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ABSTRACT
This article explores Clement Greenberg’s idea that abstraction is a form of negation in the context of mid-twentieth century homophobia and Jewish self-hatred. Greenberg presents both as a denial of the self, and so aligns the negation involved in abstraction with the self-liquidation necessary for economic progress in capitalism.
Notes on contributor
Malcolm Bull is professor of Art and the History of Ideas at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth (Princeton, 2013), and he is currently working on a book about modernism and capitalism.
Notes
1 Greenberg, Essays, 1.12 (“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 1939).
2 Ibid., 1.8, 28, and 32 (“Towards a Newer Laocoon,” 1940).
3 Greenberg, Essays, 4.87 (“Modernist Painting,” 1960) and Greenberg, Art and Culture, 139 (“The New Sculpture,” revised 1961).
4 Greenberg, Essays, 3.190 (“Abstract and Representational,” 1954) and Greenberg, Art and Culture, 71 (“Collage,” revised 1961).
5 Greenberg, Essays, 2.125 (Review of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock, 1947).
6 See, for example, the essays in Frascina (ed.), Pollock and after.
7 Greenberg, Essays, 2.17 (Review of Multiple Exhibitions, 1945) and 2.80 (Review of Paul Gauguin and Arshile Gorky, 1946).
8 Greenberg, Essays, 2.75 (Review of Multiple Exhibitions, 1946).
9 Greenberg, Essays, 2.167 (“The Present Prospects of American Painting,” 1947) and 2.40 (Review of De la Fresnaye and Stuart Davis, 1945).
10 Greenberg, Essays, 2.266 (Review of Whitney Annual, 1948).
11 Greenberg, Essays, 2.291, (Review of Jean Dubuffet, 1949), 293 (Review of Henri Matisse, 1949), and 162 (“Present Prospects,” 1947); Greenberg, Art and Culture, 11 (“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” revised 1961).
12 Greenberg, Essays, 1.34 (“Towards a Newer Laocoon,” 1940).
13 Greenberg, Essays, 2.17 (Review of Multiple Exhibitions, 1945).
14 Jones, Eyesight Alone, 220; emphasis in the original.
15 Ibid., 175.
16 Greenberg, Essays, 2.162 (“Present Prospects,” 1947).
17 Greenberg, Essays, 2.266 (Review of Whitney Annual, 1948).
18 Greenberg, Essays, 2.301 (Review of Ben Nicholson and Larry Rivers, 1949).
19 Greenberg, Essays, 2.257. (“The State of American Writing: A Symposium,” 1948).
20 Getty Research Institute. Clement Greenberg papers. Box 26.3.
21 Greenberg, Essays, 2.36–8 (Review of Dim Luster, 1945).
22 See Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique, 115–23; Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, 10–12; Butt, Between You and Me, 23–9 and 41–5; and Reed, Art and Homosexuality, 152–9.
23 Glenn, “Vogue of Jewish Self-hatred,” 95–136. See also Matthew, “Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Their Jewish Issues,” 651–64.
24 Greenberg, Essays, 2.45 (Review of Whitney Annual, 1945).
25 Greenberg, Essays, 1.177 (“Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature,” 1944).
26 Greenberg, Essays, 3, 46–7 (“Self-hatred and Jewish Chauvinism,” 1950). In this respect the positive Jew is the counterpart of the homosexual who, Greenberg suggests, is determined to “flaunt what you are supposed to be ashamed of” (Greenberg papers, Box 26.3).
27 Greenberg, Essays, 3.54 (“Self-hatred and Jewish Chauvinism,” 1950).
28 Quoted in Glenn, “Vogue of Jewish Self-hatred,” 109.
29 De Duve, Clement Greenberg, 41; emphasis in the original.
30 Ibid., 45.
31 Olin, The Nation Without Art, 173 and 176.
32 Greenberg, Essays, 4.85ff (“Modernist Painting,” 1960), and Kaplan, “Reframing the Self-criticism,” 180–99.
33 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 302.
