Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg [Hardcover]

Alice Goldfarb Marquis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2006

In the years of his greatest dominance, Clement Greenberg almost single-handedly established Jackson Pollock and the New York School at the center of the American art world. His work set the tone for art criticism for half a century to come. This biography, based on unpublished and previously unavailable documents, interviews and archives, presents a riveting story of imagination and grandiosity, of vision and tragic excess. With clarity and insight, Alice Goldfarb Marquis, author of the widely acclaimed Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare (which the Washington Times called "the one indispensable Duchamp companion") and Art Lessons (named best nonfiction book of the year by the San Diego Book Awards), explores Greenberg's complex relations with numerous friends and lovers, including Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler and Harold Rosenberg. It also recreates the heady art scene in America from the 1940s through the 1980s, detailing the ways in which a generation of critics, with Greenberg at the helm, used personal conviction and innate notions of taste to set the course of modern art. Greenberg remains an indispensable reference in any discussion of art criticism, and Art Czar is the first biography to provide a complete, evenhanded portrait of the man, his work and his times.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Arguably the dominant American art critic of the 20th century, Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) established the fundamental narrative of modern art—the movement toward total abstraction—that continues to circulate in the art world to this day. In this smart, lively, thorough biography, Marquis defines the many masks the great critic wore and discarded throughout his career: self-hating Jew, camp counselor, college snob, delinquent father, failed fiction writer, power broker. She traces Greenberg's career from its meandering start on the margins of bohemia to its great moment of opportunity when the twin streams of capitalist philanthropy and communist intellectual fashion converged. She follows him through the frothy, postwar era of New York art making and into the days beyond, when Greenberg's rigid system of formal classification ceased to apply to contemporary currents of pop and conceptualism. Along the way are interesting insights into the churning auction prices, the sexual hijinks and the ritual alcoholism that made the good times mythical. Marquis, who has also written biographies of Marcel Duchamp and of MoMA's founding director, Alfred Barr, is especially good at conveying the sensual experience of mid-century New York intellectual life. For all interested in the golden years of the New York art world, and in American intellectual history in general, this volume will fascinate. (Apr.)
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Review

Ms. Marquis has done a superlative job of setting the bare facts of the man's monklike concentration and tireless industry against the glitz and screaming egos of collectors, dealers, and artists. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: MFA Publications (June 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0878467017
• ISBN-13: 978-0878467013
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,360,239 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, May 22, 2006

By 

Steve (By DUNDEE Scotland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg (Hardcover)

This is the second biography of the (in)famous Clement Greenberg, the brilliant art critic who cut his teeth at Partisan Review in the 1930s and 40s, and provided an elegant and convincing (albeit deeply problematic) historical trajectory of modern art.

This biography follows on the heels of Florence Rubenfeld's Clement Greenberg: A Life (1997), which came in for a great deal of criticism, on the one side from Greenbergers who didnt want to be reminded of what an arrogant and deeply unpleasant man Greenberg could be if you didn't suck up to him and take his word as gospel, and on the other hand, by academics who felt that Rubenfeld lacked the academic clout to write a suffiently meaty tome. Both criticisms were wide of the mark; Rubenfeld did an admirable job, bringing to light lots of interesting information about Greenberg's early life, and providing a judicious balance between dealing sensitively with Greenberg's intellectual development while providing plenty of juicy and salacious gossip (let's face it, that's what we read biographies for, right?)

I mention Rubenfeld because her biography poses problems for Marquis. Its clear that Marquis' biography suffers for being released after Rubenfeld. (And interestingly, Marquis never cites Rubenfeld directly- her study is simply referred to as "another biography"). It seems that Marquis did not get access to Greenberg himself, as Rubenfeld did; she offers little in the way of new information, although she does offer a different slant on events here and there (for instance, it turns out that Greenberg did not punch Max Ernst at a party in the late forties, as Rubenfeld recounts; rather, it seems that Greenberg accosted Ernst before being punched by Nicolas Calas). However, such information doesnt really warrant another biography, even though its an enjoyable enough read, especially the account of Greenberg's time at PR in the 30s, (and it could hardly be otherwise, being such a fascinating period of intellectual history). However, without doubt it lacks something of the vividness of Rubenfeld's study, which dealt with Greenberg's Jewishness, the influences on his criticism, and his undergoing quack psychoanalysis in the 50s/60s, an issue which Marquis completely skates over. And further, Marquis is a journalist like Rubenfeld, so she certainly doesnt offer any of the academic punch which was felt to be lacking in the first bio.

Perhaps the biggest weakness of this bio is the lack of respect Marquis demonstrates towards Greenberg's writing. He may well have been an arrogant and deeply unpleasant man, but he was and remains one of the great art critics in English, notwithstanding the drastic drop-off in quality characteristic of his late criticism. But Marquis can't resist making snide comments everywhere. She even insinuates that the essay 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' (1939) was more or less co-authored with Dwight Macdonald, which struck me as a bit ungenerous.

Overall, this is an interesting read, but we're still waiting for a biography of Greenberg which will offer a satisfactory engagement with his criticism, as well as providing the necessary colour of his mesy private life.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars We need a better biography, May 27, 2006

By 

Walter Bannard (miami, fl USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg (Hardcover)

This is another biography letting us know what a thoroughly bad person Clement Greenberg was with little evaluation of what the man accomplished, how he accomplished it or why he is acknowledged as perhaps the greatest art critic who ever lived. Where Rubenfeld went after him with hammer and tongs, Marquis does it with innuendo, spin and an incessant stream of disparaging adjectival phrases. Every paragraph, every account, every anecdote is worked over to make him look cruel, thoughtless, short-sighted, careless, nasty, pathetic, dogmatic, passive, neurotic and on and on. She gets facts wrong, talks constantly about his "theories" (he was not a theorist), leaps into supposition and speculation at every opportunity, lards the text with quotes from bitter associates, and demonstrates in several places that she does not understand anything about art or the simple esthetic approach he used unwaveringly during his whole career.

How and why Clement Greenberg continuously draws this kind of pathologically virulent hostility is something for a social psychologist to figure out. He himself said "I have an argument with my reputation". I knew the man for 35 years, saw him often, ate with him, drank with him, argued with him, looked at at art with him - the man in this book and the man in the Rubenfeld book is not the man I knew. We need a book that sets the record straight. But then I guess the question would be, who would read it?

If one could rinse out all the arbitrary negativity in this book there would be a residue of simple biographical history. There is certainly some value in that.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars just the facts - unfortunately, October 29, 2006

By 

Unutterable (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg (Hardcover)

While Marquis seems to cover all the surface facts, she fails to give us a look into the theories that made Greenberg so important. And her concern with Greenberg's reputation appears slanted; for example, the controversy surrounding Greenberg's stripping the paint off the late David Smith's sculpture is defended and his detractors are summarily dismissed. It made me curious to read Rubenfeld's biography, though better yet would be to get Greenberg's Art and Culture and read what the man himself had to say.