Clement Greenberg

“You don’t choose your response to art, it is given to you,” insisted Clement Greenberg. Whether it was given to this man by inborn instincts or by the players and dynamic in the art world of his generation, Clement Greenberg’s ‘response’ to art was fueled with a passion and perception that is arguably unmatched. Greenberg began pronouncing his aesthetic judgments in the 1930s with a strength that lasted well into the ‘50s. He wrote with clarity about Modernist art, as an editor, a critic for the Nation, and throughout many of his influential essays.
Two of these essays, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” of 1939, and “Modernist Painting” of 1965 are both fine examples of his meticulous and deliberate writing style as he presents, definitively, cultural-art phenomenon that, although relevant to their current art-world, have an essential history.
In “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg discusses and concludes the caustic distinction between the elite...