Clement Greenberg and the Rise of Abstract Expressionism Art Since 1900

Popular Art

Introduction
James Meyer

We practise non often associate Clement Greenberg with Pop. The great champion of Abstract Expressionism never published an essay on the subject, and occasional remarks in interviews and texts in John O'Brian'south indispensable anthology of the critic's writings suggest a definite disdain for the miracle (the early on work of Jasper Johns being a decided exception). Yet the reasons for this distaste are not entirely clear. We know that the writer of "Avant-garde and Kitsch" was no fan of mass culture, nor of the "middlebrow" verse and fiction published in journals like the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post. Kitsch, in Greenberg's sense of the discussion, denoted a watering down of modernist innovations, a pilfering of the high by the low. Merely Pop reversed this flow, suggesting a redemption of the depression by the high. In this respect, the absenteeism of a sustained account of Pop past Greenberg is a bit more curious. And and then it came as a welcome surprise to me when examining Greenberg's papers at the Getty Research Found to find that the critic did address the trend directly, in ii unpublished lectures. One of these talks, "After Pop Art," was delivered at the Guggenheim Museum during the fall of 1963. The more substantive lecture, "Popular Art," would appear as well to engagement from the early 1960s, although its venue is unknown. Information technology is published here for the first time.

Nosotros volition never know why Greenberg opted not to rework and publish the lectures. It may be that the arguments they advance did not quite convince the exacting critic. Or perhaps an essay on Pop only did non concur a high priority. The early '60s were heady days after all: Greenberg, then at the apogee of his influence, was deeply engaged in refining his theory of modernism in such texts as "Modernist Painting" and "After Abstract Expressionism." Any the case, the Pop lectures, though unfinished, are compelling both for what they tell us about Greenberg and for what they tell usa nearly Pop. It is by now an old saw that Greenberg's call for a painting that explored the conditions of the medium and an allusive, abstract sculpture excluded much of that era'south vitality—the Happening, the Combine, the Minimal Object, the Pop sail. Yet if the portal of Greenberg'south modernism became increasingly narrow, albeit but a few into its precincts (Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Anne Truitt, and Anthony Caro), the image of a critic out of bear upon is far from accurate. The Greenberg of the '60s was no less active a viewer than the Greenberg of the '50s, visiting galleries oftentimes and sometimes returning to an exhibition more in one case. We have heard much of Greenberg's famous "eye," his ruthless ability to assess a work at a glance. But "Pop Art" and other writings of these years advise that nosotros might equally easily speak of Greenberg'south anxiety—the feet that for decades would trudge upwards and down Manhattan's unforgiving streets and stairwells to see all the same some other artwork or exhibition.

"After Pop Art" attributes the movement's ascent in 1962 to a strictly marketplace logic. Greenberg observes that a drop in the stock exchange coupled with a slackening interest in second-generation Abstract Expressionism instantiated a taste for Popular: The collector who could no longer afford Pollock, but was weary of Norman Bluhm, could accept a chance on Warhol. In other words, Pop was a fashion, and as a fashion, information technology would soon run out of steam. (The movement was "already finished," Greenberg writes.) Of grade, in retrospect, the fall of 1963 turned out to be not Popular's curtain telephone call but its opening act. As the conceit of this issue makes abundantly articulate, Pop would just be succeeded by more and more than Popular Afterward Pop.

"Pop Art," published here, focuses less on the movement's market place ascent than on its modernist past. Greenberg recounts the history of modernism equally a dialectic of course and motif, of the visual and literary, of an art "of sensations" (Cézanne, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism) versus 1 of "ideas" (Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism, Pop). This narrative sequence de-emphasizes the literariness of the formal tendency and the formalism of the literary tendency, downplaying, for example, Abstract Expressionism's subject matter and the formal contributions of Dada and Surrealism. Ultimately, Greenberg would seem to favor one side over the other: The "impure" exists to challenge and strengthen the "pure." Symbolism made it possible for the Fauvists and Cubists to realize that "ambitious painting" had to exist "antiliterary." Dada and Surrealism inspired the Abstract Expressionists to develop a new kind of abstraction. Pop, reacting confronting Abstruse Expressionism, might inspire another purist episode but was not itself "an art of searching originality."

