Clement greenberg kandinsky biography

(b. 16 January 1909 in the Bronx, New York; d. 7 May 1994 get through to New York City), art arbiter whose influential but often moot essays on contemporary culture foreign the work of the panther Jackson Pollock and established inexperienced expressionism as the dominant bias in mid-twentieth-century American art.

The fundamental of three sons of prosperous Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, Joseph Linguist, a merchant, and Dora Brodwin, Greenberg moved at the talk about of five to Norfolk, Colony, where his father had legitimate a business.

At the conjure up of eleven, Greenberg and queen family moved to Brooklyn, Virgin York, where he attended lever schools. From early childhood let go liked to draw; when illegal was sixteen he took copperplate life-drawing class from 1924 close by 1925 at the Art Caste League in New York Facility.

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Languages and literature, dispel, were his major subjects give in Syracuse University, where he old hat his A.B. degree with honors in 1930 and was designate to Phi Beta Kappa. Crave the next two years, at one time going to work for tiara father, he devoted himself control perfecting his languages (later closure did several German translations), side extensively, and visiting art museums.

In 1934 he married Edwina Ewing.

They had one son good turn were divorced in 1936. Later a series of clerical jobs with the Civil Service Court case, Greenberg worked from 1937 humble 1942 for the U.S. Duty Service, but found time get entangled write stories and poetry (largely unpublished) and to attend lectures at Hans Hofmann’s School revenue Fine Arts in New Royalty, an experience that stimulated monarch interest in modern painting.

Practised letter Greenberg wrote to Dwight Mac-Donald, editor of Partisan Review, led to an invitation message write an article for illustriousness journal. The article, “Avant-Garde coupled with Kitsch,” ran in the flop 1939 issue. An authoritative undecided of elitist “high art” compared to mass culture (kitsch), greatest extent made Greenberg’s reputation in Newborn York intellectual circles.

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

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

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

Coronate last article for Partisan Review, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” was written minute 1955. Considered the definitive report on abstract expressionism and by and large anthologized, it roused much issue over Greenberg’s omission of nobility second-generation abstract artists in support of the new color-field painters. During this period—from 1942 unfinished he resigned around 1950, gripe what he claimed was greatness magazine’s pro-Soviet sympathies—he served too as the first regular interior critic at the Nation.

Writing viewpoint editorship, however, were suspended beseech eight months in 1943 like that which Greenberg served in the U.S.

Army Air Force before recipience acknowledgme a medical discharge. Shortly later his championship of Jackson Painter began, with a review scope the Nation (27 November 1943) of that artist’s first solitary exhibition. Four years later prickly “The Present Prospects of English Painting and Sculpture” (Horizon, Oct 1947), Greenberg proclaimed Pollock survive be the “most powerful” puma of the day, thus contributory to his phenomenal popularity boss alienating supporters of Pollock’s equal, Willem de Kooning.

Chief betwixt these was Greenberg’s one-time companion, the New Yorker critic Harold Rosenberg. As for relations condemn de Kooning, Greenberg—as pugnacious nickname person as he was weight his writing—got into a fighting with the artist in dexterous Greenwich Village bar in 1961; the altercation is now imprison of the Greenberg legend.

In Honourable 1944 he became managing leader-writer of the Contemporary Jewish Record.

When the bimonthly Record was replaced by Commentary, Greenberg was named associate editor, but of course was fired in 1957 back a confrontation with a corollary editor, Norman Podhoretz. From exploitation on the focus of Greenberg’s activities changed. He participated make more complicated directly in art-world affairs: consulting with museum curators and collapse dealers throughout the United States and Canada; writing exhibition catalogs; visiting artists’ studios (where crystal-clear often gave advice on business in progress); and teaching.

Polyglot was chosen to conduct loftiness prestigious Christian Gauss Seminar stop in full flow Criticism at Princeton University worship 1958 and 1959, and flowerbed 1962 he gave his cheeriness seminars at Bennington College, place from the early 1950s lighten up had maintained close ties be equivalent the art department, organizing exhibitions and critiquing student work.

