Moonie S.

Historians of the Future: Harold Rosenberg's Critique of Artforum.

Visual Resources 2015, 31(1-2), 103-115.

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 1

Historians of the Future: Harold Rosenberg’s

critique of Artforum

Stephen Moonie

This paper discusses Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) and his critique of Artforum. It focuses
particularly on the journal’s landmark issue on the New York School in September 1965.
Rosenberg criticized Artforum for blurring the boundaries between art history and art
criticism: an entwinement which is now widely accepted by many commentators, not least
because some of Artforum’s major critics went on to pursue academic careers, shaping the
discipline of contemporary art history. However, this acceptance has resulted in some
confusion with regard to the current role of art criticism. In this regard, Rosenberg’s
opposition to Artforum merits consideration. Although Rosenberg was not disinterested, this
paper claims that his remarks open up the historical roots of our current confusion. What was
at stake in the debates amongst Artforum’s major figures was nothing less than the “history of
the future.”

Keywords: modernism; art criticism; Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978); Clement

Greenberg (1909-1994); Michael Fried (b.1939); Frank Stella (b.1936).

In 1965, Harold Rosenberg remarked that “art criticism today is art history, although

not necessarily the art history of art historians.”1 Rosenberg’s characteristically wry

remark was directed at the newly founded journal Artforum, highlighting the

intertwining of art history and art criticism, which lay at the heart of the early years of

this publication. This essay will assess Rosenberg’s critique in relation to the early

development of Artforum, and particularly in relation to its September 1965 issue in

which modern American painting was debated. Rosenberg’s remarks were primarily

directed towards the means by which Artforum laid claim to a quasi-art-historical

“objectivity.” This use of art-historical method served didactic aims: the related

developments of modernism’s institutionalization and the artworld’s expansion

required an increasingly academic criticism in order to establish artistic and academic

reputations. As he wrote for broader-interest publications such as Vogue and the New

Yorker, as well as for the rival periodical Art News, Rosenberg’s voice is often
 2

marginal to critical debates from this period, and this was exacerbated by Artforum’s

explicit rejection of his brand of existentialist Modernism. Nonetheless, Rosenberg’s

position on the margins equipped him to assess Artforum’s emergence with a critical

eye.

Others noted the art-historical inclination of Artforum. For instance, Max

Kozloff, a lone admirer of Rosenberg amongst the editors of Artforum, remarked that

the new magazine’s criticism was “Florentine” rather than “Venetian” as it adopted a

dry, scholarly style in contrast to the belle-lettrisme of Art News in the 1950s.2 A fault

line, then, was drawn up at an early stage between the established Art News (founded

in 1902) and the newcomer Artforum (founded in 1962). Art News, a periodical

associated with Thomas Hess as well as Rosenberg, was engaged with the

metaphysical concerns of Abstract Expressionism whereas the younger generation at

Artforum drew greater sustenance from the formalist criticism of Clement Greenberg.

Rosenberg’s critique then, is not without ressentiment: he was well aware of the threat

posed by this new publication. This is highlighted by the following anecdote by

Artforum’s first editor, Philip Leider, who recounted his first meeting with Frank

Stella during a panel at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1960s:

Frank felt he was sticking it to Rosenberg when he said, “And it’s a pleasure

to be here in San Francisco, especially because of this wonderful art magazine

that you’re putting out.” And Rosenberg winced because he hated Artforum.

Already. Absolutely. It was in competition with Art News, even on that little

level.3

While this dispute was undoubtedly grounded in professional rivalry, it nonetheless

hinged upon a different conception of critical method and its relation to art history. At

the centre of the dispute was Clement Greenberg’s narrative of modernism.

