The Intransigent Critic: Reconsidering the reasons for Clement Greenberg’s formalist stance from the early 1930s to the early 1970s

© Sheila Christofides

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Postgraduate Board, Student Guild University of New South Wales

September, 2004 ABSTRACT

This thesis investigates the reasons for Greenberg’s aesthetic intransigence – that is, his adherence to a formalist/purist stance, and his refusal to countenance non-purist twentieth- century avant-garde trends evident in the art he ignored or denigrated, and in the art he promoted. The most substantial body of work challenged is Cold War revisionism (exemplified by the scholarship of Francis Frascina, Serge Guilbaut, and John O’Brian) which casts Greenberg as a politically expedient party to the imperialist agendas of various CIA-funded organisations. The major conclusions reached are that: Greenberg’s aesthetic intransigence was driven by a similarly intransigent ethico-political position, and that his critical method reflected patterns of argumentation set up in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939). This essay, and Greenberg’s ethico-political position, derived, not least, from his direct encounter with American Nazism and anti-Semitism which led him to realise that America (with what he saw as its decadence, cultural apathy, and low-level mass taste) was as vulnerable to the threat of totalitarianism as Europe and Russia. Reflecting this fear, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ had juxtaposed a stagnant, impure culture with a vigorous avant- garde culture of impeccable vintage – in the process infusing politics into a formalist, historical conception of modernism Greenberg first devised in the early 1930s and then augmented, during 1938-9, with Hans Hofmann’s theories and others. Thus established, this rudimentary paradigm for Greenberg’s art writing was elaborated upon and made canonical in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ (1940), and entrenched after the war concurrent with the entrenchment of his ethico-political position. In the face of a Stalinist/capitalist war of wills, continuing anti-Semitism, and what Greenberg perceived as increasing decadence, he continued to argue for a serious, professionally-skilled (predominantly abstract) art, which would be resistant to the ersatz, yet not dehumanized by excluding the natural. By promoting this as the only genuine avant-garde art (while ignoring or denigrating playful, humorous and anarchic avant-garde tendencies), and by reiterating in the 1950s his pre-war Marxist sympathies, Greenberg was effectively demonstrating his continued hope for a utopian culture (luxuriant, formal, informed and socialist) first visualised in the late 1930s. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due:

To the College of Fine Arts, Sydney, for a research grant received in 2001.

To my supervisor, Assoc. Prof. Alan Krell, and co-supervisor, Dr. Graham Forsyth (Associate Dean, Academic), for their invaluable advice, for their encouragement and help, for opening up the possibility of researching to this level, and for their efforts in appointing examiners. Special thanks to Alan for his careful reading of, and comments upon, chapters in progress and his close criticism of the final draft – and also to Graham for his help in 2001 with the grant application, and his comments on work in progress and the final draft. Thanks also to the examiners for their welcome remarks, and to Douglas McKeough (Research Administration / Student Centre Coordinator) for his help and advice.

To Kapil Jariwala for sharing his reflections on Greenberg and for putting me in touch with John McClean. To John McClean for his reflections on Greenberg and for sending me Karen Wilkin’s address. To Karen Wilkin for putting me in touch with William Phillips and Martin Greenberg. To Martin Greenberg for his reflections on his brother. And not least to Lynne Swarts for sharing her insights into Judaism, particularly the significance of history and memory to that religion.

To Brenda Stace-Chat, Penelope Wardle and Kay White for their support and patient listening to aspects of this project. To Dawn Baker, Roland Chat, Sandra Curry, Marion Flynn, Victoria King (who commented on the introduction), Sister Rosamund, Cheng-Lian Sim and others for their kind support in various ways during the course of this research.

Very special thanks to my family, Andrew and Eleanor Christofides, for their tolerance, support, and encouragement – and to the smallest member, Kelly, for her canine companionship. ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Introduction……….……………………….…………………………… 1 Overview……………………………..….………………………. 3 Notes ………………………………………………………..…… 9

Chapter One: Aesthetic Intransigence Criticism……………………………….………………………… 10 Oversights and resounding silence...……………………………. 20 Notes…………………………………………………….….…… 34

Chapter Two: Early Correspondence and Seminal Essays First formalism, first views………...……………………………. 39 ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ and ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’….... 60 Notes…………………...………………………………………… 66

Chapter Three: The Partisan Review Circle Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald and Leon Trotsky...……... 71 Brechtian, Eliotic Trotskyism…………………………..….…….. 89 Ignazio Silone …………...……………………………..….…….. 99 Notes ………………...…………………………………...……… 111

Chapter Four: Irving Babbitt and Gotthold Lessing…………………... 116 Notes ……….…………………………………………..………. 127

Chapter Five: ‘Jewishness’ Anti-Semitism……...……………………………………………. 128 Thierry de Duve, Susan Noyes Platt and Robert Storr …….….… 132 Hitler and Yeats ………...………………………………..……… 141 Notes…………………..………………………………………… 160

Chapter Six: A Culture in Plight A wartime perspective …………………...……………..……….. 167 A postwar world-view ……………………...…………..……….. 178 The persistent spectre of anti-Semitism…………………………. 201 Notes…..………………. ……………………………...………... 212

Chapter Seven: Cold War Revisionism Serge Guilbaut ………………..……………………..………….. 220 John O’Brian…………...…………….………………………….. 239 Notes ………………………..…………………………...……… 250

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS, cont. Page

Chapter Eight: Culture and Politics Modern culture – a mixed blessing………………...……………. 254 Inveterate Marxism………………………………………………. 263 Notes……………………...……………………………………… 278

Chapter Nine: Seriousness, The Centre of Gravity Isolation and play…………………...…………………………… 284 The importance of work…………………………………………. 295 Notes……………..……………………………………………… 313

Chapter Ten: End of Utopia Francis Frascina…………………………………..……………… 317 Rosenberg earns art a bad name……….…………………..…….. 326 Notes….…………………………………………………………. 334

Conclusion………………………………………….………………….. 339 Notes…………………………..……………………...…………. 350

Bibliography Cited material……………………………………………………. 352 Selected uncited material………………...……………………… 367

Appendix……………………………………………………………….. 374 Notes…………………………………………………………….. 385

iv

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AGK Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian, University of Chicago Press, 1986, 5-22 (first published in Partisan Review, Fall 1939)

TNL Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, in: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume I: Perceptions and Judgments 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian, University of Chicago Press, 1986, 23-38 (first published in Partisan Review, July-August 1940)

O’Brian, Vol. 1 Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments: 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1986

