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Abstract
This paper discusses Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) and his critique of Artforum. It focuses particularly on the journal's landmark issue on the New York School in September 1965. Rosenberg criticized Artforum for blurring the boundaries between art history and art criticism: an entwinement that is now widely accepted by many commentators, not least because some of Artforum’s major critics went on to pursue academic careers, shaping the discipline of contemporary art history. However, this acceptance has resulted in some confusion with regard to the current role of art criticism. In this regard, Rosenberg's opposition to Artforum merits consideration. Although Rosenberg was not disinterested, this essay claims that his remarks open up the historical roots of our current confusion. What was at stake in the debates among Artforum’s major figures was nothing less than the “history of the future.”
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Matthew Bowman and Barbara Pezzini for inviting me to contribute to this special issue. I would also like to thank Isobel Flowers at Artforum and the Harvard Art Museums Archives for their help.
Notes
1 Harold Rosenberg, “Criticism and its Premises,” Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), 146. Originally delivered at “A Seminar in Art Education for Research and Curriculum Development,” Pennsylvania State University, August 30–September 10, 1965.
2 Max Kozloff, “Problems of Criticism III: Venetian Art and Florentine Criticism,” Artforum (December 1967): 42–45. Republished in Kozloff, Renderings: Critical Essays on a Century of Modern Art (London: Studio Vista, 1968): 321–35. This remark is itself indicative of the imbrication of art history and art criticism: relying upon knowledge of historical debates between disegno and colore.
3 Philip Leider, cited in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974 (New York: SoHo Press, 2000), 113.
4 Mary Fuller, “An Ad Reinhardt Monologue,” Artforum (October 1970): 36–41.
5 See, in particular, the special issue on sculpture, Artforum (Summer 1967).
6 In a 1978 postscript to “Modernist Painting,” Greenberg denied this prescription, arguing instead that he merely provided a descriptive account of modernism, but this does not square easily with the influence which he undoubtedly exerted. See Clement Greenberg, “Postscript,” in Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1978), 201. Reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brian, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 93–94.
7 Rosenberg, “The New Role of the Universities.” Paper delivered at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, July 1965. Transcript held within the Harold Rosenberg Papers, 1923–1984, Getty Research Institute, Research Library, Accession no. 980048, Box 30 folder 11.
8 Rosenberg, “The Resurrected Romans,” in The Tradition of the New (New York: Da Capo, 1994): 154–77.
9 Rosenberg, “Criticism and its Premises,” 147.
10 Rosenberg, “Criticism and its Premises,” 147.
11 That these relatively young abstract painters were exhibited at a prestigious venue such as the Fogg is itself indicative of the modernism's institutionalization.
12 Michael Fried, “Three American Painters,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998): 222–23. Originally published as the catalog essay for Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1965). Subsequent references refer to the republished essay.
13 Philip Leider, “Introduction,” in The New York School, special issue, Artforum (September 1965): 5. See also Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in O'Brian, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3, 217–36. Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” The Tradition of the New, 13–39.
14 Fried became London correspondent of Arts Magazine in 1961, and he wrote the “New York Letter” for Art International between 1963 and 1964. These early essays culminate with “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood, 148–72. Originally published in Artforum (June 1967): 12–23.
15 Barbara Rose, “The Second Generation: Academy and Breakthrough,” Artforum (September 1965): 54.
16 Rose, “The Second Generation,” 55.
17 Rose, “The Second Generation,” 56.
18 Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” Art International (May 1960): 26–29. Republished in O'Brian, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 96–97.
19 Rosenberg, “Young Masters, New Critics: Frank Stella,” The De-Definition of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 121.
20 See Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook, no.8 (1965): 74–82; Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella's Irregular Polygons,” in Art and Objecthood, 88–89.
21 Robert Rosenblum, “Frank Stella,” Artforum (March 1965): 20–25; Philip Leider, “Frank Stella,” Artforum (June 1965): 24–26.
22 Rosenberg, “Young Masters, New Critics,” 125.
23 Rosenberg, “Young Masters, New Critics,” 124.
24 Fried, “Three American Painters,” 251.
25 See William Rubin, Frank Stella, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 56.
26 Rosenberg, “Criticism and its Premises,” 148.
27 Fried writes, “[C]riticism that shares the basic premises of modernist painting finds itself compelled to play a role in its development closely akin to, and potentially only somewhat less important than, that of the new paintings themselves.” “Three American Painters,” 219.
28 I take no credit for the originality of this observation. See Jonathan Harris, Writing Back to Modern Art: After Greenberg, Fried and Clark (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 100. The metaphor of the mirror inevitably carries with it the connotation of narcissism: this takes on a rather prescient irony given Fried's subsequent habit of citing himself copiously in his art historical work. See Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
29 Rosenberg, “Criticism and its Premises,” 146.
30 Fried acknowledges this when he writes, “And the greatest danger facing a modernist painter . . . is not that he may rest content with a partial or imperfect solution to a formal problem, but that his solution of it may be both so total and so perfect that he will not know how to go on.” “Three American Painters,” 243.
31 For Rosalind Krauss's “break” with modernism, see Krauss, “A View of Modernism,” Artforum (September 1972): 48–51. Republished in Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 115–28.
32 For antagonism towards Alloway, see Newman, Challenging Art, 341, 344–45, 367–68. Alloway did, however, find sympathy with Leider's editorial successor, John Coplans.
33 “Second Roundtable, Chicago, Illinois, USA,” in The State of Art Criticism, ed. James Elkins and Michael Newman (New York: Routledge, 2008): 218.
34 Carter Ratcliffe offers some thoughtful reflections upon Artforum's vexed relationship to the market: “By setting up objective criteria, this notion of artwriting as a kind of journalism and the art magazine as a kind of trade paper could be left behind. What happened, of course, is that by setting up supposedly objective criteria when it did, Artforum positioned itself to function as the artworld's trade paper in a way that other magazines just couldn't manage to do in the 1960s and early ‘70s.” See Newman, Challenging Art, 450.
35 Rosenberg, “Criticism and its Premises,” 145.
36 Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004).
37 For an elucidation of Kozloff's position, see “Critical Schizophrenia and the Intentionalist Method” (1965) and “Psychological Dynamics in Art Criticism of the Sixties” (1966). Both republished in Kozloff, Renderings, 301–12; 312–35.
38 Lawrence Alloway remarks upon this in his essay “Network: The Art World Described as a System,” Artforum (September 1972): 29. Rosenberg had more critical things to say about it in “The New as Value,” in The Anxious Object: Art Today and its Audience (New York: Horizon, 1966), 227–35.
Additional information
STEPHEN MOONIE is Associate Lecturer in Art History in the Department of Fine Art, School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University. He completed his PhD in 2009 at the University of Essex on the subject of modernist painting and its criticism. He contributed to the catalog The Indiscipline of Painting (Tate, 2011), and has published essays on the criticism of Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990) and Leo Steinberg (1920–2011). He has currently completed manuscripts on Ray Johnson (1926–1995), on October’s critique of painting, and on Charles Harrison's (1942–2009) late critical writings.