The Flattening of “Collage”* LISA FLORMAN In his influential article “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” Tom Crow took the courageous step of citing—favorably—several critical essays written by Clement Greenberg. Crow wanted to remind us that, in its earliest theoretical formulations, including those advanced by Greenberg himself, modernist art was seen as thoroughly bound up with the rise of capitalism and the culture industry that attended it.1 It was, of course, to the early, overtly Marxist Greenberg (the author of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and “Towards a Newer Laocoon”) that Crow directed our attention; he had substantially less enthusiasm for the arguably more dogmatic, formalist critic who, two decades later, wrote “Collage.”2 That Greenberg, Crow rightly pointed out, had become so intent on denying any overlap between the products of mass culture and modernist art that he refused to acknowledge the obviously commercial nature of the collage elements—the labels, the scraps of newspaper, and wallpaper—that Picasso and Braque had actually pasted into their papiers collés. Crow seemed to feel that, whatever the insights of “Collage,” they were outweighed by such oversights, and within the course of a few paragraphs he had effectively written the essay off as irredeemably flawed. If I find myself less willing or able to dismiss “Collage,” it is not because I think the formalist, Kantian Greenberg is more compelling than his Marxist predecessor. In truth, I am far less interested in either the formalist or the Marxist alone than I am in (to borrow Stephen Melville’s phrasing) the Hegelian who * This essay benefited from its presentation to the seminar in modern art jointly sponsored by the History of Art Department and the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. I would like to thank Brigid Doherty for extending the invitation to deliver the paper there. I would also like to thank Harry Cooper for his generous and careful reading of the text; even those few suggestions that I did not ultimately take helped me to clarify the finer points of the argument that I was trying to make. A more general debt of gratitude is owed to Stephen Melville, who, early on, showed me what it might mean to actually read Greenberg thoughtfully and with care. 1. Tom Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 3–37. 2. Greenberg, “Collage” (1959), in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 70–83. OCTOBER 102, Fall 2002, pp. 59–86. © 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320826452 by guest on 02 October 2021 60 OCTOBER emerges out of the rubbing of Kant against Marx in Greenberg’s writings.3 I would even go so far as to suggest that Greenberg has been a powerful presence within art history precisely because, like Hegel, he offers us a model, albeit imperfect, of how “art” and “history” might be thought together, and of how their conjunction can be seen to articulate a single field: art history as distinct from history tout court or, perhaps more urgently at present, from either visual or cultural studies.4 All of this is by way of saying that if in what follows I engage in a close reading of “Collage” (a text that Crow describes as one of Greenberg’s “most complete statements of formal method”5), it is not so much to explicate the essay’s formalism as to draw from it an understanding of the grounds on which art might properly be said to have a history—its history, if not fully separate from, neither fully subsumable into, a history of culture more broadly or generally conceived. I also hope to show that that understanding can be turned back upon the text itself, and used to rectify some of its more evident shortcomings. Even the omissions pointed out by Crow can be addressed, I believe, by rigorously applying the logic that Greenberg developed in the first half of the essay but failed to carry through.6 I am getting ahead of myself, however. Before we can even begin our close reading, we need to clarify precisely which text it is that we intend to read. “Collage” has all too often been taken as a straightforward revision of “The Pasted- Paper Revolution,” an essay that Greenberg wrote a year earlier, and that appeared in the September 1958 issue of ARTNews.7 The differences between the two texts 3. Melville, “Positionality, Objectivity, Judgment,” in Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1996), p. 78. Of course, it remains to be seen what kind of a Hegelian Greenberg actually is. 4. Crow’s essay, it seems to me, largely blurs these distinctions—not only through its explicit appeal to cultural studies (primarily the work of Phil Cohen, Stuart Hall, and Tony Jefferson), but also through its implication that the autonomy of art, on which rests whatever claim art history may have to occupying a distinct field, actually originates elsewhere. Crow writes, for example, that “the formal autonomy achieved in early modernist painting should be understood as a mediated synthesis of possibilities derived from both the failures of existing artistic technique and a repertoire of potentially oppositional practices discovered in the world outside” (p. 29). Similarly, although Crow begins by regarding the avant-garde as a resistant subculture like those studied by Hall and Jefferson, he closes his argument with the suggestion that it in practice only borrows from such groups. Thus: “In their selective appropriation from fringe mass culture, advanced artists search out areas of social practice that retain some vivid life in an increasingly administered and rationalized society” (p. 35). 5. Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture,” p. 8. 6. In this ambition to turn what I take to be the strongest arguments within “Collage” back upon that text itself, I feel a bit of the same hesitation expressed by T. J. Clark when he admitted that he was “genuinely uncertain as to whether [he was] diverging from Greenberg’s argument or explaining it more fully.” In my case, there is undoubtedly some truth to both claims—though I trace my ambivalence to “Collage” itself, which seems to lay out two distinct and even contradictory models of how modernism works. For Clark’s analysis, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” see Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 47–63. 7. Reprinted in Clement Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: 1993), vol. 4, pp. 61–66. “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” is in turn something of a reworking of a review of The Museum of Modern Art’s Collage exhibition that Greenberg wrote a decade earlier and published in The Nation 27 (November 1948). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320826452 by guest on 02 October 2021 The Flattening of “Collage” 61 have, as a result, been frequently elided.8 But “Collage” is more than twice as long as its predecessor, and, although much of the additional material can be passed off as simply providing greater detail to the existing argument, the essay also includes two subjects nowhere raised in “The Pasted-Paper Revolution”—Picasso’s and Braque’s cultivation of the sculptural aspects of Cubism, and the later (that is, post–1915) paintings of Juan Gris—that significantly alter the argument’s overall shape. To the extent that Greenberg’s desire to incorporate these subjects into his narrative seems likely to have been what occasioned the rewriting, it might be worth our while to examine them briefly before taking up a properly sequential reading of the text. We will see as we proceed that the two subjects are closely, if negatively, related in the unfolding narrative of “Collage.” For our purposes, though, it probably makes sense to disentangle them momentarily and attend first to Greenberg’s discussion of the paintings by Gris, which serves as a sort of coda to the essay as a whole.9 While Gris’s work had been mentioned in “The Pasted-Paper Revolution,” the emphasis there was, understandably, on his papiers collés, and Greenberg’s judgment was largely negative; Gris’s collages were held to “lack the immediacy of presence of Picasso’s and Braque’s.”10 In “Collage,” although essentially the same charge is repeated, Greenberg follows it with praise for Gris’s later paintings, again, specifically those done in 1915 and the several years following. Greenberg claims that the paint- ings effectively recapitulate and clarify the most important achievements of Picasso’s 8. The situation is not helped by the fact that “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” was included in Greenberg’s Collected Essays and Criticism, while “Collage” was not. Even if that editorial decision was taken in view of the still ready availability of Art and Culture, it is likely to discourage any direct comparison of the two texts, and so to reinforce the impression that the differences between them are relatively minor. 9. It might seem that by beginning, as I do, at the end of “Collage,” I am willfully flouting the order of the argument as it is actually presented, and thereby altering it in some fundamental way. I would counter, however, that one of the things that characterizes “Collage” (and makes it more than a little Hegelian) is that no part of it is fully explicable in isolation. Everything is to be understood in the context of the whole, with the rather awkward qualification that that whole in turn depends entirely on the individual moments comprising it.