O’Brian, Vol. 2 Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose: 1945-1949, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1986

O’Brian, Vol. 3 Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals: 1950-1956, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1993

O’Brian, Vol. 4 Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance: 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1993

O’Brian, John O’Brian, ‘Introduction’, in: Clement Greenberg: The Collected ‘Introduction’ Essays and Criticism: Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments: (Vol. 1) 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, xvii-xxv

O’Brian, John O’Brian, ‘Introduction’, in: Clement Greenberg: The Collected ‘Introduction’ Essays and Criticism: Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals: 1950-1956, (Vol. 3) ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, xv-xxxiii

1

INTRODUCTION

The importance of Clement Greenberg’s two essays ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’1 and

‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’2 (the first written in 1939 on the verge of World War Two, and the second in 1940) are, as T.J. Clark once indicated, that they staked out the ground for his later practice as a critic and set down ‘the main lines of a theory and history of culture since 1850’.3 By this Clark would not have meant that these were the only lines, simply that this was Greenberg’s version of modernism. Indeed, it is a point of significance to this thesis that his writings excluded some of modernism’s most exciting developments – particularly those related to varying extents with the art of performance. This very narrowness predetermined that it would only be a matter of time before Greenberg’s theories would be directly challenged by the ascendance of art practices he had, for the most part, ignored, or that his role as a critic would be superceded by writers taking a more inclusive approach. As it happened each eventuated. Not with a bang, but by degrees until, by the mid 1960s, Greenbergian modernism was being challenged on numerous fronts.

Now this raises certain questions, for Greenberg was extremely well read and a good and erudite judge of the art he chose to promote. This suggests that he would have known the risk he was taking by ignoring developments he witnessed during the 1950s – developments gathering strength and evolving within his field of view until, in the early sixties, they burst forth into the mainstream. With the aim of contributing to a better understanding of Greenberg and to this field of scholarship, the primary purpose of this thesis is to answer the question of what motivated him to remain a formalist, indeed a 2

purist, to the point of risking both his career as a critic and his credibility as a defender of avant-garde values. The key to answering this question seems to lie in the two essays mentioned above. Dynamic, idiosyncratic, highly ambitious in intent, and possessing a discrete and rich history quite apart from Greenberg’s art criticism, they have long been taken as seminal to the way we have perceived him and hence Greenbergian modernism.

Published by Partisan Review, the leftist political magazine that became the launching pad of his career, their sheer complexity is evidenced by the quantity and variety of explanations they have engendered – explanations that have centred on the issues surrounding his aesthetics, his politics, and his Jewishness. There seems, however, to have been little attempt at making connections between the political/cultural climate of these times and that of the post-war period. That such connections are evident in certain of

Greenberg’s later writings suggests that these texts have not been consulted as a means of discovering ongoing causes for his aesthetic intransigence. This thesis seeks to redress this deficiency by exploring a range of his published texts, including lesser-known works such as ‘Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility’ of 1948 and ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ of 1953.

The methodology employed in this exercise is threefold. Firstly, reading and interpreting

Greenberg’s texts in relation to known and assumed sources of influence, as also in relation to contemporary data ranging from media reportage to cultural criticism. Secondly, comparing Greenberg’s understanding of what constituted the avant-garde with practices he overlooked or marginalized. Thirdly, arguing alongside or against various other interpretations. The hypothesis resulting from this investigation is that Greenberg’s 3

intransigence was driven as much by his Jewishness and socialist beliefs as by any other cause.

Overview

The purpose of the first two chapters is to define the terms of, and prepare the ground for, the main argument. Chapter One demonstrates that Greenberg’s aesthetic intransigence went beyond his adherence to formalism, his promotion of abstraction, and his silence on various avant-garde developments from the early twentieth-century to the 1950s. His intransigence, it is argued, included some particularly outspoken opposition to various avant-garde developments from the 1960s onwards, reaching a peak of visible anger in

‘Counter-Avant-Garde’ of 1971. Resulting from this discussion, the question is raised as to why Greenberg waited a decade to launch an all-out attack on Harold Rosenberg’s ‘The

American Action Painters’ of 1952.4 Chapter Two addresses issues arising from

Greenberg’s early correspondence to his friend Harold Lazarus, such as his search for a formalist method, his politics and his religion. The chapter concludes with a brief reading of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ and ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon.’

These two essays are interpreted at length in Chapters Three to Five following precedents set by T. J. Clark (who read between the lines of ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’),5 and

Thierry de Duve (who was trying to make explicit that which was implicit in what he had termed the ‘Silences in the Doctrine’).6 Covered here are the themes of socialist politics, propaganda, kitsch, purism, anti-Semitism, Nazism and Stalinism. Chapter Three investigates the influence on Greenberg of those aligned to various extents with Partisan 4

Review, such as Ignazio Silone, Dwight Mcdonald, Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera, André

Breton and T. S. Eliot. Chapter Four describes the ways in which Greenberg might have been influenced by Irving Babbitt’s The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the

Arts7 and Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry.8

Chapter Five explores Greenberg’s Jewishness in relation to American anti-Semitism. It then considers de Duve’s chapter ‘The Silences in the Doctrine’in relation to ‘otherness’, and the criticism of Platt and Robert Storr in relation to a tendency to cast doubt on

Greenberg’s motives, to turn his Jewishness against him. Presenting a different understanding, this chapter moves on to compare Hitler’s anti-Semitic construction of modern art with a seemingly parodic element in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. Bringing this interpretation to a close, the chapter then addresses two lines quoted by Greenberg, ‘Nor is there singing school but studying/ Monuments of its own magnificence’.9 These lines, from

‘Sailing to Byzantium’ by W. B. Yeats, are explored in terms of their own background and

Jewish history.

Central to the arguments of these chapters is the question of Greenberg’s motivation to write firstly, an exposition and denunciation of kitsch and, secondly, an apology for the historical inevitability of abstraction. That is, what was his purpose in moving from writing an unambiguously political article (albeit one in which the fate of art played no small part) to writing one whose sole ostensible premise was to provide a canonical, historically- grounded account of avant-garde art? Given that this move was singularly the most 5

important step towards Greenberg’s subsequent career as an art critic, it is a question that must be addressed.

