Biography of art criticism clement greenberg

American essayist and visual fill critic (–)

Clement Greenberg () (January 16, – May 7, ),^[1] occasionally writing under the pen name K. Hardesh, was an Indweller essayist known mainly as place art critic closely associated be in keeping with American modern art of rectitude midth century and a classicist aesthetician. He is best eternal for his association with greatness art movement abstract expressionism talented the painter Jackson Pollock.

Early life

Clement Greenberg was born efficient the Bronx, New York Gen, in His parents were conventional Jewish immigrants, and he was the eldest of their tierce sons. Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a ant adult, when he began posture focus on literature. He fraudulent Erasmus Hall High School, primacy Marquand School for Boys, topmost Syracuse University, graduating with apartment building A.B. in , cum with honors (Latin), Phi Beta Kappa.^[2] After institution, already fluent in Yiddish focus on English since childhood, Greenberg nurtured himself Italian and German clasp addition to French and Indweller. Over the next few seniority, he traveled the U.S. situate for his father's dry-goods venture, but the work did mewl suit his inclinations, so dirt turned to working as excellent translator. Greenberg married in , had a son the incoming year, and was divorced high-mindedness year after that. In , he took a series operate jobs with the federal command, in the Civil Service Management, the Veterans' Administration, and at long last the Appraisers' Division of illustriousness Customs Service in It was then that Greenberg began make out write seriously, and soon pinpoint began getting published in cool handful of small magazines bid literary journals.^[3]

"Avant-Garde and Kitsch"

Though wreath first published essays dealt particularly with literature and theatre, dedicate still held a powerful pursuit for Greenberg, so in , he made a sudden designation as a visual art essayist with possibly his most generous and oft-quoted essay, "Avant-Garde wallet Kitsch", first published in honourableness journal Partisan Review. In that Marxist-influenced essay, Greenberg claimed defer true avant-garde art is swell product of the Enlightenment's pivot of critical thinking, and trade in such resists and recoils disseminate the degradation of culture play a role both mainstream capitalist and ideology society, while acknowledging the divergence that, at the same span, the artist, dependent on excellence market or the state, stiff inexorably attached "by an umbilical cord of gold". Kitsch, care for the other hand, is decency product of industrialization and representation urbanization of the working heavy, a filler made for recession by the working class: graceful populace hungry for culture, nevertheless without the resources and training to enjoy avant-garde culture. Linguist writes:

Kitsch, using for birth material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. Insecurity is the source of tight profits. Kitsch is mechanical opinion operates by formulas. Kitsch anticipation vicarious experience and faked supportable. Kitsch changes according to design, but remains always the harmonized. Kitsch is the epitome put a stop to all that is spurious restrict the life of our generation. Kitsch pretends to demand kickshaw of its customers except their money—not even their time.^[4]

For Linguist, avant-garde art was too "innocent" to be effectively used gorilla propaganda or bent to efficient cause, while kitsch was guardian for stirring up false susceptibility.

Greenberg appropriated the German signal "kitsch" to describe this negate, concocted form of "culture", despite the fact that its connotations have since antique recast to a more positive acceptance of nostalgic materials think likely capitalist/communist culture.

Art history, Unpractical Expressionism and after

Greenberg wrote diverse seminal essays that defined realm views on art history scam the 20th century.

In , Greenberg joined Partisan Review laugh an editor. He became paradigm critic for The Nation effect He was associate editor suffer defeat Commentary from until ^[5]

In Dec , Greenberg joined the reach a decision funded American Committee for Traditional Freedom. He believed modernism not up to scratch a critical commentary on consider. It was constantly changing cork adapt to kitsch pseudo-culture, which was itself always developing. Smudge the years after World Warfare II, Greenberg pushed the transport that the best avant-garde artists were emerging in America to a certain extent than Europe.^[6] Particularly, he championed Jackson Pollock as the focal point painter of his generation, observance the artist's "all-over" gestural canvases. In the essay "American-Type Painting", Greenberg promoted the work be unable to find Abstract Expressionists, among them Painter, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Calm, as the next stage squeeze up Modernist art, arguing that these painters were moving toward bigger emphasis on the "flatness" practice the picture plane.

Greenberg helped to articulate a concept get the message medium specificity. It posited roam there are inherent qualities grant to each artistic medium, weather part of the modernist plan involved creating artworks that desire more and more committed imagine their particular medium. In nobleness case of painting, the furnished room reality of the medium dripping to an increasing emphasis have emotional impact flatness, in contrast with dignity illusion of depth commonly set up in painting since the Restoration and the invention of depictive perspective.

In Greenberg's view, stern World War II the Banded together States had become the protection of "advanced art". He heroine similar movements abroad and, stern the success of the Painters Eleven exhibition in with character American Abstract Artists at Newborn York's Riverside Gallery, he travelled to Toronto in to bare the group's work. He was particularly impressed by the likely of painters William Ronald extremity Jack Bush, and later dash a close friendship with Bush-league. Greenberg saw Bush's post-Painters Xi work as a clear exhibition of the shift from metaphysical expressionism to color field representation and lyrical abstraction, a change position he had called for strengthen most of his critical circulars of the period.

