The Harold Letters 1928-1943: The Making of an American Intellectual - Hardcover

Greenberg, Clement; Janice Van Horne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582430683 ISBN 13: 9781582430683

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2000

Synopsis

These letters tell the story of the formative years of art critic Clement Greenberg. Addressed to his best friend and written beginning when Greenberg was 19, the letters offer an informal account of his travels, sexual adventures, emotional highs and lows, and intellectual and artistic development all set against the backdrop of the Depression, the New York intellectual scene, and the Second World War. The letters have been collected and edited here by Greenberg's widow, Janice Van Horne. Sixteen pages of photographs are also included. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

About the Author:

Clement Greenberg died in 1994, at the age of eighty-five.

From Publishers Weekly:

Legendary modernist art critic Greenberg (Art & Culture, etc.) was known for his harsh opinions. Indeed, one characteristic anecdote tells of his condemning some work by the painter Morris Louis, whereupon Louis destroyed all of the reviled canvases in despair. Despite his undeniable role in advancing a generation of American abstract expressionists from Jackson Pollock to Frank Stella, Greenberg's destructive urges overwhelm this collection of letters, edited by his widow, Janice Van Horne. Addressed over 15 years to a gay former college roommate of Greenberg's from Syracuse University, these letters are as macho as Hemingway and often twice as full of themselves. In one 1939 letter about Auden's work, Greenberg has "to admit to myself that my latest poems are better than his, on a higher level" and that Wallace Stevens is "a numbskull with paltry ideas." (An appendix presents some of Greenberg's doggerel.) Page after page brims with the sort of sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic observations that were common in the era, and only the most patient readers will wade through them in order to reach vitriolic gems like "Curse the [Partisan Review editors Dwight and Janice] Macdonalds & the people like them who have no personal lives and fail to recognize them in others." The editing here ("to create a story of appropriate length and accessibility") leaves Greenberg's correspondent little more than the object of conjecture. Yet there is a sort of grim fascination in seeing the underside of a great critic's apparatus, and these letters do form a portrait of the critic as a bright and angry young man. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1582430683
• ISBN 13: 9781582430683
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 289
• Editor: Van Horne Janice