This question, in turn, raises further questions. For instance, what is meant by the phrase

‘Eliotic Trotskyism’ (describing Greenberg’s stance): a phrase coined by T. J. Clark in

1982, yet not, it will be suggested, sufficiently explained by him.10 And further still is the intriguing question as to why the word ‘Alexandrianism’, used frequently by Greenberg in

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ to denote a motionless form of academicism, has, in the second essay, been replaced simply with the word ‘academicism’ to describe all of the ‘finer’ arts that are not avant-garde. Of curiosity here is not so much that Greenberg changed his choice of words, but that he used the less usual term ‘Alexandrianism’ in the first instance, and that he used it to direct us, seemingly gratuitously in the only point of the essay which jars, through the lines from ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ back to ancient Alexandria.11 Why then also did he, in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, feel the necessity to take us back to Lessing (in the first volume of his collected essays)12 if not to point us, as Michael Leja in Reframing

Abstract Expressionism implies, metaphorically back to the Laocoön character himself?13

And why, if the metaphor can be taken thus far, to denote a symbol for the separation of the arts, could it not be taken further, given that at the time of writing Europe was at war: that is, for the fate of Laocoön to be taken as denoting an insidious form of treachery – that of fifth-columnism? A form of treachery which, it is argued, was suggested to Greenberg by

Silone’s The School for Dictators, a substantial chapter of which Greenberg had clearly read before interviewing Silone in early 1939.14

6

Underlying these questions is the extent to which Greenberg’s aesthetics during this period were intricately tied to his politics and religion, in that he was driven not only by a concern for the fate of the avant-garde (in America as well as overseas), but also by an equal and related concern that the entire free world would be overrun by fascism. That is, the concern was not simply for events unfolding overseas as has been suggested, for instance, by Susan

Noyes Platt and Louis Kaplan.15 Whilst the thought of world fascism might seem a preposterous stretch of the imagination today, at the time it was not, particularly amongst the Partisan Review circle. In this circle concerns were voiced about conditions in America paralleling, in many respects, those in pre-Nazi Germany – conditions which suggested the strong possibility of the rise of fascism in both Britain and America. Indeed, fascism had arrived in America, as evidenced by accounts of a Nazi demonstration in Madison Square

Garden in February 1939 attended by Greenberg and his brothers Martin and Sol.

According to Martin Greenberg the crowd was ‘largely Jewish’ and Greenberg was shouting in ‘the middle of the heaving mob.’16 By Greenberg’s own account his brother Sol

‘traded punches with a cop’, something he himself would have done had it not been for his

‘various investments in established society’ and his ‘pledges to good fortune’.17 His attendance at this meeting is a pivotal piece of evidence, as it demonstrates Greenberg’s knowledge of, and antipathy to, American fascism, and also to American anti-Semitism.

The fact that anti-Semitism, even in America, did not simply disappear with the end of the war is made apparent in Chapter Six, which covers the years 1941 to 1953. During this period, Greenberg’s feelings about anti-Semitism were made apparent in his criticism of

Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. They were also latently apparent in his linking of Romanticism 7

with Nazism. Amongst other threads of continuity between Greenberg’s early and subsequent ideology demonstrated in this chapter are his unabated anger at Stalinism, and his gathering together of a pantheon of artists in line with his long-standing belief in the world-class potential of American art. Also described here is Greenberg’s personal journey from Trotskyism to a less radical form of socialist politics.

Aspects of this discussion are carried over into Chapter Seven, where Greenberg’s writings from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s are pitted against Cold War revisionist implications that he was a politically expedient party to the imperialist agendas of CIA-funded organisations. Of particular significance to this discussion is Greenberg’s association with the American Committee for Cultural Freedom which has been taken by revisionists to mean that he had slid towards the political right. Continuing in this counter-revisionist vein,

Chapter Eight presents a case suggesting that Greenberg’s pessimistic view of post-war culture, his utopian socialist vision, his Jewishness, and his Marxism continued to determine the nature of his criticism. Counter to arguments suggesting that he had abandoned Marxism by the end of the 1940s, evidence is presented suggesting that

Marxism remained for him a vital ideological force.

Chapter Nine begins by contrasting Greenberg’s seriously ascetic conception of the avant- garde with the playful strand of modernism he assiduously avoided mentioning. This comparison leads into an argument suggesting that Greenberg’s promotion of seriousness was driven by his socialist vision for an egalitarian society; a society in which the avant- garde was to be as much an efficient sector of the industrialised world as any other group of 8

skilled artisans. Drawing towards a conclusion, Chapter Ten revisits Cold War revisionism to illustrate that ‘Modernist Painting’, of 1960, was a canonical text which did not consciously serve the political purposes of the CIA-backed United States Information

Agency. This discussion opens the way to explaining how his optimism that was so evident in ‘Modernist Painting’ turned sour with the subsequent and sudden success of Pop Art and successive art movements. This in turn leads to the proposal of an answer to the question, raised in Chapter One, of why Greenberg waited a decade to openly attack Rosenberg’s

‘The American Action Painters’ – indeed, to openly declare war on an entire new trend in

American and British art writing.

The conclusion tackles some unsympathetic directions taken in the field of Greenbergian scholarship (directions for which Cold War revisionism seems to have paved the way). It is argued here that some of the most virulent of the criticisms directed against Greenberg in recent years have been largely unsubstantiated. The case is then made for a sympathetic comparison between Greenberg and Walter Benjamin, and a sympathic remembrance of

Greenberg’s achievements. 9

Notes

1 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 5-22 (first published in Partisan Review, Fall 1939) See ‘Abbreviations’ for future reference to: ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’; ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’; as also for full reference to the four volumes of Greenberg’s collected works, and John O’Brian’s introductions to these volumes. 2 Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 23-38 (first published in Partisan Review, July-August 1940) 3 T.J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, Critical Inquiry 9, September, 1982, 139 (also published as ‘More on the Differences Between Comrade Greenberg and Ourselves’, in: Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, eds. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983) See ‘Abbreviations’ (p. iii) for future reference to: ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’; ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’; the four volumes of Greenberg’s collected works, and John O’Brian’s introductions to these volumes. 4 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, in: Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, New York, 1971 (1959), 23-39 (first published in Art News, Vol. 51, No. 8, December 1952, 48-50) 5 Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 172 6 Thierry de Duve, ‘Silences in the Doctrine’, in: Thierry de Duve, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines: including a previously unpublished debate with Clement Greenberg, trans. Brian Holmes, Paris, 1996, 39-86 7 Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts, London, Boston, and New York, 1910 8 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984 (1766) 9 AGK, 9 10 Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 143 11 For Greenberg’s reference back to ancient Alexandria, see AGK, 10 12 TNL, 25 13 Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s, Yale University Press, 1993, 224 14 Ignazio Silone, ‘The School for Dictators’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 1, Fall 1938, 20-42 (excerpt from Silone, The School for Dictators, New York and London, 1938) 15 Susan Noyes Platt, ‘Clement Greenberg in the 1930s: A New Perspective on His Criticism’, Art Criticism, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1989; Louis Kaplan, ‘Reframing the Self-Criticism: Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” in Light of Jewish Identity’, in: Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine M. Soussloff, University of California Press, 1999 (my thanks to my supervisor Assoc. Prof. Alan Krell for pointing out this article) 16 Letter to the author from Martin Greenberg dated March 28 2002 17 Clement Greenberg, The Harold Letters 1928-1943: The Making of an American Intellectual: by Clement Greenberg, ed. Janice Van Horne, Washington, D.C., 2000, letter dated March 3 1939 10

