Page 41 - Studio International - May 1968

18 One furious critic said that a function of his Berenson, and Roger Fry. 'Content' is usually Noland', Art International, vol. 4, No. 5, 1960). It is
writing was that 'it drives other critics nuts'. (Amy associated with Warburg-Panofsky interests in not irrelevant that among Greenberg's 1954
Goldin, 'Harold Rosenberg's Magic Circle', Arts, `iconography', and is seen as relevant to intellec- `Emerging Talent' discoveries, these two are the
November 1965.) tual history rather than to artistic value. Its scope only painters widely known today and continuing
19 Art News, December 1952; reprinted in The is usually a Western European 'From the Pyra- (unlike Philip Pearlstein) to work in an 'abstract'
Tradition of the New, London, 1962. mids to Picasso', passing 1900 with luck, and super- manner.
20 At first this was kept somewhat intramural. ficial historical analyses of Museum of Modern 30 Cf. Heinrich Mifflin, Principles of Art History,
Greenberg criticized the concept of 'Action Paint- Art catalogues and writings by men like Green- London, Bell, 1952. The work has long been avail-
ing' in notes to his own important and re-labelled berg. Harvard's Department of Art History pro- able in America, and is often used as an intro-
essay on the Abstract Expressionists (`American vides few alternatives to this approach, which its ductory text for undergraduate survey courses in
Type Painting', Partisan Review, vol. 22, No. 2, graduates largely propagate. Dominated by the the history of art.
1955; re-written for Art and Culture in 1958). His Wölfflin-Berenson approach of Sydney Freedberg 31 Art International, October 25, 1962.
most violent attack on Rosenberg and everyone to the rise and fall of Renaissance pictorial style, 32 Unlike most American undergraduates, Green-
respecting him is to be found in 'How Art Writing it offers little in modern art with a notable paucity berg not only accepted Mifflin's classifications as
Earns Its Bad Name', Encounter, December 1962. of imagination and attention to the twentieth useful tools for visual analysis, but he also swal-
Rosenberg's response was 'Action Painting: a century. Art history students at New York and lowed Mifflin's theory of the absolute inevita-
Decade of Distortion', Art News, December 1961 Columbia Universities interested in contemporary bility of a linear dialectic of these formal cate-
(reprinted in Encounter, May 1963, and as 'Action art can study with Meyer Schapiro, Robert Gold- gories in the history of art. As a result, Abstract
Painting: Crisis and Distortion' in Rosenberg's water, and Robert Rosenblum; but Krauss, Cone Expressionism is neatly reduced in Greenberg's
The Anxious Object, London, 1965). Cf. also Rosen- and Fried were almost driven as well as attracted essay to merely 'another instance of that cyclical
berg's 'After Next, What ?', Art in America, April to the teachings of Greenberg. alternation of painterly and non-painterly which
1964 (reprinted in The Anxious Object), which is a 24 For an excellent discussion of this phenomenon, has marked the evolution of Western art ...since
criticism of Greenberg and his followers sparked particularly of the impact of Sidney Janis' 1962 the sixteenth century.'
by Greenberg's 'After Abstract Expressionism', exhibition of Pop art as 'The New Realism', from 33 The discovery of Mannerism as a style epoch
loc. cit. another suspicious critic, see Harold Rosenberg, between Renaissance and Baroque has required
21 Robert Goldwater, 'Art and Criticism', Partisan `The Game of Illusion, Pop and Gag', The Anxious modification of acceptance of Mifflin's historical
Review, vol. 28, Nos. 5-6, 1961; George Dennison, Object, London, 1962, pp. 63-64. theory. One of Sydney Freedberg's contributions
`The Craft-history of Modern Painting', Arts rear- 25 'After Abstract Expressionism', Art International, to the philosophy about Renaissance style is his
book, No. 7, 1964. October 25, 1962. 'Homeless representation' was description of it as carrying the seeds of Manner-
22 'Problems in Criticism II: Complaints of a the term used to describe the representational ism within its own formal evolution; he also finds
Critic', Artforum, October 1967. In this essay elements in Pollock's paintings of the 1950s and seeds of Baroque form within Mannerism—and
Greenberg complains that just because he notes a De Kooning's 'Women' series of the same period— thus a continuation between Renaissance and
tendency in art does not mean that he approves of representation which Greenberg obviously thought Baroque style. If Greenberg showed enthusiasm for
it, and that his readers and critics must distinguish had 'no place' in that art (or any art ?) ; it was Mifflin to his young Harvard friends, they would
between his descriptions and aesthetic judgements. paralleled as a 'degenerate mannerism' by another have argued for this sort of modification, which is
Aesthetic judgements are, he states, 'immediate, `witty' label: the 'furtive bas-reliefs' of Dubuffet. presented to Harvard undergraduates by post-
intuitive, undeliberate, and involuntary' leaving 28 'Post Painterly Abstraction', Art International, graduate teaching assistants.
`no room for the conscious application of standards, summer 1964. Greenberg does not define what he
rules, and percepts' (p. 38). Criticism becomes means by Pop art in this essay, either in terms of
`objective' only when it 'produces consensus'; a stylistic characteristics or of artists. He does not
consensus which is based on a 'qualitative prin- say that it is 'bad' art, but rather implies that it is
ciple or norm' in 'subliminal operation', and which not art at all: only a 'diverting' fashion, not
appears in the 'verdicts of those who care most `really fresh. Nor does it challenge taste on more
about art and pay it the most close attention' than a superficial level'. (As if it had not challenged
(p. 38, and response to a letter from Max Kozloff, his.)
Artforum, November 1967). Of course this amounts 27 The title of an exhibition he organized for the
to a personal abnegation of responsibility for one's Los Angeles County Museum of Art, presented in
own taste by relegating it to the realm of the un- 1964. Greenberg's catalogue introduction is re-
conscious and finding its criticism outside oneself printed under the same title in Art International,
in history. The recent domination of Greenberg's summer 1964.
discussion of art by his concern with a philosophy 28 One learns much more from Barbara Rose's
of art history should be seen, I believe, as part of earlier essay on 'The Primacy of Color' (Art Inter-
his effort to find that 'qualitative principle' whose national, May 1964) and Max Kozloff's discussion
operation through history would objectify his own of colour in 'Problems in Criticism III: Venetian
increasingly personal and exclusive taste. Art and Florentine Criticism' (Artforum, December
23 American art history in general is permeated by 1967) .
formalist analysis of art seen as style-epochs in a 29 In 1960 Greenberg pronounced these painters
linear evolutionary progression : an approach de- the only two 'candidates for serious status' among Part II of Barbara Reise 's article
pendent on that of Heinrich Mifflin, Bernard the younger American painters (`Louis and will appear in the June issue.