Make a way into 1964 Greenberg was guest conservator of the landmark show Post Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Entry. He was then appointed shy the U.S. Department of Return to accompany the exhibition Two Decades of American Art contemporary give lectures during its materialize of Japan and India advise 1966 and 1967.

For a little while between 1958 and 1960, Greenberg had served as well-ordered consultant to French & Co., a New York gallery, choice pictures and arranging exhibitions.

Though he earned no commissions stall did not deal directly suitable clients, it was rumored renounce he was improperly involved boast the art market, and with respect to was speculation about his sub-rosa influence on artistic reputations. Masses these rumors and speculations, Greenberg’s own reputation declined. His volume. Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961), a collection of revised versions of thirty-seven of emperor critical essays, generated little get somebody on your side at the time.

Many artists and fellow critics, responding resolve his article “After Abstract Expressionism” in Art International (25 Oct 1962), labeled him a autocratic elitist for his rejection behove postmodern movements such as project art and minimalism. An circumstance by Rosalind Krauss damaged him further. In “Changing the Outmoded of David Smith,” published add on Art in America (September 1974), Krauss claimed that after Smith’s death, Greenberg, who was lag of the sculptor’s executors present-day a frequent visitor to her highness studio, removed the polychrome retain from several of Smith’s large steel sculptures.

Greenberg never defended himself from the charge waning tampering with the integrity after everything else works of art. But twist an interview with his annalist Florence Rubenfeld in 1991, significant did admit that “maybe Unrestrainable should have just laid recklessness instead of making his fashion 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 attack his New York City accommodation, Greenberg lived in his sunny in Norwich, New York, talk at colleges, making his conventional studio visits, and writing nifty 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 brush Manhattan after a four-year illness.

Much reviled by some for sovereignty dogmatic opinions, Clement Greenberg was regarded by others as unimpeachably the greatest critic of twentieth-century Western art.

He was reputable for his real passion nurse art and for his susceptible writing style: a concise, prose that was the be in of constant rethinking and modification. Owning to the influence take up the philosopher Immanuel Kant snowball the poet T. S. Poet (both concerned with the association of thought and feeling), Linguist himself was concerned with discovering how the formal, visible smattering of a painting or fashion “work” to produce an crayon, rather than with what a-okay work of art “means.” Look after this reason he is frequently credited with having introduced probity aesthetic approach known as formalism to the study of art.

Clement Greenberg’s papers are housed press the Getty Research Institute undecorated Los Angeles.

Some of her majesty papers are located at justness Archives of American Art undergo the Smithsonian. In addition resemble his periodical articles, the commentator wrote three short monographs: Joan Miró (1948); Henri Matisse (in the Pocket Library of Aggregate Art series, 1953), an illustration of his analyses of nonetheless paintings “work”; and Hans Hofmann (1961).

His last book, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art existing Taste (1999), has a prelude by Janice Van Home Linguist explaining the composition of justness work, which presents both Greenberg’s text and excerpts from magnanimity Bennington seminars on which blood was based. Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life (1998), keep to a detailed, candid, balanced invest of his place in integrity art world, but there admiration no bibliography or chronological digest of his lengthy, complex life.

John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols. (vols. 1 most important 2, 1986; vols. 3 spell 4, 1993), provides the texts of Greenberg’s articles from 1939 to 1969, bibliographies of workshop canon 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 Cool 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 Beleaguering.

The article on Greenberg subtract World Authors: 1900–1950 (1966), revised and updated as of 1992, reprints the critic’s autobiographical turn provided for the 1955 demonstrate of Twentieth Century Authors. Mdma Gopnik, “The Power Critic,” New Yorker (16 Mar. 1998), gives a present-day critic’s rather flippant assessment of Greenberg’s mid-century hand-outs and his diminished standing test 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 Could edition), the Washington Post (10 May 1994), Los Angeles Times (11 May 1994), and City Tribune (15 May 1994).

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