CHAPTER ONE: AESTHETIC INTRANSIGENCE

Criticism

In describing Greenberg’s aesthetic intransigence, 1949 seems a suitable starting point; this being the eve of the decade which would put paid to any claims that abstraction was the one true direction of painting, and that abstract painting was the quintessence of avant-garde achievement. In 1949 Greenberg laid down his genealogy for the then current American trend in contemporary painting and sculpture in his contribution to ‘A Symposium: The

State of American Art’. This genealogy followed a direct line through Matisse, Picasso and

Léger to Klee, Arp, Miró, Giacometti and Kandinsky. For Greenberg, the expressionist trend which had emerged was now

…broad and deep enough to embrace artists as divergent as… Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, David Smith, Theodore Roszak, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Robert De Niro and Seymour Lipton…

‘three or four’ of these artists being ‘able to match anything being done by artists of the same generation elsewhere in the world.’1 Greenberg’s choice of artists, although falling under the umbrella of abstractionists, was clearly eclectic. In common, however, this expressionist trend had derived from cubism and, as such, could be seen to be ‘advanced, creative and evolving’, corresponding to ‘the truth of contemporary life’.2 Indeed, in this trend, ‘cubist discipline’ was used as ‘an armature upon which to body forth emotions whose extremes threaten either to pulverise or dissolve plastic structure’.3

The obverse of this illustrious line-up was just about everything else in the development of modern art. With almost-anything-that-wasn’t-abstract being aligned on the side of mass 11

taste, bad taste, or the academic – all of which fell under the broader umbrella of kitsch.

Pitted against Greenberg’s 1949 pantheon were Surrealism, Futurism, neo-Romanticism and ‘magic realism’ – in the ranks of the academy because they had ‘simply found new pretexts, all of them literary or journalistic, to reintroduce what is essentially academic naturalism.’4 What annoyed Greenberg here was that more money was being expended on, and more wall space given (by museums such as the Museum of Modern Art) to this art than to his own pantheon. In this process, ‘under the guise of an originality altogether literary’, academicism had managed ‘steal its way into the avant-garde and there to acquire a new respectability to replace the old-fashioned one it lost thirty years ago.’5 This sharp demarcation might have proved problematic in explaining the obvious impact of Surrealism on Pollock’s work. But this had been neatly explained seven years previously by

Greenberg’s claim that Masson, being a Surrealist, had apparently ‘absorbed enough cubism, in spite of himself, never to lose sight of the direction in which the pictorial art of our times must go in order to be great.’6

Greenberg had first seen Surrealism as ‘a reactionary tendency… attempting to restore

“outside” subject matter’, and Dali, specifically, as representing ‘the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the processes of his medium.’7 This was 1939. By 1943,

Dada and Marcel Duchamp (whose ‘little quasi-cubist paintings’ were shown ‘with less success’ than the paintings of Paul Klee) had been added to the list, and by 1944 the ‘anti- institutional, anti-formal, anti-aesthetic nihilism of the Surrealists’ was taken to have been

‘inherited from Dada with all the artificial nonsense entailed’.8 In 1948, however, a deeper anger stepped in, foreshadowing the tone of his angry outbursts in the late sixties. The 12

Dadaists and Surrealists now apparently saw collage ‘only as a means of achieving strange and surprising effects by juxtaposing incongruous images’, resulting in, ‘not works of art’, but

… montages, truly stunts: rectangles littered with small pictures connected by no aesthetic necessity, rectangles that do not delight the eye and whose value is wholly exhausted in literary shock effects that have by now become unspeakably stale. 9

In the 1960s, this inauthentic avant-garde had been joined by further phenomena. In

Greenberg’s ‘John Power Lecture’ of May 1968, the ‘retreat to the easy from the difficult… masked by the guises of the difficult’ was ‘evoked by a row of boxes, by a mere rod, by a pile of litter, by projects for Cyclopean landscape architecture… by a blank wall, and so forth’.10 This art traced its genealogy back through easy ‘novelty’ art (which derived from

Pop ‘in both spirit and outlook’), through to the ‘easiness’ of Pop art, finally, in this instance, landing at the feet of Jasper Johns.11

Greenberg had first introduced Johns in 1960 by saying that the failure of his work (along with others) to ‘challenge or expand taste’, had made it ‘less than major in its promise.’12

Two years later the inherent point that Johns would not last the distance was confirmed by the following passage:

… even when their bronze surfaces are left unpainted [Johns’s ‘sculptures’] amount to nothing more than what they really are: cast reproductions of man-made objects that, as far as three-dimensional art is concerned, could never be anything more than merely reproducible… The effect of a Johns picture is also weakened, often, when it is done in bright colors instead of neutral ones like black and gray, for these, being the shading hues par excellence, are just those that become the most exhibitedly and poignantly superfluous when applied to ineluctably flat images… the fact that as much of his art can be explained as has been explained here without the exertion of any particular powers of insight would indicate a certain narrowness. Johns sings the 13

swan song of “homeless representation”, and like most swan songs, it carries only a limited distance. (Greenberg’s italics) 13

This passage provides a perfect example of how Greenberg’s refusal to change his formalist stance set him on a collision course with the majority of the art world. Greenberg could see beyond the formal, for he had prefaced this passage by saying that Johns was ‘interested in the literary irony that results from representing flat and artificial configurations’; but this comment was qualified by saying that ‘the abiding interest of his art… lies largely in the area of the formal or plastic.’14 In reading Johns’s work in terms of its formal and plastic qualities, judgments of taste take precedence over concept and subject matter (as also over the all-essential irony). Thus, instead of seeing ‘homeless representation’ (i.e. ‘a plastic and descriptive painterliness that is applied to abstract ends, but which continues to suggest representational ones’) as a way out of the impasse of pure abstraction, Greenberg saw it as a form of mannerist ‘badness’ which had crept in during the mid-fifties in the wake of de

