, Caroline A. Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Greenberg appropriated the German word " kitsch" to describe this low, concocted form of "culture", though its connotations have since been recast to a more affirmative acceptance of nostalgic materials of capitalist/communist culture. In 1968, Greenberg delivered the inaugural John Power Memorial Lecture at the Power Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney, Australia. [8] 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.Fernand Léger, Ballet Mécanique, 1924. Film still of the mechanized, animated Chaplin which opens and closes the film. Building on both his own ideas about Formalism and the theories of the 18 th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, Greenberg argued in Modernist Painting for a new, objective way of seeing art. He believed art should be viewed and written about it in an entirely detached manner, only observing the physical properties of the object itself. These ideas had a profound influence on a new generation of Modernist art critics who became known as the “School of Greenberg”, including Rosalind Krauss, Michael Fried, and Barbara Rose, each of whom adopted a similar analytical approach when dissecting a work of art.

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. Greenberg Was a Prominent Essayist Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 1961, image courtesy of Boyd Books 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. Eventually, Greenberg was concerned that some Abstract Expressionism had been "reduced to a set of mannerisms" and increasingly looked to a new set of artists who abandoned such elements as subject matter, connection with the artist, and definite brush strokes. Greenberg suggested this process attained a level of "purity" (a word he only used within scare quotes) that would reveal the truthfulness of the canvas, and the two-dimensional aspects of the space (flatness). Greenberg coined the term Post-Painterly Abstraction to distinguish it from Abstract Expressionism, or Painterly Abstraction, as Greenberg preferred to call it. Post-Painterly Abstraction was a term given to a myriad of abstract art that reacted against gestural abstraction of second-generation Abstract Expressionists. Among the dominant trends in the Post-Painterly Abstraction are Hard-Edged Painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella who explored relationships between tightly ruled shapes and edges, in Stella's case, between the shapes depicted on the surface and the literal shape of the support and Color-Field Painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, who stained first Magna then water-based acrylic paints into unprimed canvas, exploring tactile and optical aspects of large, vivid fields of pure, open color. The line between these movements is tenuous, however as artists such as Kenneth Noland utilized aspects of both movements in his art. Post-Painterly Abstraction is generally seen as continuing the Modernist dialectic of self-criticism.Just one year later, Clement Greenberg published the second of his instrumentally important essays: Towards a Newer Laocoon, 1940. The text was a continuation of Gotthold Lessing’s famous article Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry , published in 1766. Lessing had begun making distinctions between different artistic mediums including poetry, painting, and sculpture, arguing how each had its own distinct language of development which we should recognize and appreciate. More substantial than his 'Homemade Esthetics', but I would still recommend starting with it for a broader understanding of Clement's assessments towards art criticism (even if it can be sometimes shallow). So, the best thing about the essays are the more indepth/historical explorations of essays like "Collage" which gives a wealth of knowledge to its readers; but, those more "broad" essays, can have a lot of questionable stuff in it as well, like in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch". In it, Clement postulates that bad art/kitsch has the intention of being sellable and predigested (beside other points). First, there is nothing bad about an artist doing works for pay, he even mentions Hokusai in that essays who was an illustrator who worked in the low-art of ukiyo-e (instead of the high art of painting on scrolls and doors), and yet he was great. Rembrandt, Goltzius, Goya, Dürer, and many more, all worked in the 'low art' of printmaking, which was possible because of the inovantions in printing quality. As for predigested art, he mentions Repin in opposition to Picasso, but he doesn't mention what it really means to be 'predigested' in the first place. Is it a naturalistic portayal of the world? Is it the more direct portrayal of emotion? Is it the handling of the paint? I point to you Repin's "Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan" and Rembrandt's "The Return of the Prodigal Son"; one can derive similarities in both, while also differences will be observed. Are the similarities worse Greenberg, Clement. Late Writings, edited by Robert C. Morgan, St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 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? O'Brian, John. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986 and 1993.