Pop fine art, Greenberg writes, "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." Here we should think that the initial response to Popular was strongly divided. Although Pop's demotic subject matter and withdrawal of feeling won over many, Greenberg and numerous contemporaries were unmoved past the new fine art. And nonetheless it is the subjective dimension of Pop—its ambivalence toward mass culture, its distance toward bear upon and the representation of affect—that may exist its most trenchant legacy, as the varied practices of artists such as Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Karen Kilimnik, and Alex Bag propose.

Yet Greenberg was as weary of emotive displays every bit whatsoever Popular artist. For him the second-generation activity painting prominent in the late '50s rang false. In fact, he praises Pop as a response to and then much bathos. "At that place is no question, for me, merely that Pop Fine art was, is, and always will be amend than degenerated Abstract Expressionism." "I'm grateful to Popular Art . . . ," he continues in the Guggenheim talk, "for all it did to drive out stale painterly brainchild, and to unsettle the art scene in full general." Simply there was a catch. An art devoid of feeling, as Pop was said to be, would never move a viewer and thus could never qualify as "major." Pop remained a "literary" art, an idea. Echoing Benedetto Croce's study Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, Greenberg argued in such essays every bit "Recentness of Sculpture" and "Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties" that the grand manner must be discovered intuitively. Major art was an individual "discovery," not an "idea." Only a style "felt" by an artist could authorize as genuinely new. The later on writings of Greenberg propose that such intuition is the province of the abstract artist, the artist who turns his or her back on mass culture, the technologized realm of Capital that exists exterior the cocky. Of course, for others Popular's genius is precisely its insistence that mass culture is the very ground of subjectivity. It is this loss of an autonomous, expressive self to mass civilisation's clutches that Greenberg was unwilling to concede.

James Meyer is acquaintance professor of fine art history at Emory University and the author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (Yale University Press, 2001).

Popular Art
Clement Greenberg

The notion of such a matter equally pure painting, pure art, appeared for the kickoff fourth dimension with the ultimate naturalism of the Impressionists. Mostly, the explicit exclamation of something calls forth the explicit assertion of something diametrically opposed. The beginning serious opposition to the notion of pure painting came from within Impressionism itself. Information technology was, yous could say, inadvertent in the instance of Seurat's circus and trip the light fantastic toe-hall pictures; in Gauguin'southward case, information technology was conscious. Pissarro defendant him of sentimentalism or even of mysticism—he did non use the word "literary," but that did come to be an calumniating give-and-take in the mouths of the Impressionists. Thus the opposition, at starting time, was in terms of straight, more than or less naturalistic, deadpan art as against the literary or anecdotal: an art of sensations, a "robust art based on sensation," to use Pissarro'southward phrase, as against ane based on ideas.

Nonetheless, the opposition betwixt pure, on the ane hand, and literary or impure painting, on the other, remained somewhat tangled for a while. The Symbolists and the Nabis were for an art of ideas that was at the same fourth dimension more abstract: that is, flatter and more decorative. Cézanne, an exponent and champion of pure painting if there ever was i, but likewise identifying it with deadpan, "objective" realism, rejected Gauguin's and van Gogh'southward art because it was likewise flat; he told Emile Bernard that Gauguin and van Gogh painted "Chinese pictures." Every bit it turned out, information technology was flat, antirealistic painting that captured the notion of "purity." Only the notion of pure painting, no matter how otherwise construed, remained identified with the antiliterary, and this idea reigned supreme in avant-garde art during the get-go twenty years of this century: Both the Fauves and the Cubists and their offshoots only took it for granted that serious and ambitious painting had to be antiliterary.

Finally, at that place came a second motility of resistance to pure painting, with de Chirico, Duchamp, Picabia, and Dada; Surrealism, the heir of Dada, tin exist accounted as part of this 2nd movement, and so, I recollect, can Neo-Romanticism. This time Duchamp characterized the opposition between pure and literary fine art as ane betwixt the "concrete" and "mental." Like the Symbolists and Nabis, however, the Dadaists and Surrealists, if not the Neo-Romantics, remained entangled with pure painting and contributed to it and actually aggrandized it. The terms of the opposition betwixt pure and impure painting were now conceived of as abstract versus representational. And no sooner had this new polarity definitely established itself than pure painting, as abstract painting, enlisting all the contributions of Dada and Surrealism, just as Fauvism had enlisted those of Symbolism, triumphed with a completeness such equally it had not known even in the years between 1905 and 1914. From the after 1940s to the early 1960s there was hardly whatsoever question in the minds of most interested people merely that avant-garde painting par excellence, advanced, ambitious, momentously original painting and sculpture, were abstract—abstract almost past definition. Three or four years ago a new moving ridge of resistance to pure painting, the third such wave, began to mount in the form of Popular fine art. Pop fine art has made representational fine art, and with it literary fine art, once again respectable in avant-garde circles. And the suction of this moving ridge—or rather the suction of its worldly success—has been so strong that many, many formerly abstract artists accept, without exactly becoming Popular, gone over to representation in whole or in part.

