Customer Reviews

Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection

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This is a very beautiful book, showing many wonderful works of art, but only a relatively small number of them have achieved the recognition they deserve. Greenberg was always controversial during his lifetime. He lived to see the widespread acceptance in the 1950s of his endorsements during the '40s of Pollock and the rest of abstract expressionism, but his admiration for the color-field painters of the '60s was always a minority taste, with many more artlovers during that period favoring pop art and its ramifications--op, kinetic art, minimal, etc. (I say this upon the basis of having covered the art scene for Time magazine in the '60s, having continued to write about art since, and having come to the conclusion since receiving my doctorate in art history that pop was essentially a reaction back against abstract expressionism, while color-field painting and the modernist abstraction which carries on its tradition in the present are the true continuance of the avant-garde.) Since the '60s, the greater popularity of the descendants of pop & its ramifications has made it increasingly difficult for the art that Greenberg admired to receive the recognition it deserves, especially the art made by the younger artists, but majority taste has been wrong many times in the past, and this is particularly true in the present, when critical judgments in general are so often considered less important than how well a work of art is doing in the marketplace. I like to think this situation will improve in the future, but in the meantime, the reader will be able to see in this book what really good & truly avant-garde art looks like.

An excellent and must have reference book, clement greenberg's selection of artists are important to all of the kinds of art that came about in the 20th century