Clement Greenberg was a prominent art critic and theorist who played a significant role in the development and promotion of modernism in the mid-20th century. Born in 1909 in New York City, Greenberg began his career as a writer and editor, working for various publications and eventually becoming a leading voice in the art world.
As an art critic, Greenberg is perhaps best known for his theory of modernism, which he articulated in a series of influential essays written in the 1940s and 1950s. According to Greenberg, modernism was a movement that sought to reject traditional forms and styles in favor of a new, abstract aesthetic that was grounded in the principles of form and purity.
In his view, modernism was a reaction to the excesses of 19th-century Romanticism and the decorative excesses of the Art Nouveau movement, which he believed had lost touch with the fundamental principles of art. In contrast, modernism, he argued, was focused on the essential qualities of art, such as form, color, and composition, and sought to create works that were stripped down and simplified, with a focus on purity and clarity.
Greenberg argued that modernism was the natural evolution of art and that it represented a break with the past, a rejection of traditional forms and styles in favor of a new, abstract aesthetic. He believed that modernism was a necessary and important development in the history of art, and that it represented a departure from the sentimental and decorative styles of the past.
In addition to his theory of modernism, Greenberg is also known for his criticism of kitsch, which he defined as a cheap, mass-produced form of art that appealed to the lowest common denominator. In his view, kitsch was a perversion of true art, and he argued that it represented a threat to the integrity and purity of modernism.
Overall, Clement Greenberg was a key figure in the development and promotion of modernism, and his ideas and theories continue to influence the art world to this day. His focus on form, purity, and simplicity helped to shape the direction of modern art and to establish it as a significant force in the world of contemporary culture.
(PDF) A New Reading of Clement Greenberg's Modernism, c. 1950
Ideas of writers and philosophers, in particular Kant. The essay is notable for its illuminating and largely undeveloped observations about the nature and history of pictures, let alone Greenberg's mid-life perception of the character and importance of the avant-garde. Neither extreme is a matter of caprice or arbitrariness. Introduction to Jules Olitski at the Venice Biennale 48. In this respect, Rosenberg understood Abstract Expressionism as pursuing the dream of earlier avant-gardes - like FORMALISM AND MODERNISM LASTING LEGACY PAINTING AND PERFORMANCE Greenberg's writing sought to elucidate the development of modern art and to demonstrate that a logic governed the progress from one movement to the next. Thus would each art be rendered "pure," and in its "purity" find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. This starting point has impor- tant implications for the thesis of autonomy.
In particular, Greenberg understood Modern painting moving towards pictorial flatness, since Greenberg saw the flatness of the canvas support as the overriding fact of the medium. The heightened sensitivity of the picture plane may no longer permit sculptural illusion, or trompe-l'oeil, but it does and must permit optical illusion. Introduction to a Group Exhibition in Saskatchewan 44. Although many different styles are encompassed by the term, there are certain underlying principles that define modernist art: A rejection of history and conservative values such as realistic depiction of subjects ; innovation and experimentation with form the shapes, colours and lines that make up the work with a ā¦ What did Clement Greenberg believe? The bright, artificial colours that Lewis unleashes from the height of the billboard, for instance, refuse the muted tones of the abstract works about which Greenberg was writing ā aligning themselves both formally and diegetically with the colour of advertisements. I have never enjoyed a course more than my first art history course. By this time he was an associate editor at Commentary Magazine.
Clement Greenberg āModernist Paintingā Short Summary Essay Example
But the making of pictures means, among other things, the deliberate creating or choosing of a flat surface, and the deliberate circumscribing and limiting of it. Clement Greenberg: A Life. With these positions staked out, the essay looks at a number of key painters championed by Greenberg whose work is similarly impacted by the New Criticism. Content becomes completely dissolved into form. Two decades had passed and Greenberg had progressed from being an up-and-coming art writer to being the arbiter of fine arts in New York, enjoying a truly hegemonic position.
