Key Writers On Art The Twentieth Century - (Clement Greenberg (1909-94) )

CLEMENT GREENBERG
Secondary literature
Elgin, C., With Reference to Reference, Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 1983.
—— (ed.), Nelson Goodman’s Philosophy of Art, New York: Garland Publishing,
1997.
Jones, R., Reed, E. and Hagen, M., ‘A Three-Point Perspective on Pictorial
Representation: Wartofsky, Goodman, and Gibson on Seeing Pictures’,
Erkenntnis 15 (1980), 55–64.
Levinson, J., ‘Autographic and Allographic Art Revisited’, Philosophical Studies 38
(1980), 367–83 (reprinted in Music, Art, and Metaphysics, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1990).
Nozick, R., ‘Goodman, Nelson, on Merit, Aesthetic’, The Journal of Philosophy
LXIX, 21 (1972), 783–5.
Raffman, D., ‘Naturalizing Nelson Goodman’, in Language, Mind, and Music,
Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT, 1993.
Robinson, J., ‘Music as a Representational Art’, in P. Alperson (ed.) What Is Music:
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Music, University Park, PA: Penn State
University Press, 1994.
Rudner, R. and Scheffler, I. (eds), Logic and Art: Essays in Honor of Nelson
Goodman, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1972.
Sparshott, F., ‘Goodman on Expression’, The Monist 48 (1974), 187–202.
Wreen, M., ‘Goodman on Forgery’, Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1983), 340–53.
CHARLES NUSSBAUM
CLEMENT GREENBERG (1909–94)

AMERICAN CRITIC AND THEORIST
Copyright © 2002. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
Clement Greenberg was the most influential theorizer and promoter

of Modernism in America during the middle years of the twentieth
century. His advocacy helped to bring about the institutionalization of
Abstract Expressionism and to secure the dominance of American
Modernist art in the immediate post-war period. However, Green-
berg’s subsequent rejection of Pop Art and Conceptualism led to a
period in which his writings and his preferences were regularly
condemned. These attacks arose from what was perceived as his
dogmatic advocacy of abstraction, and his distaste for commercial
popular culture – what he called ‘kitsch’ in one of his most famous
essays, ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’ (1939).
‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’ made Greenberg’s name as a critic.
Following his graduation from the University of Syracuse in 1930 he
worked at a variety of temporary jobs, finally being employed by the
New York Customs office. Throughout this period he read widely, and
was much more interested in Modernist literature than in art. ‘Avant
Key Writers on Art: the Twentieth Century, edited by Chris Murray, Taylor
149 & Francis Group, 2002. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ifmg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=240427.
Created from ifmg-ebooks on 2020-05-26 13:58:09.
CLEMENT GREENBERG
Garde and Kitsch’ was an important departure, both because it signalled

the future direction of his thought, and because it led to his direct
participation in the world of cultural journalism as an editor of the
Trotskyite journal Partisan Review, in which the essay was published.
The essay formulated his early thinking about the social character of
Modernism. Partisan Review was at this time debating whether
Modernism might ever achieve popular acceptance. Greenberg was
sceptical about this, arguing that kitsch is an almost inescapable
characteristic of mass culture in modern conditions. Under this
concept Greenberg included Hollywood cinema, popular songs,
sentimental poetry, magazines, advertisements and illustration. The
academic art of the nineteenth century also counted as kitsch.
His central argument against kitsch was not new. It derived from
ideas dating back to Whistler’s Ten O’Clock Lecture (1885), in which
Whistler argued that the authentic artist must stand apart from the
commercial purveyors of ‘the tawdry, the common, the gewgaw’.
However, Greenberg provided both an historical explanation and a
justification of this view within a broadly Trotskyite account of class
struggle. For Greenberg, Capitalism, Stalinism and Fascism all tended
to fall back on kitsch. This is because kitsch is defined by efficiency of
communication, while ‘avant-garde’ culture examines the conditions of
making and of meaning. For Greenberg, kitsch worked to maximize
effect, while the avant-garde sought to address cause. Both commerce
and totalitarian regimes sought maximum penetration of controllable
information. They required a culture of kitsch. Mass culture will
almost inevitably be kitsch, as passive consumers will comprehend

accessible effects more readily than the self-conscious explorations of
cause. Only in a truly socialist society will mass culture transcend the
psychology of passive consumption. Despite important differences
between the two men, Greenberg’s attitude to popular culture is close
to that of Theodor W. Adorno.
Greenberg expanded on these arguments the following year in
‘Towards a Newer Laocoön’ (1940). Here he concentrated on the
avant-garde itself rather than on kitsch, formulating the conditions for
the authentic culture that kitsch – in his view – undermined. Here
Greenberg articulated his famous claim that resistance to kitsch
requires that art ‘emphasize the medium and its difficulties’, adding
that the history of the avant-garde is one of ‘progressive surrender to
the resistance of the medium’. The arts have been forced into this
entrenchment within the medium in order to restore their identity
from a position of internal strength. Greenberg does not claim that this
purification of art is an end in itself, but that it is a reactive process
CLEMENT GREENBERG
forced on art by kitsch. However, the language of ‘progressive’

