Clement Greenberg in the Forties

With the publication of the first two volumes of Clement Greenberg’s Collected Essays and Criticism, we are at last on our way to having a comprehensive edition of the most important body of art criticism produced by an American writer in this century.[1] The two volumes now available—Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944 and Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949—bring together for the first time Mr. Greenberg’s critical writings from the decade in which he emerged as the most informed and articulate champion of the New York School as well as one of our most trenchant analysts of the modern cultural scene. The two additional volumes promised for the future will presumably bring his remarkable critical oeuvre up to date. John O'Brian, the editor of the series, has so far carried out his duties with an exemplary scholarly tact—both of the new volumes contain useful notes, interesting biographical chronologies, and appropriate bibliographies—and the books have been produced by the University of Chicago Press in a very readable format. Under any circumstances the publication of Mr. Greenberg’s Collected Essays and Criticism would have to be considered a capital intellectual event; but in the present climate, when so much that passes for serious criticism is in reality some form of academic twaddle, commercial hype, or political mystification, the appearance of these volumes also has a wonderfully bracing effect. For this is criticism that does not require us to surmount some impenetrable rhetorical barrier in order to discover what it is actually up to. It is plainly written, cogently argued, and admirably precise in the many discriminations and formulations it is concerned to make. For anything remotely comparable in. intellectual quality or aesthetic intelligence, one would have to turn to the most illustrious of Mr. Greenberg’s predecessors—to Julius Meier-Graefe in Germany and Roger Fry in England. In his own generation he stands alone.

It is one of the many virtues of the present edition of Mr. Greenberg’s writings that it places them firmly in the context of the history which prompted them in the first place. When, some twenty-five years ago, Mr. Greenberg published a selection of his essays under the title of Art and Culture, he was frank to say that that book was “not intended as a completely faithful record of my activity as a critic.” Although drawn from the first twenty years of Mr. Greenberg’s production, many of the essays in Art and Culture had been substantially revised in order to give the reader a clear account of the author’s current views. “Not only has much been altered,” as Mr. Greenberg noted in his preface to Art and Culture, “but much more has been left out than put in.” Art and Culture was certainly a very distinguished book. Indeed, for a quarter of a century it has remained without rival as the premiere work of art criticism in our time. Yet the emphasis which Art and Culture placed on the present inevitably had the effect of foreshortening our understanding of the past—both the critic’s past, with all of the shifts in emphasis and perspective which any full-scale critical career is bound to encompass, and that of the art which he was attempting to come to grips with in a succession of discrete encounters. It is only with the publication of The Collected Essays and Criticism that we have now begun to have placed in our possession a complete account, month by month and year by year, of this crucial critical history.

Yet the emphasis which Art and Culture placed on the present inevitably had the effect of foreshortening our understanding of the past.

It is another of the virtues of this edition that it illuminates—and with a fullness and candor that was no doubt inappropriate to the purposes of Art and Culture—the broad range of literary, artistic, and political interests that did so much to shape Mr. Green-berg’s outlook as a writer. The first entry in Volume I is a review of Bertolt Brecht’s A Penny for the Poor. The second is the author’s now classic essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” written at the age of thirty and as much concerned with literature as with art. The third is an equally important but not so well-known essay, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” which attempted to explain in historical terms how it happened that modern art, in its “revolt against the dominance of literature”—the dominance, that is, of “subject matter at its most oppressive”—came to place “a new and greater emphasis upon form” and upon the physical medium. “Towards a Newer Laocoon” was, as Mr. Greenberg acknowledged, “an historical apology for abstract art,” and may thus be considered something of a manifesto for the “formalist” view of art which he has steadfastly maintained throughout his subsequent career as a critic.