 3

Although Greenberg’s influence on Artforum is sometimes overstated, there is no

doubt that in its early years, under the editorial guidance of Leider, the magazine was

marked by Greenberg’s influence. Leider would later distance himself from the elder

critic after the threat of litigation in 1970: Greenberg was enraged by a remark made

in Artforum by Ad Reinhardt who described him as a “dealer.”4 However, the

magazine’s shift of priorities in the late 1960s took place for more substantial reasons

as Leider came to appreciate the importance of figures such as Robert Smithson and

Robert Morris, who challenged the assumptions of modernism both in theory and in

practice.5

One should not consider Greenberg’s influence on Artforum solely in terms of

the application of formalist method, as if it were merely a case of following the elder

critic’s prescriptions, for instance, heralding Jules Olitski rather than Robert

Smithson. The matter was much more deeply entrenched, and was consequent upon

the conception of historical development, which underlay the modernist narrative.

Greenberg’s early and most influential writings, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939)

and “Towards a Newer Laocoön” (1940) were retrospective accounts of European

modernism, which proposed a compelling narrative of the historical emergence of

abstraction. In the postwar period, however, the avant-garde had migrated to the US

and Greenberg’s retrospective account became a present imperative, codified in his

summa “Modernist Painting” (1960). Here, a history of modernism was not simply

elucidated, but an implicit trajectory was prescribed. In the aftermath of the

breakdown of Abstract Expressionism and Color-Field Painting, new art was

 4

burdened with the need to provide the “next step” in Greenberg’s implicitly

teleological trajectory.6

In a paper delivered in 1965, entitled “The new role of the universities,”

Rosenberg remarked upon the changed relationship to tradition between academic and

modern artists: whereas traditional artists such as John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)

and Charles Hawthorne (1872–1930) drew their strength from tradition, modern

artists were oriented towards the future. Rosenberg noted that:

In tradition […] history is behind you. In the modern world, history is in front

of you […] In other words, we are talking about modern history, which is the

history of the future, not of the past.7

This ideological struggle of modern history was of long-standing interest to

Rosenberg, who also discussed it at length in earlier essays such as “The Resurrected

Romans” (1948).8 The legacy of the French Revolution debated in that essay may be

of greater historical importance than the artworld struggles of 1960s New York but

nonetheless, the same imperatives obtained. In “The Premises of Criticism” (1965),

Rosenberg remarked:

Art criticism today is beset with art historians turned inside out to function as

prophets of so-called inevitable trends. A determinism similar to that projected

into the evolution of past styles is clamped upon art in the making. In this

parody of art history, value judgments are deduced from a presumed logic of

development[.]9

The teleological conception of art history, which under girded Greenberg’s narrative,

entailed a peculiar paradox: it involved mapping the retrospective gaze of the

historian onto the uncertainties of the present. Further, the approach led to the forming

of judgments a priori, according to the logic of the historical schema.

 5

II

One of the noticeable features of Rosenberg’s critique is that it was made in 1965,

prior to Artforum’s move from Los Angeles to New York. Rosenberg remarked then

that an academic degree in the subject “has become the accepted means of accrediting

people for careers in art, including that of art critic.”10 This comment was aimed at the

cohort of graduate students who would soon dominate Artforum’s editorial board,

shaping the direction of the magazine. These included Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss

and Barbara Rose. Most importantly, they would follow the trajectory implicit in

Greenberg’s modernism, buttressing their criticism with authoritative judgments

derived from modernism’s historical imperative. Over time, their “Florentine”

criticism won out over the approaches and methods of other, less celebrated, critics.

This victory was by no means accidental, and one can already trace its contours in

that September 1965 issue (fig.1).

