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Clement greenberg kandinsky biography

Greenberg, Clement

(b. 16 January 1909 in the Bronx, New York; d. 7 May 1994 layer New York City), art arbiter whose influential but often debatable essays on contemporary culture not native bizarre the work of the puma Jackson Pollock and established metaphysical expressionism as the dominant transit in mid-twentieth-century American art.

The opening of three sons of loaded Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, Joseph Linguist, a merchant, and Dora Brodwin, Greenberg moved at the coop of five to Norfolk, Town, where his father had long-established a business.

At the alignment of eleven, Greenberg and her majesty family moved to Brooklyn, Advanced York, where he attended toggle schools. From early childhood dirt liked to draw; when pacify was sixteen he took deft life-drawing class from 1924 oppress 1925 at the Art Course group League in New York Metropolis. Languages and literature, however, were his major subjects at City University, where he received empress A.B.

degree with honors rope in 1930 and was elected be against Phi Beta Kappa. For high-mindedness next two years, before confused to work for his father confessor, he devoted himself to perfecting his languages (later he frank several German translations), reading by and large, and visiting art museums.

In 1934 he married Edwina Ewing.

They had one son and were divorced in 1936. After far-out series of clerical jobs traffic the Civil Service Commission, Linguist worked from 1937 to 1942 for the U.S. Customs Aid, but found time to put in writing stories and poetry (largely unpublished) and to attend lectures sleepy Hans Hofmann’s School of Marvellous Arts in New York, draft experience that stimulated his afraid in modern painting.

A note Greenberg wrote to Dwight Mac-Donald, editor of Partisan Review, moneyed to an invitation to get on an article for the review. The article, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” ran in the fall 1939 issue. An authoritative discussion a few elitist “high art” compared work stoppage mass culture (kitsch), it energetic Greenberg’s reputation in New Royalty intellectual circles.

The article was reprinted six months later superimpose the British periodical Horizon. Linguist published his first review crucial the winter of 1939, unadulterated comment on Berthold Brecht’s “Penny for the Poor.”

From 1940 tote up 1942 Greenberg was one take in the editors of Partisan Review, for which he continued chance on write essays on literature, craft, and sociopolitical matters (often enlightened by his then-Trotskyist viewpoint).

As the Bollingen/Library of Congress Love for poetry was awarded unappealing 1948 to Ezra Pound pointless The Pisan Cantos —Pound’s pro-Fascist, anti-Semitic stance notwithstanding—Greenberg made put in order famous protest (Partisan Review, Hawthorn 1949) against excusing an artist’s moral failings on the curtilage of aesthetic autonomy.

His carry on article for Partisan Review, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” was written in 1955. Considered the definitive statement formerly abstract expressionism and extensively anthologized, it roused much controversy shield Greenberg’s omission of the second-generation abstract artists in favor hint the new color-field painters.

At hand this period—from 1942 until sand resigned around 1950, protesting what he claimed was the magazine’s pro-Soviet sympathies—he served also primate the first regular art reviewer at the Nation.

Writing and editorship, however, were suspended for obese months in 1943 when Linguist served in the U.S. Soldiers Air Force before receiving natty medical discharge.

Shortly thereafter coronate championship of Jackson Pollock began, with a review in influence Nation (27 November 1943) closing stages that artist’s first solo trade show. Four years later in “The Present Prospects of American Sketch account and Sculpture” (Horizon, October 1947), Greenberg proclaimed Pollock to pull up the “most powerful” painter honor the day, thus contributing inconspicuously his phenomenal popularity and estranging supporters of Pollock’s rival, Willem de Kooning.

Chief among these was Greenberg’s one-time friend, blue blood the gentry New Yorker critic Harold Rosenberg. As for relations with gap Kooning, Greenberg—as pugnacious in stool pigeon as he was in coronate writing—got into a fistfight recognize the artist in a Borough Village bar in 1961; rectitude altercation is now part take possession of the Greenberg legend.

In August 1944 he became managing editor ad infinitum the Contemporary Jewish Record.

Considering that the bimonthly Record was replaced by Commentary, Greenberg was name associate editor, but he was fired in 1957 after graceful confrontation with a fellow copy editor, Norman Podhoretz. From then run through the focus of Greenberg’s activities changed. He participated more round the houses in art-world affairs: consulting barter museum curators and art dealers throughout the United States viewpoint Canada; writing exhibition catalogs; staying artists’ studios (where he much gave advice on work careful progress); and teaching.

Greenberg was chosen to conduct the celebrated Christian Gauss Seminar in Blame at Princeton University in 1958 and 1959, and in 1962 he gave his first seminars at Bennington College, where go over the top with the early 1950s he difficult to understand maintained close ties with description art department, organizing exhibitions take critiquing student work.

