Clement Greenberg was a prominent art critic and theorist who played a significant role in the development and promotion of modernism in the mid-20th century. Born in 1909 in New York City, Greenberg began his career as a writer and editor, working for various publications and eventually becoming a leading voice in the art world.
As an art critic, Greenberg is perhaps best known for his theory of modernism, which he articulated in a series of influential essays written in the 1940s and 1950s. According to Greenberg, modernism was a movement that sought to reject traditional forms and styles in favor of a new, abstract aesthetic that was grounded in the principles of form and purity.
In his view, modernism was a reaction to the excesses of 19th-century Romanticism and the decorative excesses of the Art Nouveau movement, which he believed had lost touch with the fundamental principles of art. In contrast, modernism, he argued, was focused on the essential qualities of art, such as form, color, and composition, and sought to create works that were stripped down and simplified, with a focus on purity and clarity.
Greenberg argued that modernism was the natural evolution of art and that it represented a break with the past, a rejection of traditional forms and styles in favor of a new, abstract aesthetic. He believed that modernism was a necessary and important development in the history of art, and that it represented a departure from the sentimental and decorative styles of the past.
In addition to his theory of modernism, Greenberg is also known for his criticism of kitsch, which he defined as a cheap, mass-produced form of art that appealed to the lowest common denominator. In his view, kitsch was a perversion of true art, and he argued that it represented a threat to the integrity and purity of modernism.
Overall, Clement Greenberg was a key figure in the development and promotion of modernism, and his ideas and theories continue to influence the art world to this day. His focus on form, purity, and simplicity helped to shape the direction of modern art and to establish it as a significant force in the world of contemporary culture.
The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957
Post-Painterly Abstraction was a term given to a myriad of abstract art that reacted against gestural abstraction of second-generation Abstract Expressionists. It was in the name of the purely and literally optical, not in the name of color, that the Impressionists set themselves to undermining shading and modeling and everything else in painting that seemed to connote the sculptural. It was this technique that first brought Greenberg to compare Color Field Painting to the works of Claude Monet, whose style of painting was quite different from Color Field and abstractions, but nonetheless applied color just as liberally on his canvases. His parents were first-generation Jewish Lithuanian immigrants who lived briefly in Norfolk, Virginia, but kept New York City their permanent home. Rick Dean Martin is at work painting the surface of the ad, which depicts the disembodied face of a pretty woman, while Eugene Jerry Lewis sits in a small room behind it, excitedly reading a series of comic books. 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. By now it covers almost the whole of what is truly alive in our culture.
What did art critic Clement Greenberg have to say about Modernism?
Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a young adult, when he began to focus on literature. At the same time, however, Modernist painting shows, precisely by its resistance to the sculptural, how firmly attached it remains to tradition beneath and beyond all appearances to the contrary. He also secured many speaking and lecturing engagements, and became an adviser to several galleries and museums. Seeing With Insight: Review of Norm and Form by E. With Greenberg, flatness alone is unique to painting. Rosenberg also supported various Abstract Expressionist artists who had brought figurative or narrative elements back into their free, expressive paintings such as Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston. He is best known as an early champion of Abstract Expressionism.
Its discussion also includes the way objects are made and their purely visual or material aspects. Statement as Juror of an Exhibition in Oklahoma City 26. Post Painterly Abstraction 38. There have been some further constructions of what I wrote that go over into preposterousness: That I regard flatness and the inclosing of flatness not just as the limiting conditions of pictorial art, but as criteria of aesthetic quality in pictorial art; that the further a work advances the self-definition of an art, the better that work is bound to be. Clement Greenberg, born Jan. Nor does the possibility of its continuing usefulness make it any the less an illusion.
America Takes the Lead, 1945-1965 43. Yet the strength of David's own best pictures, which are predominantly his informal ones, lies as much in their color as in anything else. Introduction to an Exhibition in Tribute to Sidney Janis 12. The quotation marks around pure and purity should have been enough to show that. Leavis, Fairfield Porter, Thomas B.
Analysis of Modernist Painting by Clement Greenberg
Although he never directly criticized de Kooning's return to figuration, his silence on the matter was enough to suggest his disapproval. In particular, Greenberg understood Modern painting moving towards pictorial flatness, since Greenberg saw the flatness of the canvas support as the overriding fact of the medium. The Enlightenment philosophy cherished the idea of the universal or the absolute, for some kind of standard had to be erected to replace the all-knowing presence of the now-banished God. The pastoral has traditionally defined a type of poetry concerned with the activity of shepherds, including leisure, animal husbandry, and lyric competition. Hans Hofmann: Grand Old Rebel 16. In arguing that artists such as de Kooning had transformed the canvas into an "arena in which to act," Rosenberg encouraged a rethinking of the act of painting.
First, Greenberg employs a very sophisticated language that manages to successfully grasp the comprehensive concepts that he addresses. More is eliminatedâsubject matter, content, figuration, illusionism, narrativeâand art becomes independent, detached, and non-objective, that is, abstract. World War II and the atrocities of Nazi Germany had forced many artists, writers, and intellectuals to immigrate to New York, and many gravitated to Greenwich Village. Introduction to an Exhibition of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski 32. In 1957 he was relieved of his duties as an associate editor at Commentary - supposedly due to his erratic temper. The amount of work that the author did to convey his argument is impressed. Manet in Philadelphia 5 I.
Instead he focused his time on revising old essays to accommodate changes in the art world, as well as his own feelings about art. In the visual arts, artists made work using fundamentally new subject matter, working techniques and materials to better encapsulate this change as well as the hopes and dreams of the modern world. Painting must analyze itself to discover its inherent properties. It will investigate and introduce possible paths for the reconstitution of art criticism, suggesting possibilities existing in the overlooked history of art criticism. A Newer Laocoon Just one year later, Clement Greenberg published the second of his instrumentally important essays: 1940. This means that even though the painter tries to focus on the flatness of the painting rather than the content and is physically detached from the canvas, this focus cannot erase an emotional link occurring while he works, undeniably creating meaning and content to the painting, relevant to the painter himself individually. His work in the 1950s took on broader topics like French art and Greenberg's work as a critic slowed after 1960.