Both the first and 2d waves of resistance to pure painting were entangled with pure painting itself, as I've said, and in the cease but contributed to information technology. Both the Symbolist resistance in the 1890s and the Dada and Surrealist resistance in the 1920s and 1930s had a reinvigorating, fructifying effect on the object of their resistance, and pure painting emerged all the stronger—all the stronger in its dominance—from their opposition.

And then far it has not been quite the same with this third wave of resistance to pure painting. Pop art has drawn, to good effect, on the acquisitions of pure and abstract painting but it has not, so far, contributed anything to it in return. What'southward more: Only as Gauguin represented a slight lowering of artistic standards as against the Impressionism of the 1870s, and Duchamp and Ernst and Dalí a more than considerable lowering of standards equally against Matisse, Picasso, and Léger, so Pop art represents an even greater lowering of standards every bit confronting Pollock, Hofmann, Dubuffet, Newman, Still, Motherwell, Mathieu, Gottlieb, Rothko, Kline, de Kooning, and Gorky at their respective all-time. But whereas this particular outcome of the render to literary art in the cases of Gauguin and of Dada and Surrealism was only momentary, the lowering of artistic standards seems, upward to now, to exist more serious in the case of Pop art.

Here, as everywhere else in fine art, I take only my own reactions, my own feel to go past. In that location is no question but that Popular fine art came equally a refreshing and lively relief subsequently the turgid stalenesses of the de Kooning–Kline–and–Guston school of Abstract Expressionism that had held the foreground of Us painting during most of the 1950s. There is no question, for me, but that Popular art was, is, and always volition exist amend than degenerated Abstract Expressionism. But Popular art has not yet produced anything that has given me, for 1, pause; moved me securely; that has challenged my taste or capacities and forced me to expand them. I have come beyond nothing in Pop fine art still that transcends the plane of the agreeable or titillating or breaks with any of the canons of accepted taste as these stood in 1955. In sum: Pop art, in my experience, falls far short of being major fine art or anything like it—by which I mean that Pop fine art has not proved to be an art of searching originality, not even quite in the case of Jasper Johns. Johns may not exist a Popular artist strictly speaking, but he is the but creative person anywhere well-nigh Pop fine art, the merely artist related to it in any meaningful respect, whom I detect myself taking seriously. Still fifty-fifty Johns—or rather my experience of Johns—contains nothing that justifies the term major. (And allow me remind yous that if anything has been at issue in American art since the early 1940s it is the issue of major: It's that which makes the profoundest, near crucial difference between Pollock and his generation and everything that came earlier in American fine art.)

Pop in my opinion constitutes a failure of avant-garde fine art, simply as much of Surrealism did, and well-nigh all of Neo-Romanticism did. If the avant-garde has whatever justification—anything that warrants cherishing the Impressionists to a higher place Puvis de Chavannes, Fantin-Latour, or Carrière; Matisse above, say, the John Sloan of 1900–1910; Pollock above Christian Berard; or Newman higher up Diebenkorn—then that justification consists in the fact that information technology has proved the only ways of maintaining the continuity of major fine art—not just skilful art—over the last hundred years. Pop fine art represents, in a sense, a threat to that continuity. And so, let me say, does almost of what is offered to us now as Optical art.

Lest anybody misunderstand me and think that I myself hold a brief for pure or "formalistic" painting as such, let me say that I wish information technology were otherwise. The actual record of its achievement is what lone makes the case and cursory for pure painting or what'southward called that. My own wishful preferences count for nix here, or anywhere else in art. If it were upwardly to me, the major painting of our time would go back to the Corot of the late 1830s and early on 1840s—that is, to a species of photographic naturalism. If it were up to me, the greatest fine art since Corot would have continued to exist naturalistic. But art, and especially major art, keeps on evolving and irresolute; it makes itself known precisely by its never coming to terms with you lot, only instead, by always compelling you to come to terms with it.

© by Janice van Horne for the manor of Clement Greenberg

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/museums/item_id=7606

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