The prescience of a cranky critic

Once upon a time, in faraway Manhattan, there lived an evil art critic named Clement Greenberg. He hurled opinions like lightening bolts. He amassed power that covertly dominated battles over who would rise in the art world. He skipped across ethical lines between his work as a critic and that of power broker.

At the same time, there was another figure: Clement the Good. He befriended artists. They invited him to their studios, where they welcomed his canny advice. He cared little for riches and gave himself to a lifelong dance with art and ideas.

It’s difficult to believe that both Greenbergs shared one life, to read the sharply differing accounts of him published over recent decades. He was regarded as the most provocative, if not the most influential, art critic of the 20th century. He made the intellectual case for American abstraction after World War II. He became the most forceful early champion of Jackson Pollock. Still, for much of the time since his death in 1994 at 85, and sustained in part by a 1997 biography, memories of the evil Clem have prevailed.

Lately, that has been changing as art historians focus less on his Janus-faced persona and more on his writing about the evolution of Modernism. In books, essays and university courses, scholars, writers and even artists say they are finding new ways to understand the critic. Meanwhile, Greenberg’s critical path is gaining an unusual kind of exposure as his personal collection of artwork makes its way across the country. The 65 pieces in “Clement Greenberg: A Critic’s Collection” will be on view at the Palm Springs Desert Museum through Jan. 2, before completing a two-year, seven-stop journey at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, N.Y.

Three scholars engaged in the reexamination of Greenberg are art historian Robert Hobbs, who has been teaching an art theory seminar at Yale University this fall; James Meyer, an Emory University art historian who recently wrote about a previously unpublished Greenberg essay; and Caroline Jones, who teaches at MIT. In the spring, the University of Chicago Press will publish Jones’ book “Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses,” a theoretical study of Greenberg’s life and ideas.

Hobbs, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and visiting professor at Yale, said his students, young painters all, appreciate Greenberg’s rigor about the formal process of making art. “We have started looking at him in a very different way,” Hobbs said, “and I think the ability to look at him in this more detached way comes because he is out of the picture and we can see his contributions with a bigger, much grander historical perspective.”

It was Meyer who unearthed the unpublished Greenberg essay that appeared in Artforum magazine in October. The (generally disapproving) piece, titled “Pop Art,” was discovered at the Getty Research Institute in Brentwood, where the Greenberg papers are kept. Greenberg’s dismissal of Pop Art has long been part of his reputation as a narrow-minded grump, but the newly found piece loosens that perspective by showing that his critique was more careful than people realized and shed light on his general idea about stylistic changes at the time.

Organizers of the Palm Springs show say the exhibition also offers a pronounced opportunity to assess this complex writer-aesthetician anew. It affirms the strength of Greenberg’s preferences, according to Karen Wilkin, who wrote the main catalog essay. She added that the pieces display a taste that ranges more widely than some would expect, from landscape artists in Canada to American artists who continue to carry abstraction into our time. Wilkin, a critic for whom Greenberg’s work has been a touchstone, writes that the collection “is an instructive record of a working critic’s day-to-day testing of his eye and his judgments” across a lifetime.

“Anyone who is interested in the history of recent art, the history of taste in the 20th century, anyone interested in just plain critical prose, has to take Greenberg into account,” she said in an interview.

The show, abstract paintings and sculpture in most cases, represents fewer than half of the 159 works that Janice Van Horne, Greenberg’s widow, sold in 2000 to the Portland Art Museum. The Portland museum curated the show and is building a new wing to house the collection. The names on the pieces in Palm Springs offer a partial map of the American art universe as it formed and reformed from the 1930s to the 1990s. At the entrance to the gallery, just past the cavernous geometry of the museum’s front lobby, hangs a deft ink-on-paper drawing by Jackson Pollock. Just beyond it rests a lyrical bust of Greenberg, a 1990 bronze by British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, who credited Greenberg with guiding him out of a long ago creative impasse by pointing the way to abstraction.

Other artists with whom Greenberg was particularly close also appear: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Helen Frankenthaler and the abstract painter Hans Hofmann, a teacher-artist more than 20 years older than Greenberg who became a sort of mentor to him. Each piece suggests a different story. The Pollock drawing, from a time before their relationship went sour, was a birthday present, signed: “For Clem Greenberg Happy Jan. 16, 1951.”

The show includes lesser-known artists, such as Susan Roth, an American born in 1950, whose abstract pieces, Wilkin says, Greenberg valued as some of the finest work of her generation. Then there is Canadian Jack Bush (1909-77), little known to many Americans but highly regarded by Greenberg. Dorothy Knowles is another Canadian. Now in her 80s, she is, in Wilkin’s words, “the reigning grande dame of Canadian landscape painting.”

A question of ethics

The case for Greenberg’s importance grows from his powerful essays in the Partisan Review and other journals starting in the 1930s. In them, he shaped a closely reasoned logic for how abstract art embodied the next step in an inevitable (or so he thought) progress art had made since the Impressionists. He rooted his view in the past, in French painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially late Monet, Cezanne and the cubists.

