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Title: Perceptions and Judgements, 1939-1944 (The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol 1) by Clement Greenberg, John O'Brian ISBN: 0-226-30617-8 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: November, 1986 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.50

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Vanishing Greenbergery: Art History Takes its Revenge
Comment: Greenberg was the celebrated champion of a briefly-celebrated school of art. Sometimes it was called Abstract Expressionism, sometimes neo-plasticism. Think Rothko, think Newman... and if either name fails to jog your memory, or warm your cockles, think huge, corporate abstract. Think bank-lobby art. //That's// what he championed? //That// gospel was preached, by collectors, curators and bank lobbies all over the world? Why? How did we do it? How did we take him so seriously for so long? What is his legacy? Perhaps the most devastating answer to this last question was delivered by the populist art commentator Mathew Collinge. He said that the Greenberg legacy was "...still around, but only in the American provincial museums, in the heartlands and in the midwest..." (This is Modern Art, 1998) Could there be any more damning verdict? To be championed precisely by those institutions and individuals most pathetically anxious to be //au courant//? Never mind. The monster does not need to be slain: he was never a monster to begin with. No: a little sleight of hand with the deck of art history may have made Greenberg seem monstrously important in his day (the 1950s), monstrously wrong in ours. But he was neither. His hatred of the straightforwardly narrative and figurative, and even his famous doctrine of "significant form", was simply borrowed from a much earlier British critic, Clive Bell, who coined the term in 1915. As for his enthusiasms, they had their roots in the post-Cubist experiments of Malevich, rather than in the New York School simplicity which Mondrian -- who had escaped to Manhattan during the war -- had done so much to inspire. Americans should stop taking the blame for Greenberg, and so should Greenberg. Greenberg warmed over a school of art well dead by the time Malevich, in the early 1920s, realised that his "Suprematist" black squares were going nowhere. Similarly, he warmed over the essays of Clive Bell which were written, hearly half a century earier, to boost and promote Cubist-inspired experiments. In other words, Greenberg was a throwback posing as a modernist. One good thing: the caricatured, simplified Modernism which he sold to 1950s America was such a bore that, when the inevitable rebellion came, no mercy was shown. Warhol did not merely dismiss Greenbergian art, he despised it. In Warhol's (and Rosenquist's and Rauchenberg's) world of the abject and the human, there was less than zero room for the neo-Calivinist utopia of Greenberg and his crew. Still, you have to wonder. This book, which has Greenberg at his most confident and most arrogant, is certainly a fascinating case-study of artistic dogma gone wrong. We bought it, and we rejected it -- but his legacy maintains a stubborn half-life. Cash a check today and you'll see where.

- Paul O'Kelly, Dublin, Ireland