Analysis of Modernist Painting by Clement Greenberg
The self-criticism of Modernism grows out of, but is not the same thing as, the criticism of the Enlightenment. If the avant-garde art from the late nineteenth century, led to the end of the need to renew the critical thinking, the art of the last decades of the twentieth century again put into question the theoretical discourse about the vanguards that had been consolidated. The immediate aims of the Modernists were, and remain, personal before anything else, and the truth and success of their works remain personal before anything else. In arguing that artists such as de Kooning had transformed the canvas into an "arena in which to act," Rosenberg encouraged a rethinking of the act of painting. A Famous Art Critic's Collection 35. Kennedy CONSEQUENTIAL ESSAYS and WRITINGS Partisan Review, 1939 Partisan Review, 1948 Partisan Review, 1955 Originally delivered as a radio broadcast on The Voice of America Forum Lectures: The Visual Arts, 1960 Art International, 1962 The Partisan Review, 1940 Commentary, 1948 Art News, 1952 1962 "Action Painting: A Decade of Distortion" Art News, 1962 INFLUENCES CHART. And while I think there is some substance to the view that Greenberg was rather strategic in his critique of Kandinsky, I also believe that his point is indeed valid.
University of Chicago Press, 2005. Writing two centuries after the German philosopher, Greenberg looked backwards in time and implied another favorite Enlightenment idea, that of progress. Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art. Having been denied by the Enlightenment all tasks they could take seriously, they looked as though they were going to be assimilated to entertainment pure and simple, and entertainment itself looked as though it were going to be assimilated, like religion, to therapy. Richard Kostelanetz, 1978 Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Beginning in the early 1950s, Greenberg started a love affair with the artist Helen Frankenthaler, which ended in 1955.
The shift began with the Armory Show of 1913 and the Nazis sealed the deal in 1939 by invading and occupying France. Others, notably David Halperin, find significance within the oppositions highlighted by the pastoral, such as the contrast between the simple and complex, or urban and rural. How, then, do we reconcile such varied interpretations of Lee Krasner and her work? The "Crisis" of Abstract Art 34. The Modernists have neither avoided nor resolved this contradiction; rather, they have reversed its terms. The author traces Modernist philosophy and aesthetics back to Kant, whose method was internal criticism. This essay will analyse the ways in which Marxism assists in the understanding of the arts and, more specifically, the ways in which art responds to political agendas of the time.
What did art critic Clement Greenberg have to say about Modernism?
Retrieved 8 April 2018. From the point of view of art in itself, its convergence with science happens to be a mere accident, and neither art nor science really gives or assures the other of anything more than it ever did. The Enlightenment criticized from the outside, the way criticism in its accepted sense does; Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized. What is the modernist ideal According to Greenberg and fried? He believed that although form was not the total of art, it offered the only firm basis on which to make both judgments of quality and assessments about the relative character of different works of art. Voice of America, 1959. Art is -- among other things -- continuity, and unthinkable without it.
We know what has happened to an activity like religion, which could not avail itself of Kantian, immanent, criticism in order to justify itself. When the rise of kitsch, multi-layered and Neo Dada styles began to emerge through New York artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Greenberg fought back even harder. Greenberg's first essay on modernism, clarifying many of the ideas implicit in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", his groundbreaking essay written two decades earlier. Harold Rosenberg Many modern art movements have been supported and promoted by critics who have sought to shape understandings of the artists' work in distinct ways. That visual art should confine itself exclusively to what is given in visual experience, and make no reference to anything given in any other order of experience, is a notion whose only justification lies in scientific consistency.
The flatness towards which Modernist painting orients itself can never be an absolute flatness. But when Eugene turns on the machine, its billows suck his precious stack of Bat Lady comic books into the mechanism. Greenberg considered Immanuel Kant the first Modernist. Scientific method alone asks, or might ask, that a situation be resolved in exactly the same terms as that in which it is presented. Greenberg gives examples from the history of art to illustrate his thought. Introduction to an Exhibition in Tribute to Sidney Janis 12.
The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957
The Smoothness of Turner: Review of J. What is kitsch art Greenberg? Previously she has worked in both curatorial and educational roles, discovering how stories and history can really enrich our experience of art. Each time, a kind of art is expected so unlike all previous kinds of art, and so free from norms of practice or taste, that everybody, regardless of how informed or uninformed he happens to be, can have his say about it. See Peter BĆ¼rger trans. Boston: MFA Publications, 2006.
