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Harold Rosenberg's Critique of Artforum Moonie S. Historians of the Future: Harold Rosenberg's Critique of Artforum. Visual Resources 2015, 31(1-2), 103-115. Copyright: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Visual Resources on 08/04/2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01973762.2015.1004784 DOI link to article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2015.1004784 Date deposited: 06/05/2016 Embargo release date: 08 October 2016 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence Newcastle University ePrints - eprint.ncl.ac.uk 1 Historians of the Future: Harold Rosenberg’s critique of Artforum Stephen Moonie This paper discusses Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) and his critique of Artforum. It focuses particularly on the journal’s landmark issue on the New York School in September 1965. Rosenberg criticized Artforum for blurring the boundaries between art history and art criticism: an entwinement which is now widely accepted by many commentators, not least because some of Artforum’s major critics went on to pursue academic careers, shaping the discipline of contemporary art history. However, this acceptance has resulted in some confusion with regard to the current role of art criticism. In this regard, Rosenberg’s opposition to Artforum merits consideration. Although Rosenberg was not disinterested, this paper claims that his remarks open up the historical roots of our current confusion. What was at stake in the debates amongst Artforum’s major figures was nothing less than the “history of the future.” Keywords: modernism; art criticism; Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978); Clement Greenberg (1909-1994); Michael Fried (b.1939); Frank Stella (b.1936). In 1965, Harold Rosenberg remarked that “art criticism today is art history, although not necessarily the art history of art historians.”1 Rosenberg’s characteristically wry remark was directed at the newly founded journal Artforum, highlighting the intertwining of art history and art criticism, which lay at the heart of the early years of this publication. This essay will assess Rosenberg’s critique in relation to the early development of Artforum, and particularly in relation to its September 1965 issue in which modern American painting was debated. Rosenberg’s remarks were primarily directed towards the means by which Artforum laid claim to a quasi-art-historical “objectivity.” This use of art-historical method served didactic aims: the related developments of modernism’s institutionalization and the artworld’s expansion required an increasingly academic criticism in order to establish artistic and academic reputations. As he wrote for broader-interest publications such as Vogue and the New Yorker, as well as for the rival periodical Art News, Rosenberg’s voice is often 2 marginal to critical debates from this period, and this was exacerbated by Artforum’s explicit rejection of his brand of existentialist Modernism. Nonetheless, Rosenberg’s position on the margins equipped him to assess Artforum’s emergence with a critical eye. Others noted the art-historical inclination of Artforum. For instance, Max Kozloff, a lone admirer of Rosenberg amongst the editors of Artforum, remarked that the new magazine’s criticism was “Florentine” rather than “Venetian” as it adopted a dry, scholarly style in contrast to the belle-lettrisme of Art News in the 1950s.2 A fault line, then, was drawn up at an early stage between the established Art News (founded in 1902) and the newcomer Artforum (founded in 1962). Art News, a periodical associated with Thomas Hess as well as Rosenberg, was engaged with the metaphysical concerns of Abstract Expressionism whereas the younger generation at Artforum drew greater sustenance from the formalist criticism of Clement Greenberg. Rosenberg’s critique then, is not without ressentiment: he was well aware of the threat posed by this new publication. This is highlighted by the following anecdote by Artforum’s first editor, Philip Leider, who recounted his first meeting with Frank Stella during a panel at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1960s: Frank felt he was sticking it to Rosenberg when he said, “And it’s a pleasure to be here in San Francisco, especially because of this wonderful art magazine that you’re putting out.” And Rosenberg winced because he hated Artforum. Already. Absolutely. It was in competition with Art News, even on that little level.3 While this dispute was undoubtedly grounded in professional rivalry, it nonetheless hinged upon a different conception of critical method and its relation to art history. At the centre of the dispute was Clement Greenberg’s narrative of modernism. 