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 Criticismwould 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