NOTES
- Donald Kuspit, Clement Greenberg Art Critic, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1979, p. 3.
- Mary Kelly, ‘Reviewing Modernist Criticism’, Screen, 22, 3, 1981, p. 47.
- T.J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art’, in Pollock and After, ed. Francis Frascina, Harper& Row, London, 1985, p. 47.
- His activism was greatest between early 1940 and late 1942, when he and Dwight Macdonald comprised the more Left faction of the editors of Partisan Review, then published by a Trotskyist group of intellectuals. John O'Brian, ‘Introduction’, in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism Volume 1, John O'Brian ed., The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1986, p. xx.
- This is the result of the difficulty and limited dissemination of Adomo's writing. However his influence on English-speaking artists and theorists has increased dramatically in the last decade, following the politicization of art since the 1970s, and the increasing attention paid to Adorno's colleagues in the Frankfurt School—such as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse.
- The Institute subsequently moved to Hollywood (U.S.A.) in 1941, where a number of exiles had settled—including Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. In 1949 the Institute returned to Frankfurt. This final move broke up the Institute's inner circle. Marcuse and Lowenthal remained in the U.S.A. Adorno, Horkheimer and Pollock returned to Frankfurt. Adorno assumed directorship of the Institute when Horkheimer retired in 1958.
- Edward Shils, ‘Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture’, Sewanee Review, LXV, 1957, p. 600.
- Dwight Macdonald, ‘Correspondence’, Sewanee Review, LXVI, 1958, p. 355.
- Irving Wohlfarth, ‘Hibernation: On the Tenth Anniversary of Adorno's Death’, Modern Language Notes, 94, December 1979, pp. 981–982.
- Theodor Adorno, ‘Committed Art’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1978, p. 312.
- ibid., p. 318.
- In How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983) Serge Guilbaut documented how such events as the Russo-German pact and the invasion of Finland by U.S.S.R. in 1939 produced ‘the utter confusion of much of the American intelligentsia, whose political naiveté precluded a global view of the situation.’ (p. 38) As an example he cited a group formed around Meyer Schapiro, which included Rothko, Gottlieb, Lewis Mumford and Milton Avery. ‘Even though… affiliated with the Trotskyists’, writes Guilbaut, ‘the emphasis was on the apolitical nature of the group, whose purpose was said to defend the interests of artists and the “democratic way of life.”’ (p. 41.) According to Guilbaut, this process (of de-radicalization) was complete by June 1941, when Germany attacked the U.S.S.R. and ‘the centre of attention had shifted from social concerns to individual concerns’ (p. 46).
- Clement Greenberg, ‘The Renaissance of the Little Mag; Review of Accent, Diogenes, Experimental Review, Vice Versa, and View’, The Collected Essays and Criticism Volume 1, p. 46.
- ibid., p. 47.
- ibid., p. 45.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Surrealist Painting’, The Collected Essays and Criticism Volume 1, p. 225.
- Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1984, p. 415.
- See Martin Jay, ‘Adorno in America’, New German Critique, 31, Winter 1984, p. 159. As early as 1957 Edward Shils characterised the cricles around Partisan Review and the Frankfurt School as cultural mandarins. It has since become a familiar argument, especially in respect to Greenberg. However Jay makes the point that while Adorno and Greenberg werre not the first to criticize popular culture—they were the first to attack it ‘from a radical rather than a conservative direction.’ (Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1973, p. 217).
- For example, see: Clement Greenberg, ‘General Panel Discussion’ Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Pipers, eds. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, 1983, p. 266–267; and Clement Greenberg, ‘Problems of Art Criticism: Complaints of an Art Critic’, Art Forum VI, 2, October 1967, p. 39.
- For example see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, and ‘The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America’, October 15, Winter 1980, 61–78; and Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed’, Art History, 4, September 1981, pp. 305–327. The most sympathetic account of Greenberg's criticism, and one which addresses the complexities of his Marxism and critical aims, is Donald Kuspit's Clement Greenberg Art Critic.
- Francis Frascina, ed., ‘Introduction’, Pollock and After, pp. 7–8.
- ibid., pp. 10–16.
- ibid., p. 11.
- ibid., p. 14.
