8/9/2023 0 Comments Cold war phenomena definition3 Paintings by Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning were to demonstrate the free spontaneous sensibility of the American option as opposed to the robotic Socialist Realism coming out of the Soviet Union. Starting in 1956, the USIA and the CIA, in conjunction with New York's Museum of Modern Art, arranged a series of exhibitions to be sent to Europe as weapons of the Cold War in which the United States and the Soviet Union were struggling for the soul of Western Europe. Greenberg disciple William Rubin evidently wasn't kidding when, in the 60s, he referred to Pollock as 'World Historical', meaning that Pollock (read 'the United States') had taken on the leadership of Europe.Īs for Greenberg himself, his hegemonic positioning as über-critic was a minor wrinkle in this new geopolitical arrangement. He would keep its flame alive - a rough-hewn, authentic Siegfried emerging from the forest with the song of the new day on his lips. Abstract Expressionism, on the contrary, spoke of a new, Euro-derived historicist sophistication in the Yankee which made him, in the guise, say, of Jackson Pollock, worthy of receiving the torch of avant-gardism from a Europe crippled by war. Earlier American art not spawned out of Paris - such as the Regionalist painting of Thomas Hart Benton - could not have been used credibly for this purpose in Europe, where it would speak only of the provincial backwardness of the Americans. It was, in other words, a highly suitable sign for the propagandist idea of the unity of the United States and Western Europe - but unity under American leadership. Abstract Expressionism was, of course, the branch of American art which had lately received the most direct European influence - but it also embodied something of the mythical Yankee initiative, rugged individualism, and so on. This is not to say that the art was without value, or that any American art at all could have been effectively used in this way. Post-War American military and industrial hegemony carried American art along with it into a fairly lasting moment of cultural hegemony. It was not, then, what Greenberg said about art that made 'Greenbergianism' seem like a real - even an important - entity it was the art he chose to say it about: the fact that he championed American painting at the moment when it was about to go over the top historically. 2 The view that pure form somehow is its own content because it derives from universals has been perhaps the most clichéd and central European view about art since the Pre-Socratic period, with the exception of eras in which the Christian church has dominated. Greenberg was really just a late and distant representative of a European tradition going back through Roger Fry and Clive Bell to the so-called Critical Historians of Art and the ancestral lineage behind them: Schelling, Hegel, Kant, Goethe, Ficino and, ultimately, Plotinus, Plato, and Pythagoras. Greenberg himself acknowledged that he was merely embellishing the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant - though his stance was also shot through with liberal injections of Hegelian historicism which he didn't acknowledge. I think it is clear that there never was a 'Greenbergian' theory of art. I have elsewhere published my critique of Greenberg's theoretical position,1 and will offer here, instead, a discussion of the Greenberg phenomenon - his enduring hold on much of the American art establishment, both in the gallery and in the academy. Recently the whole mass of Greenberg's critical writings has been republished in a four volume set by the University of Chicago Press. In 1961, selected essays from 1939-1960 were published as the book Art and Culture, which still maintains an overpowering dominance in the American critical canon. They are supported by a much larger number of brief reviews of exhibitions in which these principles are more or less applied. A handful of brief theoretical essays, such as 'Avant-garde and Kitsch' (1939), and 'Toward a Newer Laocoon' (1940), remain the remarkably enduring testament of his position: a relentlessly highbrow American brand of 'formalism'. Greenberg had started with literary ambitions, was redirected into art criticism, and worked for many years as the critic for the influential liberal broadsheet, The Nation. On May 7, 1994, Clement Greenberg, the American art critic most famously associated with Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting, died aged 85.
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