Nothing If Not Critical

Imagine what the reaction would be today if an art critic issued this pronunciamento: “The extreme eclecticism now prevailing in art is unhealthy, and it should be counteracted, even at the risk of dogmatism and intolerance.” Some postmodern identity-politics artist would probably draw and quarter the offender to cheering crowds as part of a performance piece at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. And for adding, “Let painting confine itself to the disposition pure and simple of color and line, and not intrigue us by associations with things we can experience more authentically elsewhere,” he might find his body parts flung into an installation at the Geffen Contemporary as much for thinking painting is still important as for thinking it’s better when it’s abstract.

But when Clement Greenberg inveighed against eclecticism, it was in the pre-atomic year 1944. And he was talking about the Museum of Modern Art’s slavish admiration of reactionary Surrealists and School of Paris semi-abstractionists. The next year, he would take a flier on a young, glowering American abstract artist named Jackson Pollock: “[His] second one-man show at Art of This Century [Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery] establishes him, in my opinion, as the strongest painter of his generation and perhaps the greatest one to appear since Miro.”

Carefully buttressed over the next few years by exquisitely timed polemical essays reiterating that the only hope for salvation of an already exhausted modern art resided in the irascible New York painters who would come to be known as Abstract Expressionists, Greenberg’s opinions on art would become gospel in Manhattan Bohemia. By the mid-1960s, he would have not just discovered but actually hot-housed the next putatively major movement in art, Color-Field painting, and be sitting pretty as a $900-per-hour artists’ advisor and cultural kingmaker.

In the mid-’40s, as Florence Rubenfeld writes in her surprisingly readable biography (we’re talking the life of an art critic here), Greenberg cut an almost sinisterly impressive figure: “Clem was in his mid-thirties, five feet eleven inches tall, with an impressive forehead exaggerated by a domed head, bald for as long as anyone could remember. He had a beaked nose, large liquid-brown eyes, full sensual lips, and long, shapely fingers usually locked around an unfiltered Camel in the standard toke position. He stuttered a bit in those days and spoke carefully as a consequence. His words issued from the front of his mouth, as if his teeth stood guard.”

When I first met Greenberg in 1980, at one of those comfy, bucolic, out-of-New-York symposiums at which he loved playing the eminence grise, he was 71 and by then as august and irrelevant to the actual playing field of contemporary art as, say, Casey Stengel is to contemporary baseball. In 1989, Elizabeth Frank observed in her review of his collected essays that Greenberg was the most hated man in the New York art world. Greenberg’s long career arc is one of American art’s more fascinating--I’d almost say intellectually lurid--stories, involving as it does Stalinist office politics, a doomed Pygmalionesque love affair, questionable ethics, booze, drugs and a psychiatric cult.

Greenberg’s immigrant father, Joseph, had to concoct a western territory for his necktie business to get his laggard son out of his Brooklyn house. All that accomplished, however, was foster a brief marriage in Carmel, bear Greenberg a son (Danny) with whom he could never cope and provide him with the material for his only published poem, “Sacramento 1935.” It later proved to be plagiarized from a poem by Mary Lorimer Welch published in the New Republic in 1933--a fact that makes you think “hmmm” when considering Greenberg’s fetish for artistic originality. Greenberg returned to the East and got himself a couple of civil service jobs that enabled him to move out on his own into Greenwich Village and into literary editing for the politicized “little magazines” Partisan Review and Commentary. Partisan Review never had a circulation of more than 8,000, but it held enormous sway in the 1940s among those known as “New York intellectuals,” who in turn constituted the straw that stirred the drink of American cultural life.

The magazine was, if not communist with a capital C, at least (in Rubenfeld’s words) “dedicated to the idea of social revolution and . . . [p]roletarian literature as a way to make the experience and humanity of working men and women accessible to those who were educated or affluent.” Nevertheless, the magazine promoted modernism, the difficult, obscure poetry, painting and music its beloved proles would have thrown out in a Moscow minute if they’d run it. Greenberg left the review--whose anti-Stalinist Stalinist water-cooler politics among such editors and contributors as Phillip Rahv and Dwight MacDonald were so divisive that the magazine announced, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, that it could take “no editorial line on the war”--when the Nation offered him a slot as its art critic.

At that time, no serious writer wrote seriously about painting and sculpture in any American magazine. And Greenberg brought no expertise other than a dilettante’s dabble in painting to the table. In fact, he embarrassed himself right away, describing Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” as containing purple, orange and other “impure” colors when, of course, it contained all primaries. But he soon found his bearings in the profession for which he’d apparently been born. In forceful, clear, almost student-simple English, he told readers what general styles were on the rise or fall and why. He said that abstraction was up because it matched the nature of the modern, urban world, and figuration was down because all it could do was borrow “images from a stale past.” He accused French art of treading water and praised American art for displaying “more originality and more honesty.”

Greenberg went fearlessly out on limbs; famously the one (his 1945 review) with Jackson Pollock’s “drip paintings” blooming at its tip. Greenberg could flash rhetorical when necessary (“What can fifty [Abstract Expressionists] do against a hundred and forty million?” he cried about the plight of the avant-garde artist in the midst of a philistine populace in 1947), and he could stamp his essays with titles reminiscent of papal bulls (“The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture”).