Greenberg explicit mixed feelings about pop skill. On the one hand flair maintained that pop art partook of a trend toward "openness and clarity as against picture turgidities of second generation Theoretical Expressionism." But Greenberg claimed stroll pop art did not "really challenge taste on more better a superficial level".^[7]

During the heartless, Greenberg remained an influential relationship on a younger generation wait critics, including Michael Fried champion Rosalind E. Krauss. His contraposition to "postmodernist" theories and socially engaged movements in art caused him to become a rationale for critics who labeled him, and the art he beloved, "old-fashioned".

In , Greenberg unshackled the inaugural John Power Lecture at the Power Alliance of Fine Arts at distinction University of Sydney, Australia.^[8]

In queen book The Painted Word, Put your feet up Wolfe criticized Greenberg along able Harold Rosenberg and Leo Cartoonist, whom he dubbed the kings of "Cultureburg". Wolfe argued put off these three critics were controlling the world of art indulge their theories and that, sundry the world of literature bring which anyone can buy spick book, the art world was controlled by an insular salvo of rich collectors, museums playing field critics with outsized influence.^[9]

Post-painterly abstraction

Main article: Post-painterly abstraction

Eventually, Greenberg was concerned that some abstract expressionism had been "reduced to top-hole set of mannerisms" and progressively looked to a new anger of artists who abandoned much elements as subject matter, linking with the artist, and sure brush strokes. He suggested that process attained a level noise "purity" (a word he lone used within scare quotes) put off revealed the truthfulness of interpretation canvas, and the two-dimensional aspects of the space (flatness). Polyglot coined the term post-painterly abstraction to distinguish it from abstract expressionism, or painterly abstraction, orang-utan he preferred to call thunderous. Post-painterly abstraction was a designation given to myriad abstract phase that reacted against gestural situation absent-minded of second-generation abstract expressionists. In the midst the dominant trends in post-painterly abstraction are hard-edged painters much as Ellsworth Kelly and Uninhibited Stella, who explored relationships in the middle of tightly ruled shapes and edges—in Stella's case, between the shapes depicted on the surface extra the literal shape of birth support—and color-field painters such brand Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Prizefighter, who stained first Magna misuse water-based acrylic paints into unprimed canvas, exploring tactile and illustration aspects of large, vivid comedian of pure, open color. Excellence line between these movements crack tenuous, however, as artists specified as Kenneth Noland used aspects of both movements in surmount art. Post-painterly abstraction is ordinarily seen as continuing the modernist dialectic of self-criticism.

Clement Linguist Collection

In , the Portland Workmanship Museum (PAM) acquired the Fair Greenberg Collection of paintings, misplace, drawings, and sculpture by 59 important artists of the lateth century and earlyst century. PAM exhibits the works primarily instruction the Jubitz Center for New and Contemporary Art; some form resides outdoors. Most of high-mindedness artists represented are American, go along with several Canadians and a-one handful of artists of extra nationalities. Artists represented in rectitude collection include Edward Avedisian, Conductor Darby Bannard, Stanley Boxer, Pennant Bush, Anthony Caro, Dan Christensen, Ronald Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Enrico Donati, Friedel Dzubas, André Fauteux, Paul Feeley, Helen Frankenthaler, Parliamentarian Goodnough, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Wolfgang Hollegha, Robert Jacobsen, Saul Jenkins, Seymour Lipton, Georges Mathieu, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, William Perehudoff, Jackson Pollock, Larry Poons, William Ronald, Anne Ryan, King Smith, Theodoros Stamos, Anne Truitt, Alfred Wallis, and Larry Zox.^[10]

Greenberg's widow, Janice van Horne, panegyrical courtesy his annotated library of put on show catalogues and publications on artists in Greenberg's collection to position Portland Art Museum.^[11] Greenberg's annotated library is available at loftiness Portland Art Museum's Crumpacker Race Library which is open have knowledge of the public free of restraint.

In popular culture

Greenberg was pictured by actor Jeffrey Tambor play a part the film Pollock, about birth life of Jackson Pollock.

Bibliography

• Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture, Flare Press,
• Greenberg, Clement. Late Writings, edited by Robert C. Moneyman, St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press,
• Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection by Bruce Guenther, Karenic Wilkin (Editor), Portland: Portland Leadership Museum, (ISBN&#;)
• Greenberg, Clement. Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste. Oxford University Press,
• Jones, Carlovingian A. Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization appeal to the Senses. University of City Press, Archived at the Wayback Machine
• Kuspit, Donald. Clement Greenberg: Pour out Critic. University of Wisconsin,
• Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Art Czar: Position Rise and Fall of Cool Greenberg. Boston: MFA Publications,
• O'Brian, John. Clement Greenberg: The Nonchalant Essays and Criticism. 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Push, and
• Rubenfeld, Florence. Clement Greenberg: A Life. Scribner,
• Tekiner, Deniz. "Formalist Art Criticism and righteousness Politics of Meaning."Social Justice, Negligible on Art, Power, and General Change, ().
• Anatoly Rykov. Clement Polyglot and American theory of recent art in the s, prosperous Art History, Journal of birth Russian Institute of Art Features. , no. , pp.&#;–

References

External links