He pressed his theoretical construction with language that bore a magisterial aura of objectivity, even as he repeatedly denied that he sought to dictate opinion. Many who faulted that dictatorial tone saw his writing and his multifaceted participation in the art world as interlocking parts of a power broker’s technique to self-aggrandize. That view extended to suspicions that the large collection he built from gifts from the artists he wrote about was yet another manifestation of his disregard for ethics. By today’s standards, a critic who accepted gifts from people he wrote about would risk rebuke or firing.

Visitors to Greenberg’s apartment on Central Park West remember walls covered with art. Wilkin, one of those visitors, said the collection changed as he sold some pieces and acquired others. And no one denies that he sometimes sold when he needed money. But Florence Rubenfeld, in her ’97 biography, “Clement Greenberg, A Life,” concluded that the gifts moved through a life far more intellectual and literary in its goals than aggressively materialistic. “Beginning in the forties, Clem accepted gifts from artists whose work he admired, a custom common in Europe and widely practiced in this country as well, although certainly an ethically questionable arrangement,” she writes.

The show in Palm Springs displays Greenberg’s critical growth in the early 1960s, as he promoted the more detached, more specifically shape-focused styles of color-field painting -- with its stress on unmodulated fields of color, often soaked into canvas -- and the iconic modes of Post-Painterly Abstraction. They are embodied by the colored shapes of Noland’s paintings, the dense, spray-painted layers of Olitski’s. It is 40 years since Greenberg included those artists in one of the most important shows to appear in Los Angeles, the Post-Painterly Abstraction show he guest-curated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964. Names from that show appear in Palm Springs: Ludwig Sanders, Walter Darby Bannard, Friedel Dzubas and Frankenthaler (Greenberg’s girlfriend for a number of years; love letters from her to him remain under seal as part of the Getty collection).

The 1964 exhibition is generally viewed as Greenberg’s last big hurrah as a tastemaker. By the mid-’60s, the art world was moving on, dramatically, to Pop Art, which ignored, even defied, the high calling of abstraction. Critics dismissed Greenberg as out of touch with the open attitude that celebrated Andy Warhol’s ironic, playful aesthetic. Old debates about figuration versus abstraction gave way to whole new languages fostered by rapidly changing technology, the rise of celebrity, social upheaval and an art market that became highly visible and lucrative.

Greenberg’s public image -- few art critics even have a public image -- hardened for many people into that of a somewhat corrupt grandfather who hides his fortune under a pillow and avenges his isolation with meanness.

The corrupt part was affirmed for many when former Greenberg devotee, critic and art historian Rosalind Krauss wrote a 1974 expose in Art in America magazine alleging that Greenberg had abused his position as executor of the estate of artist David Smith by permitting, or even possibly taking part in, the removal of painted color from Smith’s metal sculptures after Smith’s death. Greenberg had argued with Smith against his use of color on the sculptures, according to Rubenfeld’s biography.

The story became enshrined as the ultimate intrusion by Clement the Bad, and it blunted appreciation for his intellectual side. It also offers the most stark relief against which to understand the shift embodied in the work of Hobbs, Meyer and Jones. Two years ago, the catalog for a show at the UCLA Hammer Museum of paintings by Milton Avery contained an essay by Hobbs, the curator, about the nuanced critical relationship between Avery and Greenberg. Greenberg’s critics often have charged him with a dogmatic preference for purely abstract art. But Hobbs shows the critic’s grasp of Avery’s ability to merge abstract and figurative styles and how Avery’s use of flat but shapely areas of color became a basis for color-field painting.

Unsettling the scene

In her book, Jones said, she will show “why it is incumbent upon us to stop bashing [Greenberg] and to start to understand why we needed him.”

She said she had developed a theory about Greenberg’s emphasis on comprehending reality by looking at art as a foundation for a historical development she calls the bureaucratization of the senses. “The best example for what I mean,” she said, “is probably hi-fi (high-fidelity sound technology) -- that you were not supposed to go to a jazz club and jostle up against people and maybe dance anymore. You were supposed to go out and buy a hi-fi and put earphones on and listen to acoustically perfect sound. Perfect sound was for ears alone.”

In the Artforum essay, Meyer quotes Greenberg as saying that Pop “has not yet produced anything that has given me, for one, pause; moved me deeply; that has challenged my taste or capacities and forced me to expand them.” But he also mines deeper regions of the rediscovered Greenberg piece for the critic’s view of Pop as a force at work in the shifting landscape of fading movements. He finds Greenberg saying that he is “grateful to Pop Art ... for all it did to drive out stale painterly abstraction, and to unsettle the art scene in general.”

Meyer leaves readers with an image of a Greenberg who is neither good nor bad but who is dynamic. “We have heard much of Greenberg’s famous ‘eye,’ his ruthless ability to assess a work at a glance,” Meyer writes, adding that “we might as easily speak of Greenberg’s feet -- the feet that for decades would trudge up and down Manhattan’s unforgiving streets and stairwells to see yet another artwork or exhibition.”

“His rejection of Pop Art was interesting,” Meyer said. “Previous generations viewed the rejection as: ‘He doesn’t get it.’ ”

Meyer, 42, speaks of himself as part of a generation of younger art scholars who, he says, are rediscovering the critic. “We’re not threatened by Greenberg,” he said. “We’re interested in him. He’s part of history now, and we can go back to all kinds of texts and read them in fresh ways. Maybe his system could not fully explain the ‘60s and ‘70s, but he was fully aware of what was being shown, and not out of it at all.”