Kooning’s Woman paintings.15 In a concurrent reading of Barnett Newman, it might seem that Newman was being seen in terms denied to Johns. That is, ‘the quality and meaning’ of

Newman’s pictures lay ‘almost entirely in their conception’.16 But this was to speak of formal conceptions only, and by these criteria, Newman was judged as having the ‘exact choices of color, medium, size, shape, proportion’. For Greenberg, these alone ‘determined the quality of the result.’17

This example speaks of an underlying tenet of Greenberg’s philosophy, best encapsulated in 1973 with an assertion that taste could be disputable up to a point, but in the end it was the ‘best taste’ which developed under the pressure of the ‘best art’.18 It was, therefore, only 14

the best taste which formed the ‘consensus of taste’. 19 Greenberg’s conception of taste, bound up with formal concerns, seemed to require a product readable in those terms – such as painting or sculpture. Reasons for requiring such a product, related to proof of skill, are discussed in Chapter Nine.

By 1968, when it was realised that, far from singing a ‘swan song’, Johns had sounded the drums for an era in which abstraction was no longer the main issue, Greenberg’s discontent was barely contained:

… under cover of Johns’s idea Pop Art was able to enter and give itself out as perhaps even more “advanced” – without, however, claiming to reach the same levels of quality that the best of Abstract Expressionism had. The art journalism of the 60s accepted the “easiness” of Pop art implicitly, as though it did not matter, and as though such questions had become old-fashioned and obsolete. Yet in the end Pop art has not succeeded in dodging qualitative comparisons… Its vulnerability to qualitative comparisons – not its “easiness” or minor quality as such – is what is seen by many younger artists as constituting the real failure of Pop art.20

It was not so much that Greenberg failed to understand the significant influence of Pop Art, but more that he refused to accept it as in any way equal to art which remained faithful to its specific medium. This much is clear from a further passage, similar in tone to his 1948 comments on Surrealist collage:

No artistic rocketry, no blank-looking box, no art that excavates, litters, jumps, or excretes has actually startled unwary taste in these latter years as have some works of art that can be safely described as easel paintings, and some other works that define themselves as sculpture and nothing else.21

15

Clearly not sharing the opinion of the ‘many younger artists’ on whose part Greenberg seemed to speak, nor even the implication that, measured qualitatively, Pop Art had failed to shape up, in 1968 Harold Rosenberg presented a more appreciative view of things:

The commercial artist or designer who has provided the bulk of “nature” for the Pop artist is an aesthete too. Like the Pop painter, he converts all styles to his own needs… In appreciating the Lichtensteins now on view… one is obliged to keep in mind that the comic strips on which they are based were created… by artists who, as Larry Rivers pointed out near the inception of Pop, “went to art schools… admired the Old Masters (etc.)”… Pop is… linked with Minimalism and color-field painting. But it is also linked equally with the commercial-crafts spirit of America’s newly expanded art world.22

Even in hindsight, Rosenberg did not consider Pop a ‘failure’ but a celebration of a particular spirit in harmony with at least some of the manifestations of kitsch Greenberg had, from the outset, criticized.

By now, Greenberg had come to believe, seemingly for the first time, that if Johns was the father of the recalcitrant developments of the sixties, Duchamp was the progenitor of the lot, including developments Greenberg had previously attributed to Dada and Surrealism.

With this came the bitter truth that those he had thought minor, and/or as having a limited shelf life, were in fact the embodiment of the sixties’ Zeitgeist. Duchamp, who had not been mentioned since 1943, now became the subject of sustained criticism, commencing in 1968 with Greenberg’s ‘John Power Lecture’ and reaching full-force in 1971 with the essay

‘Counter-Avant-Garde’.

Here, the true avant-garde was defined against the phenomenon of avant-gardism. And all self-consciously innovative art was, by nature, avant-gardeist – denoting, in the case of 16

Duchamp, something amounting to ‘hardly more than elaborations, variations on, and recapitulations of his original ideas’.23 In other words, avant-gardism was a form of decadence eating away at the true avant-garde from within its own sphere. The Futurists, in their pursuit of the new, might have ‘discovered avant-gardeness’, but it was Duchamp who bore the prime responsibility for avant-gardism.24 Duchamp, then (whose work fell not only into the category [with some noteable exceptions] of the non abstract, but also into that of the bogus avant-garde), was the prime exemplar of what had gone wrong with advanced art since 1912. And what had gone wrong was the result of two profound mistakes. The first mistake being that Duchamp had ‘attributed the impact of Cubism – especially Picasso’s first collage-constructions – to what he saw as its startling difficulty.’25 (Two months after this publication, Greenberg elaborated further by saying that Duchamp had seemingly decided ‘that the secret of the success of the avant-garde had been that it had been startling and shocking with each new move it made… as though he equated originality and avant- garde art with surprise.’)26 The second mistake being that:

Young artists in the 1960’s reasoning in a similar way [to Duchamp]from their misconception of Pollock’s art, likewise concluded that the main thing was to look difficult, and that the startlingly difficult was sure to look new, and that by looking newer and newer you were sure to make art history.27

The problem was that Pop art, carrying on a tradition of academicism that had run concurrent with Abstract Expressionism, was succeeded in this tradition by Assemblage and Op art, which were ‘too tamely artistic, too obviously tasteful, to maintain for long the advanced-advanced look that avant-gardist art needed in order to be plausible.’28 Therefore

Duchamp was again being consulted for his ‘vision of the all-out far-out – art beyond art, anti-art and non-art.’29 And it was this for which a new middlebrow consciousness was 17

being prepared through a rhetorical avant-gardist distortion of ‘the past triumphs of the classic avant-garde, from Manet to Barnett Newman.’30 The reason why Greenberg found middlebrow consciousness problematic will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

By contrast with Duchamp, Picasso (or at least his early work) came in for some of

Greenberg’s kinder criticism over the years. Beginning with ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ we see that the ‘excitement’ of his art (along with that of Braque, Mondrian, Miró, Kandinski,

Klee, Matisse and Cézanne) lay in its ‘pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc.’.31 By 1946 Picasso was ‘incomparably sensitive to his age and milieu’, displaying a ‘hypersensitivity to the fundamental moods of an age that expressed itself much more sincerely in its techniques and methods than in its conscious ideologies.’32 In a 1957 review, his work from 1905 to 1926 was described as an

