THE AMAZING ART COLLECTION OF CLEMENT GREEN
By Karen Wilkin*

Works of art move you to a greater or lesser extent, that’s all. So far, words have been futile in the matter. ––Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) was the most renowned and controversial American art critic of the 20^th Century. Early in his career, he stirred debate in the art world by championing the work of unknowns such as Jackson Pollock and David Smith. Falling in and out of fashion with trends in art criticism over five decades, Greenberg based his judgments on the individual work rather than on theories about art. His comments, provocative in character, have inspired emotions as intense as the art they review. Years after his death, the art world is still arguing about the Greenbergian aesthetic.

Less well known than his criticism is Greenberg’s extensive art collection. Never before shown in its entirety, Greenberg’s collection can at last be seen in a traveling exhibition organized by the Portland Museum of Art (now on view until September 16, 2001). Complementing the exhibition is Clement Greenberg: A Critic’s Collection by Karen Wilkin and Bruce Guenther (Princeton University Press, 2001). This important catalogue explores Greenberg’s influence by offering an eye-opening introduction to the art he not only wrote about but put on his walls.

More than 200 color plates, many accompanied by Greenberg’s comments about the artists, unveil the 152 works in his collection, which was recently purchased by the museum. Many of the pieces are by painters and sculptors who are now being rediscovered by young contemporary artists exploring formalism, the nature of paint and the evolution of modern art. The works included in the book reflect a range of styles and movements. Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann and Adolph Gottlieb are represented, as are artists of the Color Dield movement, including Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.

Shedding light on Greenberg’s significance to criticism, the text of this important book discusses his famous studio visits, his role as a friend to particular artists and the controversy surrounding his commentary. As Karen Wilken writes in this excerpted portion of her essay entitled "Clement Greenberg: A Critical Eye":

Clement Greenberg died on 7 May 1994, at the age of eighty-five. That his was a voice to be reckoned with had first been signaled in 1939 by publication in the Partisan Review of "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," a brilliant, hyperbolic discussion of the inseparable gulf between high culture and its debased counterpart. In 1941 Greenberg began to review art exhibitions, producing, over the next three decades, a body of perceptive, forthright essays that established him as quite possibly the most significant art critic of the twentieth century, certainly its most celebrated and disputed. A generation of younger critics and art historians, including Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Kermit Champa, Charles Millard, and Kenworth Moffett, among others (most of whom developed individual approaches quite different from Greenberg’s) were profoundly affected by his example. Today, while Greenberg’s reading of the development of Modernism has come to be seen not as the definitive tracking of the course of adventurous, innovative art, but as only one of many possible ways of describing what happened in painting and sculpture from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth, anyone seriously interested in the history of modern art must take his work into account.

Greenberg remains an exacting presence in the consciousness of the art world. For some he embodies notions of aesthetic excellence and integrity. Yet even for those who dismiss or disagree with his views, he represents a force that must be acknowledged, a perennial gadfly who cannot be safely ignored. Public denunciation of Greenberg’s views remains, in some circles, proof of independence of mind and seriousness—as it did in the last decade of his life—but today his work is increasingly discussed with renewed respect and curiosity and the work of the artists he championed greeted with new enthusiasm. The essays that established and sustained Greenberg’s reputation are again being read, not with ironic detachment, as artifacts of a rapidly receding past whose prejudices and peculiarities must be corrected by present-day sensibilities, but with new interest and attention. This astonishing body of work, most of it written between 1939 and 1969, with additional material dating from the 1970s and early 1980s, has now been collected and published virtually in its entirety. It is an instructive record of a working critic’s day-to-day testing of his eye and his judgment, a chronicle of his efforts to find the common thread that ran through his varied encounters in order to discover larger patterns in his empirical experience.

At first the young critic’s views were considered radically vanguard outside New York’s small, tight-nit circle of art world figures and intellectuals. A 1947 issue of Time magazine, for example, scoffed at his praise for David Smith and Hans Hofmann and ridiculed his assertion that Jackson Pollock was "significantly and peculiarly, the most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one." Yet more and more Greenberg was recognized not only as the most articulate and perceptive champion of American postwar abstraction, but also as an outspoken, acute observer with penetrating things to say about the entire trajectory of adventurous Western painting and sculpture. The publication of Art and Culture, in 1961, a collection of essays previously available only in periodicals, expanded Greenberg’s already considerable authority. His trenchant account of the nature of Modernism and of the achievements and relative aesthetic worth of Modernist artists, past and present, became essential elements in any consideration of the recent history of art. Greenberg traveled widely. He was invited to lecture and conduct seminars, to select and judge exhibitions, and to contribute to art magazines and museum catalogues throughout the world. His opinions about works of art and about artists who interested him were solicited, formally and informally, by collectors and art dealers internationally. Wherever he was, he satisfied his apparently boundless appetite for looking at art by visiting museums, exhibitions, and studios, establishing lasting connections with artists that ignored geographical boundaries.

Yet in the last ten or fifteen years of his life, Greenberg became a sort of mythical bugbear, invoked, like Sigmund Freud, by his admirers as the ultimate authority and by his adversaries as the source of everything they disapproved of. He embodied a notion of the art critic as a subjective, demanding eye, as a rigorous, implacable judge. Those who admired Greenberg saw him as a defender of the highest standards of aesthetic excellence; those who didn’t saw him as arrogant, narrow, and out of touch with a changing art world. His insistence on discussing only those elements of a work of art that could be seen, without reference to intention or theory, led to assumptions that he approved only of formalist abstraction and cared nothing for "content"; any art that he liked was assumed to be empty and devoid of "meaning." Greenberg was frequently misquoted during this period, his complex and subtle descriptions of his experience of works of art distorted into simplistic prescriptions or reduced to puerile notions about flatness or close-valued color. His critical voice, assured and authoritative from the start of his career, was interpreted not as recounting what he had seen, but as issuing directives. The phrase "would appear to be" was read as "ought to be," while the tacit "in my opinion" or "in my experience" with which each of Greenberg’s essays implicitly began was ignored, despite the ample evidence that the critic, at his best, was led, however reluctantly, by his eye, never by preconception or an idea about what art should be.

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