This issue focused on the New York School and coincided with Maurice

Tuchman’s exhibition of Abstract Expressionism held at the new Los Angeles County

Museum of Art. The September 1965 issue functioned not only as a retrospective on

Abstract Expressionism—which by then was already receding into the past—but it

also allowed the journal to establish its own identity as a forum aligned with a

younger generation of New York artists. In his introductory essay, the editor Philip

Leider made a telling quotation from Michael Fried, whose essay “Jackson Pollock”

was published in the same issue. This piece was an excerpt from Fried’s essay for the

Fogg Art Museum’s exhibition catalogue Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland,

Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (fig.2).11 Leider cited the following passage, in which Fried
 6

lamented “[t]he almost complete failure of contemporary art criticism to come to

grips with Pollock’s achievement.” In Three American Painters Fried had added

This failure has been due to several factors. First and least important, the

tendency of art writers such as Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess to regard

Pollock as a kind of natural existentialist has served to obscure the simple

truth that Pollock was, on the contrary, a painter whose work is always

inhabited by a subtle, questioning formal intelligence of the highest order, and

whose concern in his art was not with any fashionable metaphysics of despair

but with making the best pictures of which he was capable.12

Leider wondered aloud why Fried, this “young critic,” was keen to prioritize “formal

intelligence” over “metaphysical despair” and suggested an answer to his own

question on the following page, where he posited Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’

Painting” (1956) as the (preferred) counterpart to Rosenberg’s “The American Action

Painters” (1952). 13 What was at stake in the prioritization of “formal intelligence”

over “metaphysical despair” was on the one hand, a re-reading of Pollock’s influence,

which would serve to situate a new generation of painters engaged with more

explicitly pictorial problems. It also served to legitimate Greenberg’s formalist

method as best attuned to articulating those new artists’ achievements. But the new

critics adopted an academic tone which was not as clearly visible in Greenberg’s

writing. Fried’s “Three American Painters” is notable firstly for its length: in its

republished form, it runs to forty-seven pages of densely packed analysis: far beyond

the length of even Greenberg’s longest essays. Almost half of the essay consists of a

substantial historical-theoretical prelude, which includes the discussion of Pollock

republished in Artforum. This prelude is required in order to set up the discussion of

Stella, Noland and Olitski who are heralded for having successfully developed their
 7

work in response to Pollock’s innovations. As Rosenberg remarks, the “evolution of

past styles has been clamped upon art in the making.” Fried’s essay is also notable for

its systematic nature. Unlike Greenberg’s ideas, which evolved through spot reviews

and ad hoc theorizing, Fried’s is a fully worked-out narrative of the concerns of

contemporary painting. It is rarely noted that Fried’s criticism throughout the 1960s

exhibits a remarkably consistent narrative, which can be tracked through his essays up

to and including his cri de cœur, “Art and Objecthood” (1967).14 This is because his

seamless narrative owes more to the retrospective gaze of the historian, rather than to

the uncertain gaze of the critic attempting to make sense of the new.

Barbara Rose’s essay in the same issue, entitled “The Second Generation:

Academy and Breakthrough,” built upon the strategic move made by Leider and

Fried. Rose pulled no punches in her assessment of Rosenberg: she described the

“American Action Painters” essay as “histrionic,” adding that “the worst excesses of

self-indulgence and inept art that resulted from the elevation of mindless ‘action’ over

self-consciousness and critical deliberation were encouraged by such an approach.”15

This led, according to Rose, to the “slickly mannered academicism” of Abstract

Expressionism’s younger followers in the late 1950s.16

In conjunction with the concern with “formal intelligence” advocated by

Leider and Fried, Rose posited a second generation of younger painters attuned to

those concerns. These new abstract artists abandoned existential angst and, in Rose’s

words, “developed a restrained, simplified composition depending mainly on large,

clearly articulated color areas for its expansiveness.”17 This formal move built upon

the “open” format of Color-Field Painting originating in Greenberg’s essays such as

“‘American-Type’ Painting,” “The Later Monet” (1957), and “Louis and Noland”

(1960), where Greenberg argued that “the ‘aesthetic’ of post-Cubist painting—by

 8

which I mean painting after Kline, after Dubuffet, and even after Hans Hofmann—

consists mostly in this renewal of the Impressionist emphasis on the exclusively

visual.”18 This emphasis upon the “exclusively visual” would later be described as

“opticality”: the term within which Post-Painterly Abstraction would be subsumed.

