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