Greenberg, Clement

Greenberg, Clement, 1909–94, American art critic, b. New York City. Greenberg's criticism was primarily concerned with art produced after abstract expressionism. This art, now known as color-field painting, he termed post-painterly abstraction, reflecting Heinrich Wölfflin's theory that painterly and linear styles alternate through the ages. In his essay collection Art and Culture (1961), Greenberg argued that the essence of modern art, especially painting, lies in its purely visual content. Greenberg's philosophy of art was outlined in a series of lectures posthumously published as Homemade Esthetics (1999).

Bibliography

See biography by F. Rubenfeld (1998).

---

Greenberg, Clement

(born Jan. 16, 1909, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died May 7, 1994, New York City) U.S. art critic. After graduating from Syracuse University, he returned to his native New York City and began writing for such publications as Partisan Review and The Nation, promoting an approach to looking at art that became known as “Greenbergian formalism.” The chief arbiter of art in the U.S. from the late 1940s through the 1950s, he exerted extraordinary influence as a champion of Abstract Expressionism and its leading exponent, Jackson Pollock. He routinely visited galleries and artists' studios and promoted the work of many, including Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, and David Smith. He disavowed such later movements as Pop art and conceptual art and wrote little after the 1960s.