Interestingly, he was writing in these early years as a Marxist—an anti-Stalinist Marxist of the Trotskyist persuasion, to be sure, but a Marxist all the same. In this phase of his career Mr. Greenberg was very much a part of the Partisan Review circle that looked to Trotsky as a political guide in attempting to “save” the Revolution from what was looked upon as Stalin’s “betrayal” of it. In the fourth entry in Volume 1 of The Collected Essays—an essay called “An American View,” written for Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon in 1940 and published in London during the Blitz—we are given a clear statement of the political folly which this ideological outlook entailed. “Hitler realizes this much: that in order to keep capitalism there must be fascism,” Mr. Greenberg wrote; “Trotsky realizes that in order to keep democracy there must be a socialist revolution . . . . We must choose: either capitalism or democracy. One or the other must go. If we insist on keeping capitalism then we cannot fight Hitler. He must win.”

Cyril Connolly promptly and correctly responded to this mistaken analysis by writing an article in the same issue of Horizon which firmly rejected Mr. Greenberg’s claims. “It is obvious that this view,” Connolly wrote, “. . . rests on an over-simplification of the facts, and if put into practice would lead to disaster.” (Mr. O’Brian quotes Connolly’s response in a footnote.) Before the end of the Forties Mr. Greenberg had more or less come to agree with Connolly, describing himself in a Partisan Review symposium in 1948 as an “ex- or disabused Marxist.” And as an editor of Commentary from the late Forties to the end of the Fifties, he was, of course, in the forefront of those ex-radicals who played a role in articulating the case for what came to be characterized as anti-Communist, or Cold War, liberalism—a position from which, I believe, he has never since deviated.

What needs to be borne in mind about the role of Marxism in Mr. Greenberg’s early writings is that (1) it did much to shape his view of history, and (2) it was never allowed to distort his judgment of particular artists. The extent to which a Marxist-influenced teleology came to be subsumed in his reading of art history is another matter. It can be argued—I have argued it myself—that some residue of the Marxian dialectic disposed him to find in art history, arid most particularly the history of modern art, something in the realm of aesthetics (“subject matter at its most oppressive”) that is more or less akin to the Marxist notion of class struggle as an iron law of historical development.[2] Something of the sort is certainly to be found in such essays as “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” and it persists as a kind of leitmotif in a great many other essays, too. Yet it must be said that Mr. Greenberg’s response to particular works of art is, more often than not, remarkably free of the.ideological strictures to be found in his more theoretical pronouncements. And even in “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” he was at some pains to underscore the limit that he placed on his own theoretical imperative:

This is not the observation of a closed mind, and the application of “other possible criteria” occurs more frequently in Mr. Greenberg’s criticism than one expects from a writer so given to theoretical absolutes.

There is much discussion of poetry as well as of politics in these first two volumes of The Collected Essays; and fiction, philosophy, criticism, and even on one occasion the ballet—Anthony Tudor’s Dim Luster—are likewise given some interesting attention. The Forties was also a period in which Mr. Greenberg was much occupied with his translations of Kafka, and Volume 2 contains the first of his essays on Kafka, written in 1946. There is little question, I think, that Mr. Greenberg had both the resources and the sensibility to become a first-rate literary critic. But it was the art rather than the literature of his time that claimed his primary allegiance, and it is, of course, as a chronicle of his art criticism that this new edition of his writings makes its principal claim on us.

During the period under review Mr. Greenberg was writing most regularly for Partisan Review and for The Nation. As Mr. O’Brian points out in his introduction to Volume I, “His longer, justly celebrated essays were written primarily for Partisan Review, while his shorter, until now mostly unrecovered articles, appeared mostly in The Nation.” Read now in sequence, these articles give us an amazingly detailed, close-up view of the art life of the time—not only in their account of the new art that was being shown in New York for the first time, but also in their response to the work of the established masters.