Amongst the artists singled out by Rose, Frank Stella is the key figure. Stella’s

work was keenly attuned to modernist criticism. Rosenberg’s opening line to his

review of Stella’s retrospective in 1970 quipped, “With a retrospective at the Museum

of Modern Art at the age of thirty-three, Frank Stella is an artist who wasted no time.”

Rosenberg added that Stella reflected “the aesthetic interests of [the 1960s], or, at any

rate, of those forces that were most effective in advancing reputations in it.”19 For

many, Stella’s work was a key historical step in postwar American art, uniting critics

as diverse as Fried and Donald Judd in their estimation (even if they differed on the

manner with which his work should be interpreted).20 However, for Rosenberg, Stella

formed part of a newly developing artworld where reputations could be made much

more quickly than ever before. The criticism in Artforum was crucial to shaping those

reputations.

Stella’s work would feature several times in Artforum in 1965: Robert

Rosenblum wrote an article in March, while Stella’s work would appear in the June

issue, when he was part of the US pavilion at the São Paulo Biennale.21

Acknowledging the young painter’s flair in 1970, Rosenberg nonetheless discerned

that there was something awry in his work, declaring that it consisted of “the most

professorial paintings in the history of art.”22 Rosenberg did not mean to say that

Stella’s paintings were the first modernist works to depend upon revolutionary,

philosophical or spiritual ideas for their justification. Rather, he contended that they

were almost entirely dependant upon a discourse of formalist art history as embraced
 9

by the ambitious new generation of critics writing at Artforum. In a remark which

mirrored Rose’s comment five years earlier, Rosenberg wrote that Stella “wished to

negate not only the content of Abstract Expressionism but its gesture too[.]” He added

that

Stella’s response to postwar American art has been to reinterpret it in terms of

strictly formal problems—such as depth and flatness, size, shape, texture,

repetition—as if he were anatomizing de Kooning, Pollock, Kline and

Hofmann in a classroom.23

This remark was also an indirect attack on Fried, whose estimation of the same

phenomenon was made in exultant terms. Stella’s work, Fried claimed, was notable

for its “exaltation of deductive structure as sufficient in itself to provide the substance,

and not just the scaffolding or syntax, of major art.”24 “Deductive structure” denoted

the way in the compositional structure of a work such as Gran Cairo (1962, fig.3),

was generated by the shape of the picture support itself: the concentric bands of color

derive their structure by mirroring the edges of the canvas. This “classroom” analysis,

to which Rosenberg referred elsewhere as “chessboard esthetics,” testified to the

imbrication of art history with criticism and painting: Stella’s paintings depend upon

an art-historical development which validates their historical importance, while the

notions of “opticality” and “deductive structure” provided the terms within which

Stella could be critically evaluated. Rosenberg was well aware of the problems, which

this implied. In fact, he wrote:

Today the art historian is dealing with an art that is conscious of itself as

engaged in making art history and that in order to impress the art historian

(especially the art historian turned critic) deliberately takes his prejudices into

account[…] Both the art historian and the art critic must be wary of
 10

responding to a mirror held up to them by the artist for the purpose of arousing

their admiration for the image of their own ideas.25

In “Three American Painters,” Fried also remarked upon this phenomenon: that both

Modernist artist and critic found themselves in a symbiotic relationship.26 Fried

doubtless believed this a flattering position to be in. However, Rosenberg’s metaphor

of the mirror held up to the gaze of the art critic/historian opened up a mise-en-abyme:

Rosenberg and Fried both agreed that Stella’s art is engaged with pictorial problems.

But are they problems of painting, or problems of criticism? To put it more

specifically, do they belong to Stella, or to Fried?27 Rosenberg had a related, but

distinct conception of the critic’s relationship to the artist. He wrote:

The critic must, then, be familiar with the art of the past; above all, the critic

must have reflected upon it. But art-historical knowledge has for the critic a

different function than it has for the art historian. The critic is not primarily

concerned with tracing the evolution of past styles and arranging works within

them. He approaches the work not as the product of a past time set in its niche.

