Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg

by Alice Goldfarb Marquis

In the years of his greatest dominance, Clement Greenberg almost single-handedly established Jackson Pollock and the New York School at the center of the American art world. His work set the tone for art criticism for half a century to come. This biography, based on unpublished and previously unavailable documents, interviews and archives, presents a riveting story of imagination and grandiosity, of vision and tragic excess. With clarity and insight, Alice Goldfarb Marquis, author of the widely acclaimed Marcel The Bachelor Stripped Bare (which the Washington Times called "the one indispensable Duchamp companion") and Art Lessons (named best nonfiction book of the year by the San Diego Book Awards), explores Greenberg's complex relations with numerous friends and lovers, including Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler and Harold Rosenberg. It also recreates the heady art scene in America from the 1940s through the 1980s, detailing the ways in which a generation of critics, with Greenberg at the helm, used personal conviction and innate notions of taste to set the course of modern art. Greenberg remains an indispensable reference in any discussion of art criticism, and Art Czar is the first biography to provide a complete, evenhanded portrait of the man, his work and his times.

Genres: Art, Biography, History

336 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 2006

Reviews

[. · Rating 5 out of 5]

If a class were taught on how to write biographies to adequately capture one's life, personality, and impact without superfluous droning on and senseless page counts, this book would deserve a place in such a curriculum.

[Pat Shey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always loved the art movement now known as Abstract Expressionism - Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothco, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline.

Clement Greenberg was a profane, brilliant, chainsmoking alcoholic writer - but his essays on art - especially his early championing of Pollock, gave legitimacy to the movement, and shifted the art world from France to the US

The book serves as a great period piece for pre-war left wing intellectualism - where the arguments were not just about Communism or Socialism, but which brand of Communistm - Stalinist vs Trotskite - arguments that often came to fisticuffs. Many art critics used a Marxist framework to critique art, and Greenberg use the German aesthetics, most notably with his favorite, Emmanuel Kant, was his chosen framework to critique art.

Ironically, despite the Marxist/Communist sympathies of the art critics as the time, it was Stalin's repressionions in the USSR, with their disproportionate effect on artists, that paved the way for broad acceptance of abstract artists in the US - contrasting the freedom in the USA to paint whatever the artist wanted, with the repression of the "subversive" art in the USSR.

An interesting snapshot of the times, and the birth of a new art movement. Plowed through this book while floating in a pool in Lake Forest, Illinois this weekend. Pretty damn good way to spend a weekend.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

A dry biography of a man who was more of a troll than art critic. Alice Marquis doesn't seem to understand how bad Greenberg's poetry is, which she cites approvingly, or how horrible his behavior is. One episode: Greenberg beats up a sickly friend of Jean Wahl for being "antisemitic" (?) by defending Wahl in an argument. Marquis doesn't mention that Wahl is a Jewish survivor of a Nazi internment camp; the scene, like so many others, is treated as self-explanatory.

[Barry · Rating 1 out of 5]

My review of the book can be read at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061016/schwabsky.

[Marsmannix · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you love abstract expressionism, this is a great, fat, detailed book, somewhat like Clement Greenberg. Fascinating, informative!