In regard to the former—Mr. Greenberg’s account of the new art of the Forties—this new edition of his writings amply confirms his reputation as the pre-eminent critic of the New York School. In this first decade of its emergence he seems to have missed very little. As early as 1943, he wrote of David Smith: “Smith is thirty-six. If he is able to maintain the level set in the work he has already done . . . he has a chance of becoming one of the greatest of all American artists.” About Jackson Pollock that same year he wrote: “Pollock has gone through the influences of Miró, Picasso, Mexican paintings, and what not, and has come out on the other side at the age of thirty-one, painting mostly with his own brush.” About Robert Motherwell’s first one-man show in 1944: . . he has already done enough to make it no exaggeration to say that the future of American painting depends on what he, Baziotes, Pollock, and only a comparatively few others do from now on.” In 1945, on the occasion of Pollock’s second one-man show: “the strongest painter of his generation and perhaps the greatest one to appear since Miró.” And so on. It isn’t at all the case that Mr. Greenberg was especially easy on the artists he admired, either. He could be severely critical—as he was, for example, with Arshile Gorky. Yet when Gorky’s The Calendars was shown in the Whitney Annual in 1948, he did not hesitate to pronounce it “the best painting in the exhibition and one of the best pictures ever done by an American.” That same year—“a remarkably good one for American art,” as he noted—he spoke of Willem de Kooning as “one of the four or five most important painters in the country” on the basis of the artist’s first one-man show. One could go on quoting from other reviews as well, and we are talking only about the period which ended in 1949—the terminal date of Volume 2.

The figure who looms behind a good many of these judgments—not in the sense of dictating them, for it was never a case of that, but by way of providing a reading of modern art that gave one the essential clues to its further development—is the painter and teacher Hans Hofmann, about whom there are fewer references in Mr. Greenberg’s writing in this period than we might have expected. Hofmann is first mentioned in a footnote to “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in 1939, but his own painting is not discussed until 1945, the year of his second one-man show in New York. When, on that occasion, Mr. Greenberg spoke of Hofmann as “a force to be reckoned with in the practice as well as in the interpretation of modern art,” it was an acknowledgement of an influence that had already played an important role in the critic’s thinking—an influence duly celebrated two years later in an essay written for Horizon on “The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture.”

Clearly the critic included himself among the beneficiaries of this influence, and so must we. It may even be that much that we still admire in Mr. Greenberg’s writings about art in this period owes something to the fact that as Trotsky’s influence—and the influence of Marxism generally—steadily waned, that of Hofmann’s “formalist” reading of modern painting continued to cast its powerful spell.

It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that it is primarily as a sort of retrospective tip-sheet on the emerging eminences of the New York School that this critical chronicle is of interest now. What has kept Mr. Greenberg’s criticism alive is the quality of the thought which he lavished not only on individual artists as he encountered their work for the first time but on the larger artistic and historical issues which their work was found to raise. In this collected edition of the criticism one can see more clearly than before how the famous longer essays—“The Decline of Cubism,” “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” “The New Sculpture,” and “Our Period Style,” all written in the years 1948-49—grew out of these individual encounters with specific objects. However generalized Mr. Greenberg’s observations on individual artists, on art history, and on history itself, may sometimes appear to be, they were always firmly anchored in concrete aesthetic experience, and it is another of the strengths of The Collected Essays that it makes this internal connection between apodictic judgment and aesthetic actuality far more explicit than it has been hitherto. One may still want to quarrel with the judgment, but one knows better now on exactly what basis it has been arrived at.

Another large interest of these volumes is to be found in Mr. Greenberg’s writings on European art.

