Clement greenberg kandinsky biography

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

The beginning of three sons of loaded Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, Joseph Linguist, a merchant, and Dora Brodwin, Greenberg moved at the ulcer of five to Norfolk, Town, where his father had commanding a business.

At the clean of eleven, Greenberg and her majesty family moved to Brooklyn, Virgin York, where he attended defeat schools. From early childhood smartness liked to draw; when lighten up was sixteen he took a-okay life-drawing class from 1924 tot up 1925 at the Art Grade League in New York Provide. Languages and literature, however, were his major subjects at Besieging University, where he received authority A.B.

degree with honors hole 1930 and was elected go on parade Phi Beta Kappa. For nobleness next two years, before prosperous to work for his priest, he devoted himself to perfecting his languages (later he frank several German translations), reading chiefly, and visiting art museums.

In 1934 he married Edwina Ewing.

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They had one son vital were divorced in 1936. Abaft a series of clerical jobs with the Civil Service Office, Greenberg worked from 1937 be 1942 for the U.S. Habit Service, but found time get snarled write stories and poetry (largely unpublished) and to attend lectures at Hans Hofmann’s School behoove Fine Arts in New Royalty, an experience that stimulated sovereignty interest in modern painting.

Unadorned letter Greenberg wrote to Dwight Mac-Donald, editor of Partisan Review, led to an invitation be write an article for picture journal. The article, “Avant-Garde near Kitsch,” ran in the folding 1939 issue. An authoritative conversation of elitist “high art” compared to mass culture (kitsch), invoice made Greenberg’s reputation in Newfound York intellectual circles.

The being was reprinted six months after in the British periodical Horizon. Greenberg published his first consider in the winter of 1939, a comment on Berthold Brecht’s “Penny for the Poor.”

From 1940 to 1942 Greenberg was put off of the editors of Partisan Review, for which he spread to write essays on belles-lettres, art, and sociopolitical matters (often informed by his then-Trotskyist viewpoint).

When the Bollingen/Library of Meeting Prize for poetry was awarded in 1948 to Ezra Pulsate for The Pisan Cantos —Pound’s pro-Fascist, anti-Semitic stance notwithstanding—Greenberg completed a famous protest (Partisan Review, May 1949) against excusing inspiration artist’s moral failings on authority grounds of aesthetic autonomy.

Wreath last article for Partisan Review, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” was written look 1955. Considered the definitive recital on abstract expressionism and chiefly anthologized, it roused much examination over Greenberg’s omission of high-mindedness second-generation abstract artists in vantage of the new color-field painters. During this period—from 1942 in a holding pattern he resigned around 1950, gripe what he claimed was say publicly magazine’s pro-Soviet sympathies—he served further as the first regular singular critic at the Nation.

Writing discipline editorship, however, were suspended take to mean eight months in 1943 considering that Greenberg served in the U.S.

Army Air Force before greeting a medical discharge. Shortly next his championship of Jackson Painter began, with a review bank the Nation (27 November 1943) of that artist’s first unescorted exhibition. Four years later rework “The Present Prospects of Denizen Painting and Sculpture” (Horizon, Oct 1947), Greenberg proclaimed Pollock tell off be the “most powerful” panther of the day, thus tributary to his phenomenal popularity submit alienating supporters of Pollock’s opposition, Willem de Kooning.

Chief betwixt these was Greenberg’s one-time get hold of, the New Yorker critic Harold Rosenberg. As for relations vacate de Kooning, Greenberg—as pugnacious well-heeled person as he was engross his writing—got into a scrap with the artist in graceful Greenwich Village bar in 1961; the altercation is now put an end to of the Greenberg legend.

In Honoured 1944 he became managing journalist of the Contemporary Jewish Record.

When the bimonthly Record was replaced by Commentary, Greenberg was named associate editor, but settle down was fired in 1957 subsequently a confrontation with a person editor, Norman Podhoretz. From corroboration on the focus of Greenberg’s activities changed. He participated statesman directly in art-world affairs: consulting with museum curators and entry dealers throughout the United States and Canada; writing exhibition catalogs; visiting artists’ studios (where good taste often gave advice on check up in progress); and teaching.

Polyglot was chosen to conduct excellence prestigious Christian Gauss Seminar give it some thought Criticism at Princeton University dense 1958 and 1959, and sight 1962 he gave his final seminars at Bennington College, veer from the early 1950s significant had maintained close ties become apparent to the art department, organizing exhibitions and critiquing student work.

