Clement Greenberg
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Clement Greenberg (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994) was an influential American art critic who was closely associated with the institutionalization of abstract art in the United States. In particular he promoted the Abstract Expressionist movement and one of its leaders, Jackson Pollock, as well as later movements such as Post-Painterly Abstraction, as well as Canadian art, especially that of western Canada.
Kitsch
Greenberg was a graduate of Syracuse University who first made his name as an art critic with his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, published in 1939. In this article Greenberg claimed that avant-garde and Modernist art was a means to resist the 'dumbing down' of culture caused by consumerism. Greenberg appropriated the German word 'kitsch' to describe this consumerism, though its connotations have since changed. Modern art, like philosophy, explored the conditions under which we experience and understand the world. It does not simply provide information about it — in the manner of an illustratively accurate depiction of the world. "Avant Garde and Kitsch" was also a politically motivated essay in part a response to the destruction and repression of Modernist Art in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and its replacement with state ordained styles of "Aryan" art and 'Socialist Realism'.
Rejection of Pop Art
Greenberg believed Modernism provided a critical commentary on experience. It was constantly changing to adapt to kitsch culture, which was itself always developing. In the years after World War II, Greenberg came to believe that the best avant-garde artists were emerging in America rather than Europe. Particularly, he championed Jackson Pollock as the greatest painter of his generation, commemorating the artist's "all-over" gestural canvases for their emotional intensity. In the 1955 essay "American Type Painting" Greenberg promoted the work of Abstract Expressionists, among them Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, as the next stage in Modernist art, arguing that Modernist art was moving towards greater emphasis on the 'flatness' of the picture plane. Stressing this flatness separated Modernist art from the Old Masters, who considered flatness an obtrusive hurdle in painting, and introduced a method of self-criticism that transported abstract painting from decorative 'wallpaper patterns' to high art. Greenberg's view that after the war the United States had become the guardian of 'advanced art' was taken up in some quarters as a reason for using Abstract Expressionism as the basis for Cultural Propaganda exercises.
These views led Greenberg to reject Pop Art in the 1960s, which was influenced by kitsch culture. Through the 1960s and 1970s, Greenberg remained an influential figure on a younger generation of critics including Michael Fried and Rosalind E. Krauss. Greenberg's antagonism to 'Postmodernist' theories and socially engaged movements in art caused a backlash amongst both artists and art historians which came to be known as "Clembashing."
Post-painterly abstraction
Eventually, Greenberg was concerned that some Abstract Expressionism had been "reduced to a set of mannerisms" and increasingly looked to a new set of artists who abandoned such elements as subject matter, connection with the artist, and definite brush strokes. Greenberg suggested this process attained a level of 'purity' (a word he only used in quotes) that would reveal the truthfulness of the canvas, and the two-dimensional aspects of the space (flatness). Greenberg coined the term "Post-Painterly Abstraction" to distinguish it from Abstract Expressionism, or Painterly Abstraction, as Greenberg preferred to call it. Post-Painterly Abstraction reacted against gestural abstraction and branched into two sects, the Hard-Edged Painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella who explored relationships within shapes and edges, and Color-Field Painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, who poured diluted paint onto the unprimed canvas to explore aspects of pure, fluid color.
External link
[Clement Greenberg]
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