Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Their Jewish Issues

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 651-664 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Baigell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Immigrant Parents ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
The Social ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
Clement Greenberg ◽  
Art Critics

Clement Greenberg (1909–94) and Harold Rosenberg (1906–78) were the two art critics most closely associated with abstract expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s. Neither began their careers as art critics, however. By the mid-1980s, Rosenberg had published literary essays and poems in left-wing magazines, and Greenberg's articles and reviews first appeared at the end of that decade. During the 1940s, Greenberg began to write art criticism, and Rosenberg's essays began to appear frequently in the 1950s. By that time, both had become part of the group known informally as the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish and children of immigrant parents.Highly verbal, vocal, argumentative, and politically left of center, they often published in magazines such as Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent. Although both Greenberg and Rosenberg ultimately rejected the more dogmatic and authoritarian aspects of leftist politics, they nevertheless supported the idea that society must move forward, but not necessarily by political means. Greenberg thought that such momentum could be maintained by the cultural elite, and Rosenberg, influenced by surrealism's concerns for the creative process, believed that individuals who were independent minded and creative could do the same. Both encouraged artists to turn from the social concerns that engaged many during the 1930s to apolitical, self-searching themes that came to characterize the art of the 1940s. In effect, they, especially Rosenberg, lionized the artist as an heroic individual. In the words of one historian, both “worked to find a safe haven for radical progress within the realm of individualistic culture.” And both, among the most perspicacious critics of their time, discovered, encouraged, and/or supported artists who ultimately became major figures, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Guston, Philip (1913–1980)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Pocock
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
University Of Iowa ◽  
Federal Art Project ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
The University ◽  
Washington University

American artist Philip Guston is best known for the comic-strip-inspired paintings he created during the last decade of his life. Though they prompted scathing reviews when first exhibited in 1970, Guston’s late works became a precedent for 1980s Neo-expressionism. Born Philip Goldstein to Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants in Montreal, Guston was raised in Los Angeles, where he attended the Otis Art Institute, as well as the Manual Arts High School with Jackson Pollock. Inspired by Italian Renaissance frescoes and Mexican muralism, Guston began his career painting political murals—first in California and Mexico, and later in New York as part of the WPA’s Federal Art Project. While teaching at the University of Iowa and Washington University in St Louis in the 1940s, Guston gained critical acclaim for his allegorical street scenes. In 1951, he moved to New York and began producing gestural abstractions in the manner of Willem de Kooning. His return to figuration in the late 1960s, prompted by the social and political unrest of the period, combines the iconography of his early paintings; specifically, these works feature hooded figures and brick walls, with an expressionist style marked by his signature short, thick brushstrokes.

Shaken into Seeing and Hearing

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-170
Author(s):  
Ryan Dohoney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
The University ◽  
The City

Chapter 3 chronicles the intersection of Feldman’s and Dominique de Menil’s spiritual aesthetics. It begins by reconstructing the conditions of their first meeting: the New York City Ballet’s 1966 performance of Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace, re-choreographed for George Balanchine. It goes on to document Feldman and de Menil’s 1967 collaboration on the gallery show Six Painters at the University of St. Thomas. Through her family’s patronage, as well as Dominique’s presence as self-installed head of the art department, the University became a major presenting organization offering avant-garde cultural events in the city. Six Painters featured paintings by Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Franz Kline. Feldman was also given a residency at the university in 1967, where he lectured on abstract expressionism and his own musical aesthetics as well as presented a concert of his music.

Between creativity and death: Abstract expressionists and alcohol use disorders

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (S1) ◽  
pp. S519-S520
Author(s):  
O. Vasiliu ◽  
D. Vasile ◽  
F. Androne ◽  
M. Patrascu ◽  
E. Morariu
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Heavy Drinking ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
Innovative Work ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Car Accident