The trouble was, Greenberg wasn’t an especially nice guy. In fact, he was something of a prick. When Harold Rosenberg coined the term “action painting” to describe the same group of radical painters and championed Willem de Kooning over Pollock, Greenberg took to getting drunk and disorderly at the Cedar Tavern, a haunt for Abstract Expressionists and their admirers. A typical exchange between de Kooning and Greenberg, two Cedar regulars who grudgingly respected--but did not really like--one another, went something like:

De Kooning: I’ve slept with all your women.

Greenberg: Elaine [de Kooning] was the only woman you ever had that I thought even looked good.

Greenberg frequently threw punches, too, although, between the lines, the fisticuffs read more like Maureen O’Hara versus Yvonne de Carlo than Graziano-Zale. In the late ‘50s (a decade after he’d quit writing regular reviews but was still issuing frequent words from the mount), he finagled himself a $100-per-week consultancy with a high-end gallery whose owners hoped that Greenberg could bring them the Pollock estate. (He couldn’t; Pollock’s widow, Lee Krasner, thought his jumping off the Pollock bandwagon in the early ‘50s helped drive Jackson into drunk driving and death.) He repeated the consulting arrangement in the 1960s with the Color-Field painters and Andre Emmerich--this time earning a cool $100,000 a year and a choice painting from each show as commission for each time one of “his” artists sold something. Greenberg also received gifts of art from many artists whose studios he visited to proffer advice. Add to all this the scandals concerning his posthumously altering some of David Smith’s sculptures (mostly by deliberately letting some brightly colored ones remain outdoors to be paint-stripped by the weather) and the dictating of just how the late Morris Louis’ canvases were to be cropped when stretched, and you have the Cardinal Richelieu of postwar American art.

In the early 1950s, Greenberg fell in love--hard--with Helen Frankenthaler, a pretty, privileged recent Bennington graduate. With a likely assist from his critical acumen, she became the first artist to “do something” with what seemed to be the radical dead-end of Pollock’s drip technique. Her stain paintings knocked the socks off Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, who proceeded to form a little Color-Field colony in Bennington. (Wags later called the town “Clemsville.”) But Frankenthaler eventually dumped her much older boyfriend. Greenberg went into a deep funk and had himself analyzed by a shrink associated with a Manhattan psychiatric cult that advocated, in part, total breaks with family and monogamy. Although Greenberg wed again, the marriage remained open while he went through Bennington women like Sherman through Georgia. According to Rubenfeld, the heavy-drinking Greenberg also “smoked pot and hashish regularly, sniffed coke four, five, even six times a week, [and] sniffed heroin” through much of the ‘70s. Wreck, I think, is the word for what Greenberg became. And a Lear-like one: “No one in the Greenberg family had heard from Danny in the twenty years prior to Clem’s death, and Clem had made no effort to locate him. ‘He knows where to find me,’ was his only comment.”

But it wasn’t just the hubris and decadence of “Imperial Clem” (as Rubenfeld calls him) that made Greenberg the art world’s man-you-love-to-hate. Although he’d been right about Pollock, his next big bet on Color-Field painting was a loser. It produced only two really good artists (Frankenthaler and Louis). Noland’s liquid targets and stripes were tasty for a dozen years before he sank into what looks like abstractoid lobby art for the Caracas Hilton. Olitski--whom Greenberg once ordained as America’s greatest living painter when he soaked and sprayed Popsicle colors into huge canvases in the ‘60s--seemed afterward to pulp his own press releases into thick, sequiny “matter” paintings that remind you more of the plaster in suburban Mexican restaurants than they do of Pollock’s legacy.

And Greenberg’s narrow dogmatism didn’t sit well with the post-Vietnam generation. Many dutifully formalist art students of the ‘60s became the gay, black, Latino, feminist, figurative, political, video and installation artists of the ‘70s. They most certainly didn’t want to listen to any more lectures about art being solely concerned with aesthetic quality (with a capital Q), a term Greenberg employed with the casual zeal of an alchemist extolling phlogiston. (When Greenberg once told me, “You know, the best abstract welded sculpture in the world is now being made in Alberta,” I figured that Canadian lake water must leach a lot of quality into the local iron ore.)

Nevertheless, we who love art owe a hell of a lot to Greenberg. He gave the most progressive American artists of the 1940s the go-ahead (artists do read reviews and are affected by them) to be great and to make New York the modernist capital of the world for 30 years. He lent the practice of art criticism some bones of objectivity; before him criticism had only a pale, translucent, subjective skin. And he told people why it made sense to walk through an encyclopedic art museum and imagine that the Greek statues, old master landscapes and Abstract Expressionist brush-stroke catharses truly had something in common. I’d rather have spent half an hour rereading a wonderfully limpid, if naggingly obstinate, Greenberg essay than a whole afternoon plowing through an argot-laden volume by some anti-Greenberg academic whiningly preoccupied with telling me that everything art can do, partisan sociology can do better. Then I could spend the time I saved looking at art.