CLEMENT GREENBERG art & culture

Krystal South
Prof. Anne McClanan
Art History Methods
January 21, 2010

CLEMENT GREENBERG A R T & C U LT U R E

Clement Greenberg’s collection of critical essays, Art and Culture, written between 1939 and

1960 at an important crossroads for Modernism, compiles thirty seven writings spanning the broad

and historic nature of art. Beginning with Impressionism of the late 19th century and moving

towards the burgeoning Abstract Expressionism of the later 1950's, Greenberg makes many astute

observations on the evolution of painting, providing a crucial insight and developing critical

stratagems and tools for examining and evaluating abstraction at the birth of the movement. In his

critical theory of the physicality of abstraction in relation to Formalist properties, Greenberg

identifies unity, flatness and three-dimensional modeling as the new focus points in Modernist

painting, connecting the meaning of art with its making.

In the late 19th century, Impressionism arose and shocked the art spectator with a new kind of

image: that of the illusionist picture. Through the use of points of color and warm and cool value,

Impressionism imposed a new structure, placing color and feeling as the main methods of

composition. This move away from the use of light and dark shading to depict three-dimensional

space was a move away from the longstanding traditions of painting. With this structure, the realism

of forms and the space in which they exist is reduced, and the viewer is forced to recognize the

illusion of the image itself. Monet's use of color in "fields and areas, rather than in shapes," 1 and

the lack of definition between the brushstrokes of Impressionist works further distanced the

movement from the plastic of reality. Greenberg states, "Anything that suggests a recognizable entity

1 Greenberg, Clement. Art & Culture, Beacon Press, Boston, 1961. p. 45

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(and all recognizable entities exist in three dimensions) suggests tactility or the kind of space in

which tactile experience is possible. Modernist painting and sculpture are alienated not so much

from ‘nature’ as from the nonvisual.”2 This disconnect from those corporeal methods of picture-

making familiar to the spectator allowed a new Modernist view: that of the unseen, the emotive,

the impression. Again looking at Monet—an artist whom Greenberg sees as being on the cusp of

abstraction—the forced, almost-aerial viewpoint of the later Water Lilies causes the image to

become all foreground, further flattening the space of the image, bringing an ungrounded

realization of two-dimensionality to the picture plane. While this new Modernist painting was

revolutionary, it remained connected to old ways of art making by continuing to be

representational, its subject matter founded in the verisimilar.

In writing about the Cubists, specifically Braque and Picasso, Greenberg sees an extension of

the developments Impressionism made in flattening and unifying the image. The Cubist

brushstrokes of these artists “all lay parallel to the picture plane,”3 flattening these still natural, still

representational images to the front of the literal surface. In collage works, the use of text and the

overlapping of flat images on the illusionistic space of the picture’s surface further compacts any

otherwise implied dimensionality. The Cubist system of representing objects requires multiple

perspectives of a single figure in space, unifying the image with repetition of facet planes and

rendering the divisions between subjects obscured. The use of media in Cubism points to a new

focus on the tactility of the paint itself, rather than on that which it is meant to represent. Again

movements are made towards abstraction in all formal properties, while the subject clings still to

the safety of the natural world.

2 p. 167
3 p. 71

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Abstract Expressionism owes much to Greenberg for its success; his writings on the subject

provide a close look at the formal properties of an abstract picture, and develop a set of criteria to

evaluate and understand the work. The arrival of abstraction showed us just how flat a picture

could be, and, within it, how complex in its flatness. The removal of the natural subject matter

allowed the formal properties themselves—composition, color, shape, space, light, line and the

materials themselves—to express abstract ideas in an entirely new way. By accepting the painting as

an object rather than a window into another real space, artists such as Rothko, Pollock and

deKooning invoked the optical illusion of a disembodied abstract space, a private, new and unreal

world of the artist’s intent. Pollock, a favorite of Greenberg, united his pictures in the application of

his media, dripping paint in a consistent style over the entirety of the picture plane. Greenberg

says, “It is the kind of picture that dispenses with beginning, middle, end.”4 This refers not only to the

loss of narrative when the image is deprived of a recognizable subject, but also to the treatment of

the canvas as a whole, as it traps the image in a pure two-dimensionality where all points seem

similar. Abstract Expressionism is corporeal in full: tangible, tactile objects representative only of

themselves and the abstract thought behind them. This elevation of formal properties to the

historically important place of subject matter seems to have fulfilled Greenberg’s requirements for

a successful work of art.

Modernist artists made great leaps to arrive at abstraction and Abstract Expressionism by

building on the material, tactile and spatial experiments of artists before them. This is seen clearly

through the eyes of Clement Greenberg, who delineated the Formalist system to focus the

evaluation of quality in abstract art, after observing the trailing off of representation and the

exploration of corporeal experience by the artists of his time. Through this system that he held in

4 p.155

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such esteem, he helped the viewer "to do without the nouns and transitive verbs, as it were, of the

language of painting."5 

5 p. 137