- However in the recently published volumes of Greenberg's collected essays from 1939–1949 the references to Marx far outweigh, in quality and quantity, the very few fleeting references to ‘Denis, Fry, Bell, Wilenski, etc.’ The few comments Greenberg ever made about Barr and the Museum of Modern Art which Barr directed, are negative and derogatory. Greenberg considered Barr ‘an inveterate champion of minor art’ (Clement Greenberg, “The Late thirties in New York’ Art and Culture, Thames and Hudson, London, 1973, p. 231), and he believed that academicism had found a home in the Museum of Modern Art, which ‘devoted more funds to this spurious kind of modern art.’ (Clement Greenberg, A Symposium: The State of American Art’, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2, p. 288).
- Hilton Kramer, A Critic on the Side of History…', in his The Age of the Avant-Garde, Seeker & Warburg, London, 1974, p. 504.
- ibid., p. 502.
- ibid., p. 502.
- Victor Burgin, ‘Socialist Formalism’, Studio International, 191, March/April 1976, pp. 148–149.
- ibid., p. 148.
- ibid., p. 148.
- Peter Wollen, ‘Photography and Aesthetics’, Screen, 19, 4, 1978/79, p. 27.
- See ibid., p. 27, n. 22.
- Jochen Schulte-Sasse, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984, p. xv. Schulte-Sasse was attacking the tendency to confuse ‘modernism’ with ‘avant-gardeism’, and in particular, singled out Renato Poggioli's influential Theory of the AvantGarde (1968) as an example.
- Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the 1970s’, New German Critique, 22 Winter 1981, p. 26.
- David Roberts, ‘Marxism, Modernism and Postmodernism’, Thesis Eleven, 12, August 1985, p. 54.
- ibid., p. 57.
- Monique Chefdor, ‘Modernism: Babel Revisited?’, Modernism Challenges and Perspectives, eds. Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones and Albeit Wachtel, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1986, p. 1.
- Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1977, pp. 41–42.
- ibid., p. 41.
- Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Salon of 1846’, in Art in Paris 1845–1862, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, Phaidon Press, London, 1965, pp. 118–119.
- Albrecht Betz, ‘Commodity and Modernity in Heine and Benjamin’, New German Critique, 33, Fall 1984, pp. 181–182.
- ibid., p. 182.
- For Heine's discussion of the flâneur, see Heine, ‘Letters from Paris’, The Works, Vol. 2, Heinemann, London, 1893, p. 253.
- Quoted by Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture and Society, 2, 3, 1985, p. 38.
- ibid., p. 38.
- For a useful discussion of this dualism in relation to Gautier, see P.E. Tennant, Théophile Gautier, University of London, London, 1975, pp. 13–23.
- Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, The Painter of Modern Life and other Essays, ed. Jonathan Mayne, Phaidon Press, London, 1964, pp. 12–14.
- ibid., p. 9.
- ibid., p. 9. Baudelaire's theory of modernity is typical of the Bohemian desire for an all-inclusive aesthetic, and can be compared to the ‘new universality’ of Théophile Thoré (see Francis Suzman Jowell, Thoré- Bürger and the Art of the Past, Garland, New York, 1977, pp. 180–213).
- Baudelaire and other advocates of the ‘art for art's sake’ aesthetic such as Gautier and Flaubert were immensely interested in and studied closely the most radical political doctrines of the day (see Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts, Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd., London, 1970, pp. 145–158).
- See Jowell, Thoré-Bürger and the Art of the Past, pp. 23–48.
- Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, p. 3.
- ibid., pp. 12–14.
- Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 415.
- Albert Thibaudet claimed (in 1936) that the Goncourts were the first to use the word ‘modernisme’—‘Le mot de modernisme, crée par les Goncourt, est de grande conséquence.’ (Albert Thibaudet, Histoire de la Littérature française, Delamain et Boutelleau, Paris, 1936, p. 369). Michel Décaudin noted: ‘One characteristic must be noted at once: the presence and frequency of the adjective “modern”. One is “modern” in 1885 as one will be “new” in 1900 or “young” in 1930,’ (‘Being Modern in 1885’, Modernism Challenges and perspectives, cited above, n. 38, p. 28.)
- Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 40.
- Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display, Pitman, London, 1930, p. 9.
- ibid., p. 142.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1, p. 17.
- ibid., p. 17.
- ibid., p. 21.
- ibid., p. 21.
- For example, see Clement Greenberg, ‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2, pp. 160–170.
- Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1, p. 14.