He sees it rather as an act that has taken shape through the painter’s battles

with uncertainties, counterforces, temptations[…] In this, his approach

corresponds to that of a painter who looks at a painting by another artist; he

sees it as a complex of situations met, resources employed, leaps executed

[...]28

This remark brought together Rosenberg’s idea of the artistic “act” with the “act” of

the critic. The entwinement is not predicated upon a “logic” of pictorial development

which both are engaged in “solving,” but is based instead upon the critic’s

imaginative engagement with the artist. This view involves a concession of the critic
 11

towards the artist’s thoughts, choices and intentions, which contrasts with Fried’s

attempt to slot the artist within a “logical” pattern of development.

III

A substantial part of the beauty of “Three American Painters” is the seamlessness of

its narrative. But this seamlessness carries with it an aura of finality: a suggestion that

modernist painting has reached its limits.29 This is reflected not only in the

dissatisfaction with painting which is manifest in the avant-garde of the mid to late

1960s; it was also reflected within the editorial rifts which emerged at Artforum soon

after its move to New York: these rifts were so fractious that they eventually led to

Leider’s resignation in 1971. Modernist critics such as Fried and Rose were at odds

with rebels such as Rosalind Krauss, who, under the influence of Annette Michelson,

had taken an interest in the emergent fields of film and photography, utilizing radical

new theories derived from continental philosophy.30 To compound this, both factions

were at odds with the almost unanimously unpopular figure of Lawrence Alloway,

whose sociological inclinations, allied to his anti-elitist pluralism were equally

unpalatable to his colleagues.31 These splits were not simply intellectual

disagreements: they were exacerbated by the historical sense of mission which

undergirded the magazine. What was at stake in this struggle over the magazine’s

direction was the “history of the future.” This rift was crystallized by the emergence

of October in 1976 by Krauss and Michelson. This decisive move into the academy

completed the embryonic overlapping of art criticism and art history critiqued by

Rosenberg in 1965. The exclusively academic nature of October has contributed to a

split between academic and “jobbing” criticism: this is described as a “Balkanized”

 12

situation in James Elkins and Michael Newman’s anthology The State of Criticism

(2008).32

Modernism’s institutionalization had long since been underway. The “art-

historical” criticism of Artforum was a correlate to this trend. As Carter Ratcliffe has

recently noted, by the late 1960s, Artforum increasingly functioned as the artworld’s

trade magazine.33 The exact relationship between Artforum and this burgeoning new

market requires a more detailed analysis than can be offered here, but it is undeniable

that the magazine functioned to shape cultural trends and artistic reputations: that its

putative “objectivity” was invaluable in this regard, unwittingly or not.

Further, within the broader context of the institutionalization of criticism, the

adoption of art-historical “method” also served didactic uses. Rosenberg’s waspish

remark that the art history student treats artists as though “memorizing a deck of

cards” is a cruel one, referring to a more simplistic formalist art history which has

been long since abandoned.34 However, the purpose of such method is to be

transmissible: a necessity in any field of expertise. The transmission of critical

method can be seen decades later in the extensive influence of October in shaping the

scholarship of contemporary art history, especially the study of post-1960s art: this is

visible in the publications of the MIT Press which draw heavily upon the theories

adopted by the editors of October. This pedagogical influence is crystallized most

succinctly by the publication of Art Since 1900.35

Unlike the “art-historical” critics such as Fried and Krauss, those who were

not amenable to the increasingly professionalized nature of artwriting were left

behind. These figures include Rosenberg, but also younger critics like Kozloff, whose

refined, self-reflexive style was simply too closely attuned to his own sensibility to
 13

allow for critical followers.36 Also left behind were the numerous other contributors to

Artforum whose names are largely forgotten.