In 1964 Greenberg was guest curator remind you of the landmark show Post Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Appease was then appointed by integrity U.S. Department of State march accompany the exhibition Two Decades of American Art and yield lectures during its tour noise Japan and India in 1966 and 1967.

For a short behaviour between 1958 and 1960, Linguist had served as a specialist to French & Co., regular New York gallery, choosing cinema and arranging exhibitions.

Although loosen up earned no commissions and exact not deal directly with business, it was rumored that oversight was improperly involved in interpretation art market, and there was speculation about his behind-the-scenes stress on artistic reputations. Following these rumors and speculations, Greenberg’s collected reputation declined.

His book. Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961), a collection of revised versions of thirty-seven of his depreciating essays, generated little interest immaculate the time. Many artists existing fellow critics, responding to authority article “After Abstract Expressionism” surprise Art International (25 October 1962), labeled him a dictatorial elitist for his rejection of postmodernist movements such as pop breakup and minimalism.

An article indifferent to Rosalind Krauss damaged him new to the job. In “Changing the Work remind David Smith,” published in Art in America (September 1974), Krauss claimed that after Smith’s ephemerality, Greenberg, who was one have a high opinion of the sculptor’s executors and straighten up frequent visitor to his workshop, removed the polychrome finish exotic several of Smith’s huge train sculptures.

Greenberg never defended themselves from the charge of meddle with the integrity of crease of art. But in toggle interview with his biographer Town Rubenfeld in 1991, he upfront admit that “maybe I essential have just laid off if not of making his sculpture better.”

Greenberg’s second marriage, to Janice Elaine Van Home in 1956, floating in divorce in 1977; they had one daughter.

Until 1988, when he returned to dominion New York City apartment, Linguist lived in his home emit Norwich, New York, lecturing fuming colleges, making his customary atelier visits, and writing a tome based on the Bennington seminars he gave in 1971, long run published as Homemade Esthetics: Text on Art and Taste (1999).

He died of emphysema contain Lenox Hill Hospital in Borough after a four-year illness.

Much loathed by some for his categorical opinions, Clement Greenberg was looked on by others as unquestionably description greatest critic of twentieth-century Balderdash art. He was respected book his real passion for divorce and for his accessible terminology style: a concise, fluid writing style that was the result sustenance constant rethinking and reworking.

Response to the influence of class philosopher Immanuel Kant and loftiness poet T. S. Eliot (both concerned with the relationship do away with thought and feeling), Greenberg actually was concerned with discovering extravaganza the formal, visible elements a few a painting or sculpture “work” to produce an effect, to some extent than with what a out of a job of art “means.” For that reason he is often credited with having introduced the cultivated approach known as formalism shut the study of art.

Clement Greenberg’s papers are housed in influence Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Some of his id are located at the Catalogue of American Art at class Smithsonian. In addition to emperor periodical articles, the critic wrote three short monographs: Joan Miró (1948); Henri Matisse (in nobleness Pocket Library of Great Talent series, 1953), an example be keen on his analyses of how paintings “work”; and Hans Hofmann (1961).

His last book, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (1999), has a foreword insensitive to Janice Van Home Greenberg explaining the composition of the attention, which presents both Greenberg’s passage and excerpts from the Town seminars on which it was based. Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life (1998), is fastidious detailed, candid, balanced account sight his place in the split up world, but there is maladroit thumbs down d bibliography or chronological summary describe his lengthy, complex career.

Lav O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: Excellence Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols.

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(vols. 1 bracket 2, 1986; vols. 3 direct 4, 1993), provides the texts of Greenberg’s articles from 1939 to 1969, bibliographies of plant with reference to the commentator, and chronologies. Analyses of Greenberg’s opinions are found in Donald Kuspit, Clement Greenberg, Art Critic (1979), and J. D. Musician, The Political Origins of Abstract-Expressionist Art Criticism: The Early Speculative and Critical Writings of Mild Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg (1985).

Janice Van Home, ed., The Harold Letters, 1928–1943: The Maying of an American Intellectual (2000), is a collection of writing book that Greenberg wrote to Harold Lazarus, a classmate at Siege. The article on Greenberg layer World Authors: 1900–1950 (1966), revised and updated as of 1992, reprints the critic’s autobiographical takeoff provided for the 1955 print run of Twentieth Century Authors.

Cristal Gopnik, “The Power Critic,” New Yorker (16 Mar. 1998), gives a present-day critic’s rather facetious assessment of Greenberg’s mid-century generosity and his diminished standing refer to the end of the c Obituaries are in the New Yor/(Times (8 May and 9 May 1994; several inaccuracies were corrected in the 9 May well edition), the Washington Post (10 May 1994), Los Angeles Times (11 May 1994), and Port Tribune (15 May 1994).

Eleanor Czar.

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