3 I Although Greenberg’s influence on Artforum is sometimes overstated, there is no doubt that in its early years, under the editorial guidance of Leider, the magazine was marked by Greenberg’s influence. Leider would later distance himself from the elder critic after the threat of litigation in 1970: Greenberg was enraged by a remark made in Artforum by Ad Reinhardt who described him as a “dealer.”4 However, the magazine’s shift of priorities in the late 1960s took place for more substantial reasons as Leider came to appreciate the importance of figures such as Robert Smithson and Robert Morris, who challenged the assumptions of modernism both in theory and in practice.5 One should not consider Greenberg’s influence on Artforum solely in terms of the application of formalist method, as if it were merely a case of following the elder critic’s prescriptions, for instance, heralding Jules Olitski rather than Robert Smithson. The matter was much more deeply entrenched, and was consequent upon the conception of historical development, which underlay the modernist narrative. Greenberg’s early and most influential writings, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) and “Towards a Newer Laocoön” (1940) were retrospective accounts of European modernism, which proposed a compelling narrative of the historical emergence of abstraction. In the postwar period, however, the avant-garde had migrated to the US and Greenberg’s retrospective account became a present imperative, codified in his summa “Modernist Painting” (1960). Here, a history of modernism was not simply elucidated, but an implicit trajectory was prescribed. In the aftermath of the breakdown of Abstract Expressionism and Color-Field Painting, new art was 4 burdened with the need to provide the “next step” in Greenberg’s implicitly teleological trajectory.6 In a paper delivered in 1965, entitled “The new role of the universities,” Rosenberg remarked upon the changed relationship to tradition between academic and modern artists: whereas traditional artists such as John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) and Charles Hawthorne (1872–1930) drew their strength from tradition, modern artists were oriented towards the future. Rosenberg noted that: In tradition […] history is behind you. In the modern world, history is in front of you […] In other words, we are talking about modern history, which is the history of the future, not of the past.7 This ideological struggle of modern history was of long-standing interest to Rosenberg, who also discussed it at length in earlier essays such as “The Resurrected Romans” (1948).8 The legacy of the French Revolution debated in that essay may be of greater historical importance than the artworld struggles of 1960s New York but nonetheless, the same imperatives obtained. In “The Premises of Criticism” (1965), Rosenberg remarked: Art criticism today is beset with art historians turned inside out to function as prophets of so-called inevitable trends. A determinism similar to that projected into the evolution of past styles is clamped upon art in the making. In this parody of art history, value judgments are deduced from a presumed logic of development[.]9 The teleological conception of art history, which under girded Greenberg’s narrative, entailed a peculiar paradox: it involved mapping the retrospective gaze of the historian onto the uncertainties of the present. Further, the approach led to the forming of judgments a priori, according to the logic of the historical schema. 5 II One of the noticeable features of Rosenberg’s critique is that it was made in 1965, prior to Artforum’s move from Los Angeles to New York. Rosenberg remarked then that an academic degree in the subject “has become the accepted means of accrediting people for careers in art, including that of art critic.”10 This comment was aimed at the cohort of graduate students who would soon dominate Artforum’s editorial board, shaping the direction of the magazine. These included Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss and Barbara Rose. Most importantly, they would follow the trajectory implicit in Greenberg’s modernism, buttressing their criticism with authoritative judgments derived from modernism’s historical imperative. Over time, their “Florentine” criticism won out over the approaches and methods of other, less celebrated, critics. This victory was by no means accidental, and one can already trace its contours in that September 1965 issue (fig.1). This issue focused on the New York School and coincided with Maurice Tuchman’s exhibition of Abstract Expressionism held at the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The September 1965 issue functioned not only as a retrospective on Abstract Expressionism—which by then was already receding into the past—but it also allowed the journal to establish its own identity as a forum aligned with a younger generation of New York artists. In his introductory essay, the editor Philip Leider made a telling quotation from Michael Fried, whose essay “Jackson Pollock” was published in the same issue. This piece was an excerpt from Fried’s essay for the Fogg Art Museum’s exhibition catalogue Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (fig.2).11 Leider cited the following passage, in which Fried 6 lamented “[t]he almost complete failure of contemporary art criticism to come to grips with Pollock’s achievement.” In Three American Painters Fried had added This failure has been due to several factors.
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