Clement Greenberg: A LifeClement Greenberg was born in the Bronx in 1909, the child of Jewish immigrants from Polish Lithuania. He attended Syracuse University, spent three years sleeping late, reading, and frequenting museums, and then toured the country as a traveling salesman for a necktie business owned by his father. By 1935 he was back in New York working at a routine civil service job. One could hardly have predicted that from these inauspicious beginnings would emerge one of the century's premier cultural critics. In 1939 he wrote "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", the landmark essay that catapulted him from anonymity to the center of a stellar group of intellectuals known as the Partisan Review crowd - Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Meyer Schapiro, and Lionel Trilling, among others. The subject of Greenberg's essay was modern society examined through popular culture and painterly abstraction. It was his uncanny response to the form abstraction was going to take in advanced American painting that placed him - with no formal training in art history - at the apex of the art world for the next fifty years. Greenberg's independent opinions and combative style soon made him enemies. Greenberg criticized the taste of the Museum of Modern Art, while he sang the praises of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and David Smith when few in the art world took them seriously. By the end of the forties, when his ideas began appearing in Life, Time, and Newsweek, the establishment was compelled to react. Florence Rubenfeld traces the rise and fall of this impassioned and provocative critic, telling his story, in part, through his words and the words of the dazzling array of personalities who surroundedhim. She provides a new assessment of his profound contribution to art criticism, insights into his influences and identity, and an engaging social history of an infamous postwar milieu, peopled by brilliant intellectuals and ground-breaking artists. Clement Greenberg: A Life is an authoritative account of a remarkable man and the vibrant New York art world he helped to define. |
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Page 104
... aesthetic value of abstraction . The second exhibition he organized at MOMA ( 1929 ) was billed as a representative cross section of American painting . Abstraction had been known in Europe for twenty years and was well represented by ...
... aesthetic value of abstraction . The second exhibition he organized at MOMA ( 1929 ) was billed as a representative cross section of American painting . Abstraction had been known in Europe for twenty years and was well represented by ...
Page 116
... aesthetic achievement to sway the decision , " they wrote , " would destroy the signifi- cance of the award and ... aesthetic values superseded all others , and second , that " aesthetic achievement 116 CLEMENT GREENBERG.
... aesthetic achievement to sway the decision , " they wrote , " would destroy the signifi- cance of the award and ... aesthetic values superseded all others , and second , that " aesthetic achievement 116 CLEMENT GREENBERG.
Page 118
... aesthetic values superseded all others . Aesthetic autonomy , on its face , means simply that the experience com- municated by art is valid in and of itself , that art has no obligation to be socially or politically involved . It was a ...
... aesthetic values superseded all others . Aesthetic autonomy , on its face , means simply that the experience com- municated by art is valid in and of itself , that art has no obligation to be socially or politically involved . It was a ...
Contents
Preface | 13 |
Icarus in the Art World | 19 |
An Inauspicious Beginning | 31 |
Copyright | |
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abstract art abstract expressionism admired aesthetic American art American painting Art and Culture art criticism art world Artforum artists Avant-Garde and Kitsch became Bennington called Clem Clem wrote Clem's Clement Greenberg collectors color Commentary cubism curators David Smith dealers diary editor Emmerich essay exhibition father Feeley feelings forties French Friedel Dzubas friends Gallery Harold Hartigan Helen Frankenthaler highbrow Hilton Kramer Ibid ideas Interview invited issue Jackson Pollock Jean Jenny Jewish Jews Joseph Jules Olitski Ken Noland knew Kooning Krasner Krauss later Lee Krasner literary lived looked Louis Louis's Macdonald magazine modern art MOMA Morris Louis Museum of Modern Naifeh and Smith never Newman painter Partisan Review party Phillips piece Podhoretz poetry position PR crowd Rahv recalled response Rosenberg Schapiro sixties Story from CG studio T. S. Eliot talk taste things thought tion told took vanguard visited wanted William Rubin writing York Intellectuals