‘art of stupendous greatness, stupendous alike in conception and execution, in the rightness and consistency of its realization’.33 And in 1966, as Greenberg’s anti-avant-gardist mission gathered force, he lauded Picasso’s sculptures of 1930-31 for having reached ‘a climax of realization as well as invention in [his] wrought iron constructions.’34

Through all of this there was a certain truth. The avant-garde strand Greenberg had identified as avant-gardist might well be described as iconoclastic and concerned with issues of anti-art and non-art. By the same token, the strand he identified as classic might well be described as being the opposite of these. But it is a selective truth, which evades the fact that there was, throughout modernism, a continual interplay between various artistic disciplines, and that the distinctions were never as cut and dried as Greenberg suggested. In 18

many respects, the same truths could be found on either side – that is, if sides (rather than gradations) ever existed. It was, effectively, only by narrowing his sights down to painting and sculpture (mainly abstract), presenting these in formalist/purist terms, and giving them a very exclusive genealogy, that Greenberg was able to maintain the idea that there were two distinct factions. Clearly, then, maintaining this idea required a degree of difficulty – not least in the case of Duchamp, whose work defied analysis along formalist lines. But by adhering to formalism, Greenberg had under-read Picasso, who was, as will become apparent, involved with the very strand of modernism Greenberg was against.

Before moving on to this, an essential point to note is Greenberg’s opinion of fun and play in the arts. Somewhat surprisingly, in late 1967, he claimed a liking for Pop Art and

‘novelty’ art in general because they were ‘fun’ (on this occasion mentioning, seemingly for the first time, Peter Blake, David Hockney, Lichtenstein and Warhol).35 This was, however, an entry into criticising the entirety of ‘novelty’ art (Pop included) for being a market-driven ‘middlebrow art masquerading as challenging, advanced art… Not bad art, but art on a low level – and fun on a low level too’.36 The concepts of fun and play, while anathema to Greenberg’s austere portrayal of the genuine avant-garde, were an essential aspect of the early manifestations of performance – an art which, according to RoseLee

Goldberg, was at base anarchic and ‘executed by artists impatient with the limitations of more established art forms.’37 In Goldberg’s view, this medium was ‘a catalyst in the history of twentieth century art’, something artists turned to ‘as a way of breaking down categories and indicating new directions’ whenever ‘a certain school, be it cubism, minimalism or conceptual art, seemed to have reached an impasse.’38 The importance of 19

demonstrating the extent of Greenberg’s oversights and silence on many avant-garde traits of which he would have been aware becomes apparent towards the end of this thesis.

In denouncing fun in relation to high art, however, Greenberg was not denouncing the human element, and in promoting abstraction he was not denying the natural. Where nature itself was excluded by putting abstraction to merely decorative ends (as in, presumably, an art which took flatness as the ultimate aim), this led abstract art to ‘proceed in a void and really turn into “dehumanized” art’.39 Perhaps this was what Greenberg was driving at in

1945, when he criticized Mondrian’s theories (as opposed to his work) for committing ‘the unforgivable error of asserting that one mode of art, that of pure, abstract relations, would be absolutely superior to all others in the future.’40 In 1949 Greenberg had perceived a similar sensibility in the work of ‘the nabis, the later Kandinsky, and so many disciples of the Bauhaus’ – all seen as walking in a void of the unnatural created by the production of

‘mere pieces of arbitrary decoration’.41 This was due to these artists lacking ‘a sense of style, a feeling for the unity of the picture as an object; that is, they lack[ed] almost all reference to the structure of nature.’42 This was said in January. The following month he would say of a ‘large-scale presentation’ of the ‘strictly rectilinear art of Joseph Albers’ that it provided an ‘ever-recurring frustration’; for there was no relation between his being a

‘sensuous’ colorist, and his composition adhering ‘strictly to the dogma of the straight line’.43 Albers, ‘alas’, had to be ‘accounted another victim of Bauhaus modernism, with its doctrinairism, its inability to rise above merely decorative motifs.’44

20

Oversights and resounding silence

To recount just one of Picasso’s forays into performance is to recount an event of major importance to the evolution of modernism. That is, the 1917 ballet Parade, described in

Apollinaire’s preface as a ‘sort of surrealism in which I see the point of departure for a series of manifestations of the New Spirit’.45 Within a month, Apollinaire had given this

New Spirit a name by coining the adjective ‘surrealist’.46 A collaboration between Picasso,

Jean Cocteau, Leonide Massine and Erik Satie, Parade, causing public outrage in a time of war, had been just as shocking in 1917 as had Duchamp’s Readymades in 1912 and

Courbet’s Stone Breakers in 1849 – and for much the same reasons. Following these precedents, Parade had drawn heavily on the everyday and presented it in the context of the high arts. That is, everything from the sounds of typewriters, sirens and aeroplanes to the stilted walk of Charlie Chaplin, the mimicry of film drama, and the music of the popular burlesque. Unlike The Stone Breakers and the Readymades, which still functioned as painting or sculpture, the gigantic cubist costumes for the French Manager and the Manager from New York disrupted any pretence at ballet by preventing any movement resembling dance. In stark contrast in style was the realism of Picasso’s scenery and his other costume designs (burlesque tent, acrobats, modern American girl, Chinese conjurer, and pantomime horse).47

Therefore Picasso (during the period Greenberg had said was his best) was able (to quote his biographer John Richardson) to

…deploy far vaster effects than in the studio; to work more freely than ever before in three dimensions, and to explore the breakthrough he had made in 1912-13 with his cardboard constructions.48 21

For Richardson, the Cubist costumes represented one of Picasso’s ‘most imaginative attempts to merge painting and sculpture’.49 Not surprisingly, Greenberg, whose idea was for a separation of the arts, and who was seriously against fun within the arts, did not refer to Picasso’s early involvement with performance. If he had, he might then have been obliged to cast Picasso in a similar light to Duchamp – thereby substantially undermining the structure of his canon. In fact, Greenberg did not refer to performance at all, simply including it under the category of ‘Participatory’ on his list.50

By the time Greenberg commenced writing ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, one strand of this tradition had already reached America – transported from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain

College in 1936 by Xanti Schawinsky (on the invitation of his ex-Bauhaus colleague,

Albers).51 In 1948, it was joined by the strand exemplified by Parade, introduced to Black

Mountain by John Cage’s revival of Satie’s The Ruse of Medusa of 1913 which, according to Goldberg, ‘introduced the little-known absurdities of Satie’s “drama” and his eccentric musical ideas to the Black Mountain community’.52 Amongst those participating were

Cage’s long-time collaborator, Merce Cunningham (whose choreographic style, according to Jonathan Fineberg, had parallels with ‘allover’ painting), and Elaine and Willem de