- Margaret Rose (amongst others) has demonstrated the origins of the term ‘avant-garde’ (in connection to art) in Saint-Simon's socialist tracts, and discussed its similar usage in Marxist theory, particularly in the post-Revolutionary era of Russian Constructivism; Marx's Lost Aesthetic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984, chapters 1, 7–8. It is doubtful that Greenberg would have been aware of the extent of such connections between art and politics signified by the term ‘avant-garde’, but he would have known Lenin's concept of the Bolshevik party as a revolutionary vanguard.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘“American-Type” Painting’, Partisan Review, 22, 2, 1955, p. 179.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘“American-Type” Painting’, Art and Culture, Critical Essays, (1961) Beacon, New York, 1965, p. 209.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Abstract and Representational’, Arts Digest, 29, 3, November 1954, p. 7.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Abstract, Representational, and so forth’, Art and Culture, p. 136.
- The essay is published in Harry Levin, Refractions, Oxford University Press, London, 1966.
- William Barrett, ‘The End of Modern Literature’, Partisan Review, XVI, 9, September 1949, p. 947.
- Hilton Kramer, ‘The New American Painting’, Partisan Review, XX, 4, July/August, 1953, p. 425.
- Hilton Kramer, ‘Twenty-five Years of the Modern’, Arts Digest, 29, 3, November 1954, p. 14.
- Richard Chase, ‘The Fate of the Avant-Garde’, Partisan Review, XXIV, 3, Summer, 1957, p. 367.
- ibid., p. 364.
- Hilton Kramer, The Age of the Avant-Garde, (cited above, n. 26), p. ix.
- Andreas Huyssen, op. cit. (see n. 35 above) p. 30.
- ibid., p. 31.
- Robert Gooding-Williams, ‘Nietzsche's Pursuit of Modernism’, New German Critique, 41, Spring-Summer 1987, p. 107.
- For Adorno's opinion of these events, see his comments (Aesthetic Theory, p. 11) on the most famous of these cabaret performers, F. Wedekind.
- Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 31. Greenberg did mention Baudelaire's name once or twice, but it was always in passing—‘Flaubert, Baudelaire, maybe Gautier, maybe other French writers were the first [modernists].’ (Clement Greenberg, ‘Beginnings of Modernism’, Arts Magazine, 57, 8, April 1983, p. 78).
- See below for a further discussion of this point.
- For a study of the connections between Simmel and Benjamin, see David Frisby, ‘Georg Simmel: the first Sociologist of Modernity’, Theory Culture & Society, 2, 3, 1985, pp. 49–67.
- Walter Benjamin, ‘Addendum to ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”, Charles Baudelaire: a Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, NLB, London, 1973, p. 106.
- ibid., p. 106.
- Theodor Adorno, ‘Letters to Walter Benjamin’, Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor, Verso, London, 1980, p. 127.
- Walter Benjamin, ‘Reply’, in Aesthetics and Politics, p. 135.
- Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, Charles Baudelaire, p. 76.
- Monique Chefdor has noted that ‘modernité simply cannot be translated in English since its cognate actually means what the French understand by “modernism”’: op. cit. (see n. 38 above), p. 2.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Cézanne and the Unity of Modern Art’, Partisan Review, VIII, 3, May/June 1951, p. 324.
- Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute, Collier-Macmillan, London, 1977, p. 20.
- See Buck-Morss's comments, ibid., pp. 207–8, n. 198
- Andrew Arato, ‘Esthetic Theory and Cultural Criticism’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, (cited above, no. 10) p. 191.
- David Bathrick, ‘Marxism and Modernism’, New German Critique, 33, Fall 1984, p. 213.
- Susan Buck-Morss commented that Adorno's close colleague, Max Horkheimer, brought ‘a Hegelianized, Luk´cs-oriented Marxism… to the Frankfurt Institute when he became its director in 1931’ (The Origin of Negative Dialectics, p. 21).
- Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1930, p. 76.
- Georg Lukàcs, History and Class Consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Merlin Press, London, 1971, p. 85.
- ibid., p. 88. 100 ibid., p. 88.
- Benjamin, ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Charles Baudelaire, p. 105.
- Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 31.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’, The Collected Essays and Criticism Volume 2, p. 163.
- ibid., p. 164.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Our Period Style’, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2, p. 326.
- ibid., p. 326.
- ibid., p. 326.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2, p. 168.
- Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, The Seabury Press, New York, 1973, p. 365.
- Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel & Shierry Weber, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981, p. 34.
- ibid., p. 21.
- ibid., p. 21
- Irving Wohlfarth, op. cit. (see n. 9 above) p. 970.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1, p. 7.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘The Decline of Cubism’. The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2, p. 212.