Another large interest of these volumes is to be found in Mr. Greenberg’s writings on European art, and specifically on the School of Paris. The Forties was, of course, the decade in which the decline of Paris as the art capital of the West and the emergence of New York as its successor became an undeniable fact of international cultural life. In Mr. Greenberg’s critical chronicle of this fateful decade we do not find a celebration of the decline of Paris—and still less, any gloating over it—but there is no denial of it, either. If anything, his discussion of it—which, characteristically, takes the form of discussing individual artists—is marked by a tone of deep regret. For the art produced in the heyday of the School of Paris remained for him, even in the Forties, a touchstone of aesthetic quality. Again and again in these essays he makes it clear that for him Matisse still loomed as “the greatest master of the twentieth century”—a judgment that was by no means commonplace even in Paris in the Forties—and Cubism remained, as he wrote in 1948, “the only vital style of our time, the one best able to convey contemporary feeling, and the only one capable of supporting a tradition which will survive into the future and form new artists.” The intensely serious attention given as a matter of course to Picasso, Bonnard, Chagall, Léger, Braque, Miró, and other luminaries of the School of Paris is itself a reflection of the central place Mr. Greenberg continued to accord these artists. The welcome he gave to Dubuffet in the late Forties, moreover, makes nonsense of any notion that his was a criticism in any way governed by chauvinistic bias.

In this respect, it should be said that the campaign lately mounted by certain Marxist historians to suggest that in the 1940s New York somehow contrived to “steal” modern art from Paris by means of a government-sponsored conspiracy will find nothing in The Collected Essays to support what is essentially an exercise in political paranoia (if not indeed an attempt to repeal history itself). To Mr. Greenberg, as to many others at the time, it came “much to our own surprise,” as he wrote in 1948, that “the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power.” His complaint was that Americans were still so piously attached to the prestige of the School of Paris that they could not bring themselves to recognize what was going on in their own country—but this was an aesthetic judgment, not a political one. And the fact that Paris still loomed so large in the eyes of the New York art world, that art produced in Paris still held such unbroken sway over what dealers showed, critics wrote, collectors bought, and museums acquired—all this, too, makes nonsense of the charge that some secret conspiracy was at work to elevate New York at the expense of Paris. The plain truth is, Paris did suffer a decline so irreversible that it has not recovered to this day. It is, in any case, against the background of this abiding piety about art in Paris and its corollary—a general disinclination to believe in the importance of American art—that Mr. Greenberg’s writings in the Forties about both French and American art need to be read.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that there is much in these volumes on a variety of other subjects that remains of great interest. About the paintings of Arnold Friedman, an American artist only now—forty years after his death—being accorded anything like the recognition he deserves, Mr. Greenberg wrote beautifully and repeatedly. His obituary of Mondrian is still a very moving document:

About Edward Hopper, too, an artist one hardly expected Mr. Greenberg to have much interest in, he had some very sharp things to say. Also, about Max Beckmann. Reviewing an exhibition of the paintings Beckmann produced in Holland during the Second World War, Mr. Greenberg wrote in 1946 that there were five or six pictures in the show that “warrant calling Beckmann a great artist, even though he may not be a great painter.” He then went to say of Beckmann:

On visual art other than painting and sculpture there are likewise some brilliant perceptions. Here is Mr. Greenberg on the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson:

He writes well on the cartoons of William Steig and David Low, too.

Notwithstanding the great variety of subjects that is dealt with in this critical chronicle, we are seldom in any doubt that it is one subject, above all—the emergence of abstract art, which Mr. Greenberg described in 1944 as “one of the most epochal transformations in the history of art”—that lies at the center of The Collected Essays. In these first two volumes Mr. Greenberg’s response to this “epochal” event, while generally positive and welcoming, remains fluid and analytical. He is fully aware of the aesthetic costs entailed in the triumph of abstraction, and not reluctant to talk about them. If he can already be said to be writing here as a “formalist” critic, he also shows himself to be open to, and even enthusiastic about, a good deal that the formalist criticism of a later generation has shut its eyes to. What The Collected Essays of the Forties makes abundantly evident, moreover, is that he is a bigger and more various writer than he has generally been thought to be. This being the case, the future volumes in this series will be keenly awaited.

1. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Edited by John O’Brian. University of Chicago Press. Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, 270 pages. $27.50. Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, 353 pages. $27.50. Go back to the text.
2. See “A Critic on the Side of History: Notes on Clement Greenberg,” in The Age of the Avant-Garde (New York, 1973). Go back to the text.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 5 Number 5, on page 1
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