American Expressionists were a group of American artists who valued free expression of unconscious elements, combining emotional intense expressions with anti-figurative abstract style. Their main place of creative debates was Cedar Tavern in New York City, considered by art critics an important incubator of the Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock, one of the most prominent figures of this movement, suspected of having bipolar disorder, abused alcohol during long periods of his life, for which he even underwent psychotherapy. Unfortunately, he died in a car accident while driving under influence, after decades of innovative work, during which he created a new painting method and produced compositions which are nowadays between the most expensive works of art. Mark Rothko also had periods of heavy drinking, and finally he died by cutting his arms with a razor. He is considered a genius, who created a completely new perspective over painting, and his works are also between the most expensive paintings in the world. Willem de Kooning was affected by alcoholism since his early years, and developed dementia, at least partially induced by abusive drinking. Although affected by neurocognitive disorder, he continued to produce amazingly creative paintings until his final years and in 2016 one of his works obtained the record for the most expensive painting ever sold. Using alcohol as a tool for increasing creativity risks to expose the creator to severe disorders or even death, the subject walking on a narrow line between sublimation of unconscious impulses and tragic resignation before them.Disclosure of interestThe presenting author was speaker for Bristol Myers Squibb and Servier, and participated in clinical research funded by Janssen Cilag, Astra Zeneca, Eli Lilly, Sanofi Aventis, Schering Plough, Organon, Bioline Rx, Forenap, Wyeth, Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, Dainippon Sumitomo.

Krasner, Lee (1908–1984)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen C. Landau
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
American Art ◽  
Immigrant Parents ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Abstract Expressionist ◽  
Clement Greenberg ◽  
History Of ◽  
Artistic Career

Lee Krasner, born 27 October 1908 in Brooklyn, New York to immigrant parents from Russia, was an abstract expressionist painter whose status as the sole female pioneer of the movement is widely recognized. After attending the National Academy of Design and Cooper Union, Krasner’s talent blossomed at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, where she developed a radical understanding of the implications of modernism. Throughout her lifetime and long after, Krasner’s artistic career was overshadowed by her role as the wife (and widow) of Jackson Pollock. Credited by critic Clement Greenberg as ‘‘absolutely catalytic’’ for Pollock’s aesthetic development, Krasner shrewdly managed his reputation and prices after his untimely death. This allowed her to establish the Pollock–Krasner Foundation in her will with a multi-million-dollar endowment to support needy and neglected artists. In her Little Image series, created after she and Pollock moved from Manhattan to Long Island in 1945, Krasner explored the possibilities of drawing (and sometimes dripping) in paint in a manner similar to Pollock. By the time Lee Krasner died, on June 20, 1984 in New York City, she was considered a role model for feminist artists. The complexity of what has been characterized as her ‘‘working relationship’’ with Jackson Pollock is a defining feature of her importance to the history of postwar American art.

Hofmann, Hans (1880–1966)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christa Noel Robbins
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
York City ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Picture Plane ◽  
Depth Of Field ◽  
New York School ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Core Group ◽  
The Core ◽  
Clement Greenberg

Hans Hofmann was a German–American painter associated with Abstract Expressionism. Known as much for his paintings as for his role as a teacher, Hofmann moved to New York City in 1932. Much older than the core group of New York School painters, Hofmann acted as a kind of bridge between European and American modernism. Hofmann’s paintings are highly recognizable: they feature large planes of thickly applied, bold color, often interspersed with expressionistic fields of gestural painting. The result, which can be seen in his 1962 painting Memoria in Aeternum, is a dynamic play with depth of field and colour relations. Hofmann referred to this spatial and optical play as the "push–pull" effect, indicating the manner in which areas of a canvas can appear to push back behind the picture plane and pull forward into the viewer’s space, while simultaneously reading as flat surface. The spatial and material relationality introduced through this device influenced a generation of New York painters and critics, both those taught directly by Hofmann and those who learned of his theories through second parties. Hofmann’s students from this period include Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Allan Kaprow and, importantly, Clement Greenberg. Many of their first lessons in modernist painting took place in his school.