Kooning, who were teaching there that summer.53

In 1950, the year de Kooning famously glued the Camel cigarette ad mouth to his first

Woman painting, he taught again at Black Mountain. Also teaching there that summer were

Greenberg and (by Florence Rubenfeld’s account) Cage and Robert Rauschenberg. 22

Greenberg stayed throughout July and August, running a course, according to John

O’Brian, on ‘The Development of Modernist Painting and Sculpture from Their Origins to the Present Time’, and presiding over a seminar on art criticism ‘organized around Kant’s

Critique of Judgment’.54 The salient point being that Greenberg was in the know about this sensibility, and not only from visiting Black Mountain. In New York he frequented the

Cedar Tavern and the Club – respectively the watering-hole and intellectual melting-pot for a swathe of artists, poets, writers, critics and musicians. Throughout the fifties, the Cedar saw everything from readings by Alan Ginsberg, to a famous brawl commencing a friendship between Pollock and the Beat poet Robert White Creeley.55 According to Dore

Ashton, the Club (founded in 1948 by a core group of Greenberg’s pantheon, including

Motherwell, Rothko, and Still) in its early phase at ‘The Subjects of the Artist’ school was where intellectuals like Rosenberg, Cage and Hannah Arendt ‘dealt with questions that broadened the base of the painters’ discourse’ – a tradition continuing when the Club changed venue.56

And then there were Cage’s popular musical soirées attended by Pollock (who apparently, in the last years of his life, listened to recordings of Cage’s music as ‘a counterpoint to his inexhaustible activity’), Franz Kline, and de Kooning.57 In 1951 de Kooning would say that

Duchamp was on ‘a train track in the history of art’ going ‘way back to Mesopotamia’, thereby demonstrating a similarity to Cage, who had known Duchamp since 1941.58

Beyond Black Mountain and Duchamp, de Kooning and Cage were further linked by a joint editorship, along with Harold Rosenberg and Pierre Chareau, of a single issue publication appearing in the winter of 1947-48.59 23

In all, an ongoing dialogue was building up, in Greenberg’s vicinity, across the board between these various creators and intellectuals which, in the visual arts, would go on to inform the work of, for instance, Kline, Ronald Bladen, Larry Poons, Rauschenberg and

Larry Rivers. In turn, Claes Oldenburg can be seen to have been indirectly linked to this group and directly influenced by it. In 1958, through Red Grooms, he had discovered Alan

Kaprow and Cage; he ‘found’ Jim Dine, and through Kaprow he met George Segal and Roy

Lichtenstein.60 The result of all this was an explosion of what Paul Schimmel calls ‘the complex and overlapping art movements of the fifties’ – everything from assemblage, to happenings, to Beat, to figuration, to hard-edge, to Pop, etc.61

If Greenberg had not been informed of the Satie festival at Black Mountain through his numerous connections, he cannot, given his milieu, have failed to get wind of a further

Black Mountain performance which, by 1956, after its fame had spread to New York, had become (to quote Goldberg) ‘the talking-point’ of students attending Cage’s classes on the composition of experimental music at the New School for Social Research.62 These students comprised an amalgam of ‘painters, film-makers, musicians and poets’, including a core group of the new artistic vanguard named above – Dine, Kaprow, Poons, and

Segal.63 Cage’s performance eventually stimulated Kaprow ‘to arrange his own happening’ in 1958 at Segal’s New Jersey farm.64

Known generally as ‘the event’ and universally considered the first ‘happening’, Cage’s

Theater Piece # 1 was an impromptu performance, delivered in the summer of 1952 on the 24

evening of the afternoon it was organised. The same year, incidentally, that Rosenberg, to again quote Ashton (who saw direct connections) described ‘aspects of abstract expressionist painting as “events” on the canvas’. 65 From Goldberg’s description, this event proceeded in the following manner:

White paintings by… Robert Rauschenberg hung overhead. From a step-ladder, Cage… read a text on ‘the relation of music to Zen Buddhism’… Then he performed a ‘composition with a radio’, following the prearranged ‘time brackets’. At the same time Rauschenberg played old [Piaf] records on a hand-wound gramophone and David Tudor played a ‘prepared piano’. Later Tudor turned to two buckets, pouring water from one to the other… planted in the audience, Charles Olson and Mary Caroline Richards read poetry. Cunningham and others danced through the aisles chased by an excited dog. Rauschenberg flashed ‘abstract’ slides (created by coloured gelatine sandwiched between the glass)… ‘whistles blew, babies screamed and coffee was served by four boys dressed in white’… And it provided Cunningham with a new décor and costume designer, Robert Rauschenberg.66

Mary Emma Harris’s account differs in that, of the two hanging paintings, only one was by

Rauschenberg, the other by Kline67 – which would further illustrate the links between Black

Mountain and the New York School, particularly since Rauschenberg was going to the

Club around this time, associating, according to Jonathan Fineberg, with Abstract

Expressionists.68 Rauschenberg’s involvement in this performance demonstrates how the influence of Cage (whom he had known since the late forties, and who, along with

Duchamp, has been seen as his intellectual mentor), might have impacted upon his decision soon afterwards to incorporate found objects into his paintings. That is, the ‘prepared piano’, invented by Cage in 1938, was itself hung with just such objects attached to its strings – disrupting conventions of music, just as Rauschenberg was disrupting conventions of art. But the influence was reciprocal for, soon after the 1952 event, Cage, according to

Fineberg, inspired by Rauschenberg’s ‘silent’ paintings, wrote his famous 4’ 33”,69 which, 25

in turn, Goldberg connects to Cage’s statement that his favourite piece was ‘the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.’70 A celebration of the everyday remarkably similar to, yet less ebullient than, Claes Oldenberg’s classic ‘I am for an art…’ statement of 1961, but closer still to an earlier statement of 1959, which is :71

Place: the city, materials of the city, textures of the city, expressions of the city, of the street: asphalt, concrete, tar, paper, metal…etc. natural and manmade effects. Newspapers, comics, scrawls of all sorts, anonymous passages of materials…72

It might be assumed that in Cage’s haste to prepare a performance in a few hours he automatically drew from familiar sources. Given his admiration for Satie, it seems reasonable to suggest marked similarities between the ‘event’ and Rêlache of 1924 –

Satie’s collaboration with Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, René Clair and Jean Borlin.