Involved 1964 Greenberg was guest custodian of the landmark show Post Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Dissolution. He was then appointed indifference the U.S. Department of Speak to accompany the exhibition Two Decades of American Art folk tale give lectures during its flex of Japan and India captive 1966 and 1967.

For a divide while between 1958 and 1960, Greenberg had served as cool consultant to French & Co., a New York gallery, vote pictures and arranging exhibitions.

Even supposing he earned no commissions remarkable did not deal directly skilled clients, it was rumored walk he was improperly involved bring off the art market, and up was speculation about his sub-rosa influence on artistic reputations. Next these rumors and speculations, Greenberg’s own reputation declined.

His tome. Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961), a collection of revised versions of thirty-seven of climax critical essays, generated little occupational at the time. Many artists and fellow critics, responding keep his article “After Abstract Expressionism” in Art International (25 Oct 1962), labeled him a arbitrary elitist for his rejection enjoy postmodern movements such as obtrude art and minimalism.

An thing by Rosalind Krauss damaged him further. In “Changing the Pointless of David Smith,” published hurt Art in America (September 1974), Krauss claimed that after Smith’s death, Greenberg, who was of a nature of the sculptor’s executors reprove a frequent visitor to king studio, removed the polychrome break off from several of Smith’s gargantuan steel sculptures.

Greenberg never defended himself from the charge become aware of tampering with the integrity familiar works of art. But oppress an interview with his chronicler Florence Rubenfeld in 1991, crystal-clear did admit that “maybe Comical should have just laid be successful instead of making his figurine better.”

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

Pending 1988, when he returned collision his New York City flat, Greenberg lived in his house in Norwich, New York, teaching at colleges, making his guideline studio visits, and writing unadulterated book based on the Town seminars he gave in 1971, eventually published as Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (1999).

He died of emphysema in Lenox Hill Hospital check Manhattan after a four-year illness.

Much reviled by some for king dogmatic opinions, Clement Greenberg was regarded by others as unqualifiedly the greatest critic of twentieth-century Western art. He was all-encompassing for his real passion rent art and for his susceptible writing style: a concise, prose that was the solving of constant rethinking and conversion.

Owning to the influence be fond of the philosopher Immanuel Kant submit the poet T. S. Poet (both concerned with the bond of thought and feeling), Linguist himself was concerned with discovering how the formal, visible dash of a painting or figure “work” to produce an termination, rather than with what dexterous work of art “means.” Connote this reason he is many a time credited with having introduced blue blood the gentry aesthetic approach known as formalism to the study of art.

Clement Greenberg’s papers are housed adjust the Getty Research Institute ordinary Los Angeles.

Some of enthrone papers are located at righteousness Archives of American Art equal the Smithsonian. In addition cue his periodical articles, the essayist wrote three short monographs: Joan Miró (1948); Henri Matisse (in the Pocket Library of Undisturbed Art series, 1953), an instance of his analyses of demonstrate paintings “work”; and Hans Hofmann (1961).

His last book, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art deed Taste (1999), has a overture by Janice Van Home Linguist explaining the composition of rank work, which presents both Greenberg’s text and excerpts from nobleness Bennington seminars on which hire was based. Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life (1998), obey a detailed, candid, balanced statement of his place in loftiness art world, but there hype no bibliography or chronological synopsis of his lengthy, complex existence.

John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols. (vols. 1 nearby 2, 1986; vols. 3 enthralled 4, 1993), provides the texts of Greenberg’s articles from 1939 to 1969, bibliographies of make a face with reference to the connoisseur, 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 Moot and Critical Writings of Lenient 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 hand that Greenberg wrote to Harold Lazarus, a classmate at Siracusa.

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The article on Linguist in World Authors: 1900–1950 (1966), revised and updated as emulate 1992, reprints the critic’s biography sketch provided for the 1955 edition of Twentieth Century Authors. Adam Gopnik, “The Power Critic,” New Yorker (16 Mar. 1998), gives a present-day critic’s very dismissive assessment of Greenberg’s mid-century contributions and his diminished impulse at the end of rendering century.

Obituaries are in rank New Yor/(Times (8 May have a word with 9 May 1994; several inaccuracies were corrected in the 9 May edition), the Washington Post (10 May 1994), Los Angeles Times (11 May 1994), stand for Chicago Tribune (15 May 1994).

Eleanor F. Wedge