assertion of the medium implies a developmental line with an
inevitable conclusion – a problem with which Greenberg was forced
to wrestle in his later critical work.
Greenberg’s post-war writings abandoned Marxist rhetoric while
retaining the essential arguments put forward in these two early essays.
In fact, most of Greenberg’s work was occasional – reviews, letters and
short polemical essays, often written in response to critics with whom
he disagreed. Greenberg’s was a combative personality, and this
tendency became more prominent in his later work, especially when
he felt the ideas for which he had fought were losing ground. He
never wrote a book, though many of his more substantial writings
were published in book form as Art and Culture in 1961. It became a
powerfully influential defence of Modernism, and also a substantial
text against which critics and challengers could argue.
Because of the journalistic character of so much of Greenberg’s
writing, it is difficult to characterize the development of his thought
fully. He always claimed that his explanation of Modernism was
historical, but that his defence of specific works arose from judgements
of taste. For this reason he reacted strongly to opinions that art ‘should’
serve this or that purpose, or adapt itself to suit a theory. For
Greenberg, the absolute duty of art is to maintain its own quality. His
aggressive dismissal of Harold Rosenberg’s account of Abstract
Expressionism as ‘action painting’ was based on his view that
Rosenberg’s claim implied that the active process of painting mattered
more than the result. Rosenberg thus pandered to the philistine view
that one chaotic combination of drips and splodges was as good as
another. For Greenberg, Jackson Pollock was a serious artist whose
work recognized the full implications of the formal experiments of
Modernists from Cézanne to Picasso. Rosenberg’s theory gave the
green light to charlatans whose work was no more than ‘stunts’. Such
stunts came into prominence during the 1960s, as some artists
accepted Rosenberg’s claim that the moment of ‘performance’ could
itself be art. This aspect of the art scene in the 1960s earned
Greenberg’s withering contempt. His objections were serious, but
could all too easily be interpreted as the conservatism of a critic whose
time had passed – the modern equivalent of Ruskin’s attack on
Whistler.
He had long expressed his strong reservations about Surrealism,
which he had discussed in detail in the article ‘Surrealist Painting’,
published in The Nation in 1944. Pop Art and Conceptualism seemed
to him to be extrapolations from some of the worst aspects of the
CLEMENT GREENBERG
earlier movement. For Greenberg, Surrealism followed the same

methods as had Pre-Raphaelitism before it. Both movements
‘revitalized academicism’. Surrealism and Pre-Raphaelitism were both
literary, relying for effect on the connotations of the objects they
juxtaposed, while painting in an academically conventional manner.
Surrealism shocked because it sought to provoke. Authentic
Modernists alienated some viewers simply because this was an
inescapable by-product of their formal experiments and of their
rejection of kitsch. Furthermore, Surrealism was based on a
fundamental act of self-deception – the fantasy of automatism. Artists
who claim access to the unconscious merely deceive themselves about
their own acts of control. Again, in contrast, the seemingly wild manner
of a Pollock was actually based on a profound practical understanding
of the painting process, and of the extent of an artist’s control over it.
This self-publicizing, stunt loving, aspect of both Dada and
Surrealism provided the model for the ‘novelty art’, as Greenberg
called it, that flourished in the 1960s; it was epitomized by Warhol,
Lichtenstein, and the wider Pop Art movement. The direct references
to Pre-Raphaelitism in British Pop Art merely confirmed Greenberg’s
view. Greenberg professed to enjoy such works, but insisted that
Warhol was the Gérôme of his day, amusing but essentially trite. In
asserting this, Greenberg remained true to his early opinion of the
Hollywood movies and popular culture on which Warhol drew. Such
things were to be enjoyed, but not to be mistaken for art.
These opinions followed from the mature restatement of Green-
berg’s views in his essay ‘Modernist Painting’, first published in 1960.

In this article Greenberg most clearly articulated the change in the
philosophical basis for his thinking – a move from Marx to Kant.
Greenberg now asserted that Modernism was characterized by the act
of self-criticism. This ‘immanent’ criticism of a discipline had first
been fully undertaken by Kant himself, who provided critiques of the
act and conditions for distinct forms of reasoning. For Greenberg, the
essence of Modernism is ‘the use of the characteristic methods of a
discipline to criticise the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but
in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence’. The
rejection of the rhetoric of ‘subversion’ here is consistent with his
distaste for the montage methods of Dada, and in particular the
political Modernism of Berlin Dada and its successors.
Just as Kant used philosophy to examine the conditions for the very
possibility of philosophy itself, so Modernism (for Greenberg) sought to
identify what was distinctive to separate media. Greenberg was now less
keen to emphasize that art must reject ‘literary’ values, and argued that
CLEMENT GREENBERG
Modern painting sought to resist the characteristics of sculpture. This it

