- Clement Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals: 1950–1956, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 122–51. First published as ‘The Plight of Our Culture: Industrialism and Class Mobility’, Commentary, June 1953, and ‘Work and Leisure under Industrialism: The Plight of Our Culture: Part II’, Commentary, July 1953). Page references are from the 1993 publication.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Culture’, in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 22–33.
- While culling the original to less than a quarter of its length, Greenberg retained all passages relating to Marxism, subjecting some to extensive reworking.
- Greenberg scholars differ on the precise date of Greenberg's supposed shift to the political right.
- This kind of thinking can be found in Serge Guilbaut's and John O'Brian's writings. See, for instance, Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and John O'Brian's introduction to The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3. They in turn owe much to Eva Cockcroft's seminal text, ‘Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War, Artforum 12, no. 10 (June 1974): 39–41.
- John O'Brian, introduction to The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3, xxxiii.
- Ibid., xxix, xxx.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Letter to the Editor of Politics’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments 1939–1944, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 187. First published in Politics, March 1944).
- Clement Greenberg, ‘The Late Thirties in New York’, in Art and Culture, 230.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1953’, 140.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1, 19. First published in Partisan Review, Fall 1939).
- Ibid., 22, original emphasis.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1953’, 139–40.
- Ibid., 140.
- For details of Greenberg's teaching stint at Black Mountain College, see Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life (New York: Scribner, 1997), 145; and John O'Brian, ‘Chronology, 1950–1969’, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3, 287.
- Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, The Tradition of the New (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971 [1959]), 23–39. First published in Art News 51, no. 8 (December 1952): 48–50.
- John O'Brian, introduction to The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3, xxix.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1953’, 128.
- Peter Meyer, ‘Stalin Follows in Hitler's Footsteps’, Commentary 15, no. 1 (January 1953): 1.
- Elliot E. Cohen, ‘An Act of Affirmation: Editorial Statement’, Commentary 1, no. 1 (November 1945): 1, original emphasis.
- Reports of this protest come from: ‘The Editor's Comment: Where Was the Communist Party?’, The New International 5, no. 3 (March 1939): 67–9; Clement Greenberg, The Harold Letters: 1928–1943: The Making of an American Intellectual, ed. Janice van Horne (Washington: Counterpoint, 2000), 196; and Martin Greenberg, letter to author, 28 March 2002). By Martin Greenberg's account, ‘The police lines were strained to hold back a great crowd, largely Jewish.’
- Clement Greenberg, ‘The Question of the Pound Award’, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose: 1945–1949, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 304 [first published in Partisan Review 16, no. 5 (May 1949)], original emphasis.
- Clement Greenberg, The Harold Letters, 274.
- Ibid., 279.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, 21.
- Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 84–5.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Letter to the Editor of The Nation’ (7 February 1951), in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3, 79, 81. The letter was rejected by The Nation and subsequently published in The New Leader on 19 March 1951).
- Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone, 377–8.
- Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 78–9.
- Serge Guilbaut, ‘Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick’, in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 73.
- Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone, 71.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, 22.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing, 1948: A Symposium’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 2, 255. First published in Partisan Review, August 1948).
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of The Social History of Art by Arnold Hauser’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3, 95, original emphasis. First published in New York Times Book Review, 23 December 1951).
- Ibid.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1953’, 130.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1961’, 26, original emphasis.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1953’, 130, 147.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1961’, 26, 29, original emphasis.
- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore (1888), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 237–8.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1961’, 29.
- Ibid., 26.
- T.J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art’, Critical Inquiry 9, September 1982, 141.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1953’, 123.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1961’, 22.
- Ibid., 32.
- Ibid., 33. To speak of the ‘interested and disinterested ends that began when work first became less than universal’ was to hark back to Aristotle's Politics, cited by Greenberg, in which ‘the first principle of all action’ was leisure—leisure being both ‘better than work’ and ‘its end’. Ibid., 30.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1953’, 148–9.
- Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, 1st ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 4–5. The German version was published in 1939, and the first English version in 1949).
- Clement Greenberg, Plight 1953’, 149, original emphasis.
- Ibid.
- Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, 29–30.
- Meyer Schapiro, ‘Recent Abstract Painting’, in Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 221. First published as ‘The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art’, Art News 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957): 36–42.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance: 1957–1969, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 137, 144. First published in Encounter, December 1962).
- Greenberg and Schapiro seem to have shared a good professional relationship, joining forces to select works for a 1950 group exhibition at the Kootz Gallery. See Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro, ‘Foreword to a Group Exhibition at the Kootz Gallery’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3, 28. First published in Talent 1950 (New York: Kootz Gallery, 1950).
- Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (London: Pimlico, 1997), 73. Tomkins attributes the term ‘the cult of childhood’ to Roger Shattuck, whose book The Banquet Years, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) discusses the origins of the European avantgarde.
- For an account of the activities at Black Mountain College around this time, see Mary Emma Harris, ‘The Black Mountain College: European Modernism, the Experimental Spirit and the American Avant-Garde’, in American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1919–1933, ed. Christos Joachamides and Norman Rosenthal (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1993), 93–9.
- For details of Theatre Piece 1, otherwise known as The Event, see Mary Emma Harris's essay listed in the previous note (specifically, page 94), and RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1988), 126–7.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1953’, 139.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘“American-Type” Painting’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3, 220. First published in Partisan Review, Spring 1955).
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4, 92. Broadcast for the Forum Lectures (Washington: Voice of America, 1960). First published in Arts Yearbook, no. 4, 1961).
- Clement Greenberg, ‘“American-Type” Painting’, 218–9.
- Ibid., 220.
- Ibid., 224.
- Ibid., 221.
- Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1858, first published 1941), trans. David McLellan, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 368.
- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 237.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Plight 1953’, 146.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Surrealist Painting’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1, 225–6. First published in The Nation, 12 and 19 August 1944).
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, 10.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘“American-Type” Painting’, 226.
- Ibid., 230–1, original emphasis.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name’, 136.
- Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (1867), trans. David McLellan, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 436.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 2, 167. First published in Horizon, October 1947).
- Ibid., 160.
- For instance, at the time of Greenberg's first acquaintance with the Partisan Review circle, George L.K. Morris wrote that Hitler ‘opened the Munich Art Congress [of 1937] with the announcement that “there is no place in the German Reich for the works of Neanderthal Man”’. George L.K. Morris, ‘Art Chronicle: The Architectural Evolution of Brancusi’, Partisan Review 5, no. 3 (August-September 1938): 34.
- Adolph Hitler, ‘Speech Inaugurating the Great Exhibition of German Art 1937, Munich’ (excerpts), trans. Ilse Falk, in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 482.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 2, 233–5. First published in Partisan Review, May 1948).
- John O'Brian, introduction to The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3, xxvii.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art
Volume 12, 2012 - Issue 1