Synopses & Reviews
Drawing on exclusive interviews with Clement Greenberg before his death, this is the first comprehensive biography of America's greatest, and most controversial, critic.
Clement Greenberg was born in the Bronx in 1909, the child of Jewish immigrants from Polish Lithuania. He attended Syracuse University, spent three years sleeping late, reading, and frequenting museums, and then toured the country as a traveling salesman for a necktie business owned by his father. By 1935 he was back in New York working at a routine civil service job. One could hardly have predicted that from these inauspicious beginnings would emerge one of the century's premier cultural critics.
In 1939 he wrote "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," the landmark essay that catapulted him from anonymity to the center of a stellar group of intellectuals known as the Partisan Review crowd -- Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Meyer Schapiro, and Lionel Trilling, among others. The subject of Greenberg's essay was modem society examined through popular culture and painterly abstraction. It was his uncanny response to the form abstraction was going to take in advanced American painting that placed him -- with no formal training in art history -- at the apex of the art world for the next fifty years.
Greenberg's independent opinions and combative style soon made him enemies. William Phillips, a founding editor of Partisan Review and a close friend, explained: "Clem would declare his dislike and lack of respect for other people's ideas, behavior, character. I'm not saying he was wrong, he was usually right. But . . . it creates friction." Greenberg criticized the taste of the Museum of Modem Art, while he sang the praises of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and David Smith when few in the art world took them seriously. By the end of the forties, when his ideas began appearing in Life, Time, and Newsweek, the establishment was compelled to react.
Greenberg had become a kingmaker. The artists he praised dominated the leading art magazines and monopolized the exhibition schedules of the great museums of the world. But Greenberg flew too close to the sun and paid the price. Although he routinely denied having any power at all, he was accused of telling artists how to paint and of being a dictator who laid down laws and destroyed the careers of those who did not follow them. The artists he excluded, and the critics who supported them, were so embittered that when the backlash came it lasted for two decades. By the late seventies, "Clembashing" had become the art world's favorite indoor sport. Ironically, though, the uneven and obsessive nature of the battle -- the majority of the art world against one lone voice -- ensured his position at the center of the art conversation. To this day no one has appeared with the charisma or authority to replace him.
Florence Rubenfeld traces the rise and fall of this impassioned and provocative critic, telling his story, in part, through his words and the words of the dazzling array of personalities who surrounded him. She provides a new assessment of his profound contribution to art criticism, insights into his influences and identity, and an engaging social history of an infamous postwar milieu, peopled by brilliant intellectuals and groundbreaking artists. Clement Greenberg: A Life is an authoritative account of a remarkable man and the vibrant New York art world he helped to define.
Review
"As the author observes, there are two biographies of the subject to be written: an intellectual biography and one that deals more with the psychology of the subject. She has written the latter. As such it is a straightforward, unsubtle but absorbing account of the greatest American art critic of our century. Part of the fascination of Greenberg's life has to do with his participation in the exciting milieu of New York intellectuals of the 1940's. Although Greenberg could be brutally combative and arrogant, indeed cruel and manipulative, there is something poignant, in the end, about his story." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
The first comprehensive biography of America's most influential and controversial art critic, a man who defined abstract expressionism and brought it to the world stage.
Clement Greenberg embodied many of the themes and tensions of American intellectual life. In a fascinating narrative that draws on untapped archives and scores of interviews, Florence Rubenfeld traces Greenberg's sharp ascent into the highest realms of New York's intellectual and art worlds. In his late twenties, Greenberg started to write for the Partisan Review despite having no formal training in art history, and he rocketed to fame when his seminal essay on aesthetics, "Avant-garde and Kitsch", was published in 1939. A career as an art critic had begun.
Greenberg championed a new clique of abstract expressionists and almost single-handedly made the careers of Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and Mark Rothko, as well as Helen Frankenthaler, with whom he had a torrid love affair. He prophesied that New York and not Paris would be the new capital of art in the 20th century.
Without Clement Greenberg, American art -- and how we think of American art -- would be quite different. Moving from Greenberg's humble origins in the Bronx to his role at the pinnacle of the New York art world, this book masterfully traces his charge through American culture and history.
About the Author
Florence Rubenfeld contributes to various art journals and was the East Coast editor for the New Art Examiner for several years. She has lectured on art at the Smithsonian and lives in Washington, D.C.
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Icarus in the Art World
Chapter 2: An Inauspicious Beginning
Chapter 3: Metamorphosis
Chapter 4: The New York Intellectuals
Chapter 5: Highbrow and Jewishness: Twin Poles of Identity
Chapter 6: Breaking the Ice
Chapter 7: More on the Jewish Question
Chapter 8: Influences on Greenberg's Criticism
Chapter 9: He Wouldn't Join a Club That Would Have Him for a Member
Chapter 10: Making Enemies and Keeping Them
Chapter 11: Sowing His Seed
Chapter 12: Breakup, Breakdown, and Literary Backlash: 1955-57
Chapter 13: The Chance of a Lifetime: 1958-60
Chapter 14: Daggers Drawn: The Battle of the Titans
Chapter 15: The Second Coming: 1961-65
Chapter 16: Imperial Clem
Chapter 17: Clemsville: A Secular Halakah
Chapter 18: The Question of Immortality
Notes
Index