Rosenberg’s thinly-veiled critique of Artforum demonstrates that the “victory”

of the generation of critics influenced by Greenberg was not solely due to its own

virtues—which are undeniable—but were part of a strategic move made within a

rapidly changing artworld. There, a great deal more was at stake within a context

where young artists like Stella could rapidly build reputations, and artists were

making the leap from private galleries to museums quicker than ever before.37 The

increasing professionalization of criticism was implicated in these wider shifts in

ways that require further, more detailed, analysis. Within the scope of this essay,

however, it has not been the aim to suggest that Rosenberg’s conception of criticism

can be recuperated for the nebulous state of contemporary criticism. Rather,

Rosenberg compels us to acknowledge the historicity of criticism’s turn to the

academy. When Artforum metaphorically passed on the baton to October in 1976, this

was not an inevitable historical process: instead it was marked by the messiness that

any history entails. It is the task of art historians to unpick and re-evaluate this legacy

as it both recedes into the past while continuing to exert its influence on the present.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Matthew Bowman and Barbara Pezzini for inviting me to

contribute to this volume.

STEPHEN MOONIE is Associate Lecturer in Art History in the Department of Fine

Art, School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University. He completed his PhD in

2009 at the University of Essex on the subject of modernist painting and its criticism.
 14

He contributed to the catalogue The Indiscipline of Painting (Tate, 2011), and has

published essays on the criticism of Lawrence Alloway and Leo Steinberg. He has

currently completed manuscripts on Alloway and Ray Johnson, and on Charles

Harrison’s late critical reflections.

 15

1
Harold Rosenberg, “Criticism and its Premises,” Art on the Edge: Creators and

Situations (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976): 146. Originally delivered at “A

Seminar in Art Education for Research and Curriculum Development,” Pennsylvania

State University, August 30–September 10, 1965.

2
Max Kozloff, “Venetian Art and Florentine Criticism,” Artforum 6, no.4 (December

1967). Republished in Kozloff, Renderings: critical essays on a century of modern art

(London: Studio Vista, 1968): 321-335. This remark is itself indicative of the

imbrication of art history and art criticism: relying upon knowledge of historical

debates between disegno and colore.

3
Philip Leider, cited in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New

York: SoHo Press, 2000): 113.

4
Mary Fuller, “An Ad Reinhardt Monologue,” Artforum 10 (October 1970): 36-41.
5
See in particular the special issue on sculpture, Artforum 5, no.10 (June 1967).
6
In a 1978 postscript to “Modernist Painting,” Greenberg denied this prescription,

arguing instead that he merely provided a descriptive account of modernism, but this

does not square easily with the influence which he undoubtedly exerted. See Clement

Greenberg, “Postscript,” in Richard Kostelanetz ed., Esthetics Contemporary

(Prometheus Books, 1978). Reprinted in John O’Brian ed., Clement Greenberg: The

Collected Essays and Criticism vol.4 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago

Press, 1993): 93-94.

7
Rosenberg, “The New Role of the Universities.” Paper delivered at Southern Illinois

University, Carbondale, Illinois, July 1965. Transcript held within the Harold
 16

Rosenberg Papers 1923-1984, Getty Research Institute, Research Library, Accession

no. 980048, Box 30 folder 11.

8
Rosenberg, “The Resurrected Romans,” in The Tradition of the New (New York: Da

Capo, 1994): 154-177.

9
Rosenberg, “Criticism and its Premises,” 147.
10
Rosenberg, “Criticism and its Premises,” 147.
11
That these relatively young abstract painters were exhibited at a prestigious venue

such as the Fogg is itself indicative of the modernism’s institutionalization.

12
Michael Fried, “Three American Painters,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and

Reviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998): 222-23.

Originally published as the catalog essay for Three American Painters: Kenneth

Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1965).

Exhibition catalog. Subsequent references refer to the republished essay.

13
Philip Leider, “Introduction,” Artforum (Special issue: The New York School), 4

no.1 (September 1965): 5. See also Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in

O’Brian, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol.3, 217-236. Rosenberg, “The

American Action Painters,” The Tradition of the New, 13-39.