did by asserting the ‘ineluctable flatness’ of the pictorial surface and of the
enclosing frame. Greenberg came thereafter to be inextricably linked
with this claim about the essential importance of ‘flatness’.
Perhaps because of the importance he grants to Kant, Greenberg
now wished to push the origins of Modernism back to Kant’s
contemporary Jacques-Louis David, though he acknowledges that
David sought to assert sculptural modelling in reaction to the
decorative characteristics of Rococo. However, for Greenberg, the
Davidian legacy produced the ‘flattest, least sculptural’ paintings since
the fourteenth century, in the work of Ingres. The same was true of
Cubism, which mimicked the conventions of perspective and
volumetric modelling nominally in the service of a fuller three-
dimensionality. But the desire to include multiple positions in space
merely drew attention to the flatness of the pictorial plane, which
rendered such aspirations impossible. Only art that encourages the
suspension of disbelief – academicism – can deny the flatness of the
picture plane.
Greenberg was aware that this struggle with flatness is a dialectic:
one that maintains itself precisely because no final synthesis can be
achieved. The very process of painting is a violation of flatness; even
the work of an artist such as Mondrian constructs ‘optical illusions’ of
space. But the central point is that these illusions are defined by the
character of the medium – its effect on the eye.
After ‘Modernist Painting’, Greenberg’s writing takes on an
increasingly defensive character, despite the continuing weight of his

influence. He particularly resented the charge of ‘formalism’ that
opponents were wont to level at him because of his emphasis on the
self-validating nature of artistic activity. Greenberg’s ‘Complaints of an
Art Critic’, published in 1967, attempted to rebut the charge of
formalism. He insisted once more that aesthetic judgements occur in
the experience of art, and therefore ‘leave no room for the conscious
application of standards, criteria, rules or precepts’. However, the act
of judgement is identical with the discovery of ‘content’, but that
content cannot be translated into any readily legible message, as this
would denude the artwork of its own identity, turning it once more
into literature – the mere exemplification of a precept.
This essay indicates both the internal logic and the problematic
character of Greenberg’s own position as a critic and theorist. His
insistence that art is itself a practical critique of pre-given ideas or
assumptions leaves him with relatively little to say about the art of
which he most approves. He insisted that judgements of taste and of
CLEMENT GREENBERG
quality cannot be theorized, only discovered in the act of contempla-

tion and criticism. However, he was also aware that taste is itself
dynamic and unstable. His writings are full of the sense that taste
depends on what is historically possible given the pressures operating
within a culture. (Interviewed in 1982 by T.J. Clark for the Open
University, Greenberg stated that he never expressed a preference for
abstract art – he would have preferred Fantin-Latour’s flowers – merely
that he found that abstraction was the best art of his day. See also
Thierry de Duve (1996) for similar remarks made at the University of
Ottawa in 1987.) His reviews are by no means confined to discussion
of Modernist art; they range widely over history. Nevertheless, his
concern was always with what he called ‘plastic values’, and never with
what he considered to be trivial social or iconographical readings of
art.
After 1970 Greenberg wrote little, but continued to display a keen
interest in the art world. The revival of interest in Walter Benjamin’s
account of the avant-garde – which differed markedly from
Greenberg’s – led to a period of debate between ‘Greenbergian’
and ‘Benjaminian’ versions of Modernism, the latter reviving a boost
from the cultural developments which flowed from the movements
rejected by Greenberg: Surrealism and Pop. The ‘postmodern’ art
scene seemed to have left Greenberg’s avant-garde behind. It revelled
in the very concept that Greenberg had, ironically, popularized:
kitsch.
It was always difficult to reconcile the trajectory implied by the
move towards ‘flatness’ with the claim that the avant-garde sought a
space to keep culture ‘moving’, as Greenberg put it. But Greenberg at
least remained consistent throughout his intellectual career, articulat-
ing one of the most thoroughly thought-through accounts of the
nature and logic of Modernism.
Biography
Clement Greenberg Born New York, 16 January 1909. Greenberg

studied at Syracuse University, and joined the New York Customs
Service in 1936. In 1939 he published ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’ in the
journal Partisan Review, of which he became an editor in 1940. In 1944
he went on to become editor of the Contemporary Jewish Record. He
was also associate editor of Commentary. Throughout the 1940s and
1950s he published essays and reviews in such journals as Partisan
Review, Commentary and The Nation (and was The Nation’s art critic
between 1944 and 1949). In 1961 he published Art and Culture, a

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CLEMENT GREENBERG

CLEMENT GREENBERG (1909–94)

Clement Greenberg was the most influential theorizer and promoter

Garde and Kitsch’ was an important departure, both because it signalled

almost inevitably be kitsch, as passive consumers will comprehend

forced on art by kitsch. However, the language of ‘progressive’

earlier movement. For Greenberg, Surrealism followed the same

berg’s views in his essay ‘Modernist Painting’, first published in 1960.

Modern painting sought to resist the characteristics of sculpture. This it

increasingly defensive character, despite the continuing weight of his

quality cannot be theorized, only discovered in the act of contempla-

Clement Greenberg Born New York, 16 January 1909. Greenberg

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