Clement Greenberg, Late Writings - Softcover

Greenberg, Clement

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816639396 ISBN 13: 9780816639397

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2007

Synopsis

Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) was a colossus of twentieth-century American art, achieving a degree of authority almost unimaginable for a critic today. For more than thirty years he was both lionized as a proponent of formalism and criticized for his perceived dogmatism. In the postwar period Greenberg used his position of influence to advocate the importance of abstract expressionism and color-field painting and to establish the careers of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning. With the coming of pop art, performance and conceptual art, and postmodernism, however, Greenberg found his position increasingly challenged.

Edited with an introduction by critic Robert C. Morgan, Clement Greenberg, Late Writings is the first collection from the period 1970 to 1990, and the only comprehensive resource for Greenberg’s thought during the last third of his life. While earlier works have covered Greenberg’s early and middle career, this volume spans his mature period, during which he reevaluates and refines many of his earlier tenets in some of his most carefully crafted and engaging work. Exploring a surprising breadth of issues and mediums and demonstrating a depth of aesthetic and philosophical insights, in these relatively unknown works Greenberg incites a new direction for modernism beyond the twentieth century.

This essential volume includes five interviews from the end of his life in which Greenberg revisits some of the concerns of his formative years, illuminating the progression of his thought. Late Writings is an integral resource as issues of quality and significance in the dynamic world of art continue to be redefined.

Clement Greenberg was the most influential art critic of the postwar period. He was the author of numerous books, and his essays appeared in art magazines as well as such publications as Partisan Review, Commentary, and The Nation.

Robert C. Morgan is the author of The End of the Art World and of a monograph on the optical painter Vasarely. In addition to his work as a critic, artist, art historian, and curator, he is visiting professor of art at Hunter College in New York City.

About this title

About the Author:

Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), champion of abstract expressionism and modernism--of Pollock, Miró, and Matisse--has been esteemed by many as the greatest art critic of the second half of the twentieth century, and possibly the greatest art critic of all time. On radio and in print, Greenberg was the voice of "the new American painting," and a central figure in the postwar cultural history of the United States. Greenberg first established his reputation writing for the Partisan Review, which he joined as an editor in 1940. He became art critic for The Nation in 1942, and was associate editor of Commentary from 1945 until 1957. His seminal essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" set the terms for the ongoing debate about the relationship of modern high art to popular culture. Though many of his ideas have been challenged, Greenberg has influenced generations of critics, historians, and artists, and he remains influential to this day.

From Publishers Weekly:

The outsized reputation of formalist art critic Greenberg, sometimes called the most influential art critic of the 20th century, rests largely on a body of mid-century writings around the work of Abstract Expressionism and the rise of hard-edge minimalism. This collection of essays brings to light the prolific work Greenberg produced after that time, in the 1970s and 80s, when the art world had begun moving away from his powerful, if proscriptive and tendentious, ideals. Among other topics, Greenberg deals with the rise of multimedia art, the state of the avant-garde and the standing of old favorites like Clyfford Still and Picasso. Also included are a handful of interviews he gave. For the most part, the essays and conversations show the critic staying the course on issues of taste and distinction, tinkering out his generally Kantian theory of aesthetic development, with its residually Marxist sense of dialectical improvement, phrased in dense, but always lucid, American prose. "Taste develops as a context of expectations based on experiences of previously surprised expectations"-that's not such a difficult idea, but it's full of big implications. Always assured, sometimes rebarbative, Greenberg's oeuvre has fallen on hard times in the wake of more semiotic models of visual interpretation. But perhaps this collection, with its sensitive and intelligent introduction by writer and curator Morgan, will go some ways in repairing it.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0816639396
• ISBN 13: 9780816639397
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280
• Editor: Morgan Robert C.