14
Fried became London correspondent of Arts Magazine in 1961, and he wrote the

“New York Letter” for Art International between 1963–64. These early essays

culminate with “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood, 148-172. Originally

published in Artforum 5 (June 1967): 12-23.

15
Barbara Rose, “The Second Generation: Academy and Breakthrough,” Artforum 4

no.1 (September 1965): 54.

16
Rose, “The Second Generation,” 55.
17
Rose, “The Second Generation,” 56.
 17

18
Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” Art International (May 1960). Republished in

O’Brian, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 96-97.

19
Rosenberg, “Young Masters, New Critics: Frank Stella,” The De-Definition of Art

(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972): 121.

20
See Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook no.8 (1965): 74-82; Fried,

“Art and Objecthood.”

21
Robert Rosenblum, “Frank Stella,” Artforum 3, vol.6 (March 1965): 20-25;

“Preview of San Paolo Biennale,” Artforum 3 no.9 (June 1965).

22
Rosenberg, “Young Masters, New Critics,” 125.
23
Rosenberg, “Young Masters, New Critics,” 124.
24
Fried, “Three American Painters,” 251.
25
Rosenberg, “Criticism and its Premises,” 148.
26
Fried writes, ‘[C]riticism that shares the basic premises of modernist painting finds

itself compelled to play a role in its development closely akin to, and potentially only

somewhat less important than, that of the new paintings themselves.’ “Three

American Painters,” 219.

27
I take no credit for the originality of this observation. See Jonathan Harris, Writing

Back to Modern Art: After Greenberg, Fried and Clark (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005):

100. The metaphor of the mirror inevitably carries with it the connotation of

narcissism: this takes on a rather prescient irony given Fried’s subsequent habit of

citing himself copiously in his art-historical work. See Fried, Why Photography

Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,

2008).
28
Rosenberg, “Criticism and its Premises,” 146.
 18

29
Fried acknowledges this when he writes, “And the greatest danger facing a

modernist painter.. is not that he may rest content with a partial or imperfect solution

to a formal problem, but that his solution of it may be both so total and so perfect that

he will not know how to go on.” “Three American Painters,” 243.

30
For Rosalind Krauss’ “break” with modernism, see Krauss, “A View of

Modernism,” Artforum 11, no.1 (September 1972). Republished in Perpetual

Inventory (Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 2010): 115-128.

31
For antagonism towards Alloway see Newman, Challenging Art, 341, 344-45, 367-

68. Alloway did, however, find sympathy with Leider’s editorial successor, John

Coplans.
32
“Second Roundtable,” James Elkins and Michael Newman eds., The State of

Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2008).

33
Carter Ratcliffe offers some thoughtful reflections upon Artforum’s vexed

relationship to the market: “By setting up objective criteria, this notion of artwriting

as a kind of journalism and the art magazine as a kind of trade paper could be left

behind. What happened, of course, is that by setting up supposedly objective criteria

when it did, Artforum positioned itself to function as the artworld’s trade paper in a

way that other magazines just couldn’t manage to do in the 1960s and early ‘70s.” See

Newman, Challenging Art, 450.

34
Rosenberg, “Criticism and its Premises,” 145.
35
Yve-Alain Bois et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism,

(London: Thames and Hudson, 2004).

36
For an elucidation of Kozloff’s position, see “Critical Schizophrenia and the

Intentionalist Method” (1965) and “Psychological Dynamics in Art Criticism of he

Sixties” (1966). Both republished in Kozloff, Renderings, 301-312; 312-335.

 19

37
Lawrence Alloway remarks upon this in his essay “Network: the artworld described

as a system,” Artforum 11, no.1 (September 1972): 29. Rosenberg had more critical

things to say about it in “The New as Value,” in The Anxious Object: art today and its

audience (New York: Horizon, 1966): 227-35.