Fried, Michael (1939--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Child
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
American Art ◽  
Art Museum ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Clement Greenberg ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Canonical Texts

Michael Fried is an American art critic, literary critic and art historian. Fried is most well-known for his art criticism, which contributed to the debates on modernist painting and sculpture that were played out in the pages of American art journals, such as Artforum, during the 1960s. In 1958, while studying English as an undergraduate at Princeton University, Fried met Clement Greenberg, whose theories on modernist painting influenced Fried’s subsequent writings and art criticism. He later studied under Richard Wollheim while at Oxford University. The formalist influence of Greenberg’s art criticism is prevalent in Fried’s two canonical texts on modernist art: "Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella" (1965), the catalogue essay for an exhibition curated by Fried at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum; and "Art and Objecthood" (1967). The former focuses upon three second-generation New York School painters, considered to be "high modernist." The latter is a defense of modernist painting against a new form of three-dimensional work that he terms "literal," now known as minimalist, sculpture. The argument initiated in these two essays formed a key moment in the debates that defined late-20th-century modernist art history. In the late 1960s Fried moved away from writing art criticism, focusing instead on modernist art in the 19th and early-20th centuries. He recently returned to contemporary art with his text Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before.

The Cul-de-Sac of Social Democracy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan M. Wald
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
New York Intellectuals ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Irving Howe ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S

A history of Irving Howe and Dissent magazine is used to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the social democratic alternative that became the Left wing of the New York intellectuals during the 1950s. This is followed by an examination of the life and work of Harvey Swados, which also express the ambiguities that would render this tradition problematic during the era of new radicalization in the 1960s.

scholarly journals La peinture à vue de nez ou la juste distance du critique d’art, de Diderot à Zola

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Érika Wicky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Art Critics

Since the emergence of exhibition practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there has been a progressive normalization of the material conditions for observing paintings, such as their placement and the spectator’s distance to them. Just like painters and Salon visitors, art critics needed to move closer to their object of inquiry in order to gain better knowledge of it, but paradoxically, they could not claim objectivity without stepping back. The ideal distance that would allow viewers to simultaneously grasp the whole and the details was a contentious topic of discussion for nineteenth-century artists, critics, and scientists. Among the different ways in which this question was formulated in art criticism, one in particular reveals the presuppositions of the time about proximity: the constant reference to the smell of the painting. Associated with proximity, smell metaphorizes the pleasure or trouble spectators feel when they get close to paintings, to their pictorial materiality, or even to the figures depicted. Because smell always functions as a sign of the substance from which it emanates, art critics’ reference to it allowed them to consider the problem of proximity within the social and aesthetic issues of their time.

Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement, 1932–1937. By Laikwan Pang. [Lanham, MD, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. xvi+279 pp. £22.95. ISBN 0-7425-0946-X.]

2003 ◽  
Vol 175 ◽  
pp. 844-846
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Xiao
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Social Mission ◽  
Chinese Film ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The Social

As the first monograph on the Chinese left-wing cinema movement published in English, this book makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on pre-1949 Chinese film. Based on extensive research in both primary and secondary sources, Pang traces the historical development of the leftist cinema movement and makes several insightful observations about 1930s film culture in China in general and the leftist cinema movement in particular. She argues that during the 1930s, a group of Chinese filmmakers, despite their individual differences in social and political backgrounds, shared some common understandings about the social mission of the film medium and visions of modernity and nationhood, which resulted in a body of films that was coloured by a leftist orientation. Pang argues that some of the unique features of those films were continuously visible in the 1940s (pp. 231–238).

Lassaw, Ibram (1913–2003)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther T. Thyssen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
New York School ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
The Family ◽  
Galactic Cluster ◽  
Brooklyn Museum

A sculptor of the New York School, Ibram Lassaw was born to Russian parents in Alexandria, Egypt. The family immigrated to Brooklyn, NY, in 1921, where Lassaw learned modeling, casting, and carving. He discovered avant-garde art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, and continued to study sculpture at the Clay Club from 1927 to 1932. An active participant in New York modernist circles, Lassaw was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Group (1935), and The Club (1949). Lassaw’s interest in cosmic and religious themes culminated in abstract sculptures for Jewish synagogues, such as Pillar of Fire (1953) at Temple Beth El, Springfield, MA. Known for his web-like structures, Lassaw dripped, fused, and spattered metal, embracing the resulting accidental contours that accrued on his gridded designs, as in Galactic Cluster #1 (1958, Newark Museum). He wielded the oxyacetylene torch like a paintbrush and the intricately structured wires twist, turn, and redouble like skeins of paint by Jackson Pollock. His work was included in the 1959 Kassel Documenta, which showcased American Abstract Expressionism.

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