34 Read, Meaning, 143.
35 Schwob, Marc Chagall et l’âme juive.
36 Read, Meaning, 143.
37 Greenberg, Essays, 1.27 and 28 (“Towards a Newer Laocoon,” 1940).
38 Hitler, Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944, 280 [translation modified to include the word “kitsch” used in the original].
39 See Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects, 31–4.
40 Greenberg, Essays, 2.83 (Review of Marc Chagall, 1946).
41 Greenberg, Art and Culture, 92 (Revision of 1946 review of Marc Chagall, 1961).
42 Greenberg, Essays, 1.34 (“Towards a New Laocoon,” 1940).
43 Greenberg, Essays, 3.58 (“Self-hatred and Jewish Chauvinism,” 1950).
44 It was an anti-Semitic commonplace that the Jews were “the inventors of masturbation and homosexuality”, as these were seen as “mechanical sexual acts without any true relationship between the sexual partners,” Gilman, Jewish Self-hatred, 250.
45 Greenberg thought someone might be ashamed to admit to that they were moved by Normal Rockwell more than Raphael, Essays, 4.268 (“Complaints of an Art Critic,” 1947). He asked Larry Rivers if he was ashamed to be Jewish: Rivers and Weinstein, What Did I Do?, 182. And he claimed that homosexuals “flaunt what they’re supposed to be ashamed of” (Greenberg papers, Box 26.3). Apparently Greenberg's father claimed that his son was ashamed of him on account of his Yiddish accent: Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 41.
46 Marquis, Art Czar, 25.
47 Quoted in Matthew, Anti-Semitic Elements, 216.
48 Sombart, Jews, 183.
49 Ibid., 144 and 192.
50 Ibid., 183.
51 Greenberg, Essays, 1.157 (“The Jewish Dickens,” 1943).
52 Greenberg, Essays, 1.177 (“Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature,” 1944) and 2.147 (Review of Herbert Read, 1947).
53 However, he echoed Sombart's views in private: “What is the greatest achievement of our civilisation? Modern capitalism! Which race has made perhaps the largest contribution to that development? The Jews!”, quoted in Allen, Opening Doors, 66.
54 Schumpeter, Capitalism, 83; emphasis in the original.
55 Ibid., 84 and 96.
56 Schumpeter, Business Cycles, 154.
57 Schumpeter, Capitalism, 162.
58 Friedel and Dickey. Hans Hofmann, 91.
59 Greenberg, Essays, 4.85 (“Modernist Painting,” 1960).
60 Greenberg, Essays, 1.8 (“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 1939).
61 Marx, Grundrisse, 667; Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 222; emphasis in original.
62 Greenberg, Essays, 1.28 32 (“Towards a Newer Laocoon,” 1940).
63 Greenberg, Essays, 3.98 (Review of Arnold Hauser, 1951) and 2.225 (“The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” 1948).
64 Greenberg, Essays, 2.135 (Review of Giorgio de Chirico, 1947).
65 Greenberg, Essays, 2.15 (Review of multiple exhibitions, 1945).
66 Schumpeter, Capitalism, 126.
67 Greenberg, Essays, 2.245 (Reply to George L. K. Morris, 1948) and 3.98 (Review of Arnold Hauser, 1951).
68 According to Victor Burgin, writing in 1973, “By the 1950s, the search for stylistic innovation in painting and sculpture, embalmed in Clement Greenberg's slogan ‘perpetual revolution’, had become the legitimating ritual of a New York based ideology”, Burgin, Situational Aesthetics, 16 (cf. David and Cecile Shapiro in Frascina (ed.), Pollock and after, 139). In fact, the identification of stylistic change with “perpetual revolution” came not from Greenberg, but from Michael Fried in 1964, and drew on Merleau-Ponty rather than Trotsky. As Fried later acknowledged, his usage was at odds with Greenberg's ideas (Fried, Art, 34).