To the Editors:
In his letter to the editors about Fairfield Porter (September, 1983), Clement Greenberg denies that there was ever a meeting between himself and Porter at Willem de Kooning’s studio, at which Greenberg told de Kooning “You can’t paint figuratively today.” There are several problems with his denial. Porter and de Kooning both remembered the incident: it is hard to imagine them both making it up. Also, Porter’s account of the incident, which was by no means his only allusion to it, was published in 1972; it is strange that Greenberg, to whom the matter is not “trivial,” should have waited eleven years, and until after Porter was dead, to make a public denial; and stranger still that, when doing so, he should have appended two paragraphs of slurs and totally unsubstantiated allegations, descending to gibberish and amounting to character assassination—the sort of thing that happens when dissenting intellectuals lose sight of the issues and let their writing degenerate into mere personal animosity.
But where Greenberg leaves himself most open of all is in the surprising sentence “You don’t talk that way to art [sic] or to artists.” This is disingenuous. Without even having to refer to Green-berg’s widespread reputation for high-handedness in his dealings with artists—extending even to the physical alteration of their works after they are dead—his own published criticism is ample evidence that this is precisely the way he has talked, from the beginning. His first substantial essay, which offers “an explanation for the present superiority of abstract art” states that “a conjunction of historical circumstances . . . holds the artist in a vice from which at the present moment he can escape only by surrendering his ambition and returning to a stale past…” In that past, no matter what the artists had wanted to do, “so inexorable was the logic of the development that in the end their work constituted but another step towards abstract art… . All roads led to the same place.” Greenberg could hardly have made himself clearer. For the artist it is a Hobson’s choice of a scenario; as an intellectual effort it is reminiscent of Herbert Spencer’s theory of botany which he expounded to George Eliot one afternoon at Kew: if the plants didn’t happen to fit the theory, she explained, “tant pis pour les plantes.” Greenberg’s criticism was, and was to remain, deterministic, authoritarian, and coercive: in other words, “you” do talk to artists “that way”!
In the essay which occasioned Greenberg’s letter, “Fairfield Porter: An American Classic” (May, 1983), which warmly gives to Porter a distinguished place in American art, Hilton Kramer quotes Porter’s reaction to Greenberg’s remark at de Kooning’s studio: “If that’s what he says, I think I will do just exactly what he says I can’t do. I might have become an abstract painter except for that.” Kramer doubts that this should be taken at face value; maybe not, but I think it would be wrong to assume that it has no value. For Porter’s reaction, even if it entailed only a tipping of the scales, or the confirmation of a decision already more or less made—as Ben Jonson said, “Art’s hid causes are not found”—expresses something that is inherent in. all his activities as an intellectual and an artist from quite early on; that is, a very strong assertion of the value and integrity of what is unique and unpredictable as opposed to what is systematic and controlled. It shows in his affiliation with an unconventional political party in the 1940s whose aim was to create a society in which there would be the least possible control over the population by a leader, an ideology, a bureaucracy, or any kind of ruling class; it shows in his idea of composition in painting which has to do, he thought, not with looking for likenesses and repetitions, but in making distinctions—an idea which shows itself most obviously in Porter’s use of color, celebrating the variety of sensory experience. It shows in the lesson he felt he learned from de Kooning, that painting is a process of discovery, not the execution of a preconceived idea; jt shows in his belief that the destructiveness of technology comes from the scientific method whose generalizations ignore the specific case, and in his interest in the theory of evolution described by J. Bronowski—“Evolution is an open and unbounded plan.”
With such clearly marked tendencies of thought behind all his activities, Porter could hardly have felt anything but repugnance for the kind of criticism practiced by Greenberg, and he articulated this in several published rejoinders. His telling of his reaction to the incident in de Kooning’s studio is a serious joke, both a taunting smack at a coercive theory of art and an expression of intensely held underlying convictions.
Rackstraw Downes
New York City
To the Editors:
Although I found Clement Greenberg’s letter up to the standards of his brilliant prose, I was shocked by his contradictions of Fairfield’s quotes. I must say that I found Fairfield Porter to be the most scrupulously honest intellectual that I have met. He not only remembered what he said, he remembered what everyone else said. He never appropriated a thought without putting it in quotes. His rigorousness in this area, I believe, was the backbone of his brilliant writing, and his painting.
Alex Katz
New York City