For instance, the pouring of water from bucket to bucket, the juxtaposition of fleeting projected imagery with live action, and taking the action into the auditorium appear to have been direct appropriations. Even the whistle-blowing might be seen as a direct reference to banners hung over the stage of Rêlache proclaiming, according to Goldberg, ‘Erik Satie is the greatest musician in the world’, and ‘if you are not satisfied you can buy whistles at the box office for a few farthings.’73 And then there were distinct similarities between Cage’s radio composition and Satie’s creation of a form of ‘background noise’ through random appropriation of snippets from other composers in Musique d’ameublement of 1913.74 As also between the playing of Piaf and Satie’s trademark musical quotations of the vernacular, not only in Parade and Rêlache, but throughout his work from the early 1890s, when he appropriated popular tunes for ecclesiastical chants – an experiment which led to an exploration of popular music in its own right.75 26

Given the seminal influence of this performance, it seems reasonable to suggest that not only Cage, but Satie (through Cage), had influenced the fifties vanguard – and arguably beyond. But this performance would not have been possible without Cage’s love of Satie combined with his persistence, against strong opposition, to have Satie recognised by

Joseph Albers back in 1948. As Satie’s biographer Ornella Volta says: ‘little by little’, it was Cage who ‘managed to introduce Satie’s work to younger generations around the world’.76 Although Cage is said by Goldberg to have attributed the musical renaissance circa 1935 to the influence of Luigi Russolo and Henry Cowell, the influence of Satie might also have been evident in Cage’s work around that time. In 1937, by Goldberg’s account, and very like the score for Parade, Cage’s manifesto The Future of Music promoted the capturing and controlling of everyday sounds to use as ‘musical instruments’.77 In 1942, he presented a performance (like Parade, in war-time) in which musicians ‘played beer bottles, flowerpots, cowbells, automobile brakedrums, dinner bells, thundersheets’ and anything that could be laid hands on – he was then invited to give a similar concert at the

Museum of Modern Art.78

In terms of age, Satie was clearly a precursor to Russolo, and in many respects he can be seen to have continued in music what Gustave Courbet had begun in painting. Yet, while

Courbet was the grandfather of Greenberg’s modernist genealogy, and though Greenberg acknowledged Courbet’s utilization of the subject matter of ‘prosaic contemporary life’,79 he neglected to mention the significant step of appropriating what T. J. Clark describes as

‘the procedures and even values of popular art’.80 According to Clark this step was 27

‘profoundly subversive’, resulting in ‘an art which claimed, by its scale and its proud title

“History Painting”, a kind of hegemony over the culture of the dominant classes.’81

Hegemony or not, in terms of Greenberg’s understanding of modernism, this move of

Courbet’s has to be seen as anarchy. And perhaps it was against rule-bound critics such as

George L. K. Morris, Erle Loran and Greenberg, that Cage, according to Goldberg, proclaimed his 1952 performance a success – an ‘anarchic event… purposeless in that we didn’t know what was going to happen’.82 According to Duchamp’s biographer Calvin

Tomkins, in 1957, Cage would say that the purpose of art was ‘purposeless play’.83

Compounding Cage’s anarchy was that the ‘event’ spoke of an ironic humour which, by the early twentieth century, had infected the anarchism of the modernist avant-garde. After all, what could have been more anarchic, or humorously ironic, than Raymond Roussel’s zither-playing earthworm of 1911 (a particular favourite of Duchamp – chosen not for its musical ability but its slime), or gigantic cubist dance costumes (caricatures which prevented free movement), or a piano with strings impossibly cluttered by objects, or even the outrageous introduction of mass-media lips into the genre Greenberg considered above such things? Tomkins suggests the originators of this trait to have been, jointly, Satie and

Alfred Jarry; even though Satie’s absurd humour was evident in his music prior to Jarry’s

Ubu Roi.84 But Satie’s real influence only occurred after his revival in 1910 by Maurice

Ravel, and although Jarry’s influence on Duchamp (through Roussel) occurred around

1911, for Picasso (through Apollinaire) it was much earlier – as his 1905 drawings of Ubu attest. And, in Richardson’s view, the breakthroughs of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 owed a debt to Jarry’s breakthroughs of the previous decade: ‘when he crashed the barrier 28

between fantasy and reality, and established his parodic science of “pataphysics”, which would detonate all traditional canons of beauty, good taste and propriety’.85 Possibly reflecting some of the humour of this iconoclastic spirit, Robert Motherwell would say in

1951 that it was ‘sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art’, and, regarding the comic, that he thought of Miró, Paul Klee and Charlie Chaplin, and of ‘what human values their wit displays’. 86 Greenberg never wrote of Jarry, but he did once mention Ubu Roi in 1946, simply to say:

In two of De Niro’s ten pictures, Ubi Roi [sic] and Fruits and Flowers, the originality and force of his temperament demonstrate themselves under an iron control of the plastic elements such as is rarely seen outside the painting of the oldest surviving members of the School of Paris.87

Returning to Cage’s 1952 event, Charles Olsen, for his part, would go on to found the

Black Mountain school of poets (otherwise known as the Beat poets) with Pollock’s drinking friend, Creeley (also a friend of Kline’s), and Robert Duncan (who was involved with Clyfford Still and various San Franciso artists). Creeley’s association with Black

Mountain led to his becoming ‘very intrigued by [Philip] Guston’.88 These poets were part of a phenomenon first noted by Jack Kerouac in 1948, when he told fellow beat writer John

Clellon Holmes that beatness meant ‘being right down to it, to ourselves… and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world… I guess you might say we’re a beat generation’.89 In 1952, this phenomenon was apparently announced to the world by a

Holmes article in the New York Times, entitled ‘This is the Beat Generation’.90

By ‘generation’, it seems reasonable to assume that Kerouac was referring to his associates in alternative living, drug-taking, and writing – associates he had known since 1945 such as 29

William Burroughs, Neil Cassady, Alan Ginsberg, Herbert ‘the Junkie’ Huncke, and Joan

Vollmer (Burroughs’s wife, who was accidentally shot and killed by him in 1951 during a drinking bout).91 All a million miles from Greenberg’s aesthetics. Jonathan Fineberg, with the value of hindsight, took a broader view than Kerouac, seeing the Beat Generation as inclusive of Cage, Cunningham and Rauschenberg, etc. Further, Fineberg saw the ‘gritty self-absorbed alienation’ of the Beat writers to have evolved from the ‘distinctive existentialism of the New York School and the New York writers of the forties.’92 By the fifties, however, this influence was reciprocal – the Beat poets now informing the philosophy of the New York school. The most influential of these poets, according to Dore

Ashton, being Ginsberg, whose ‘very presence reinforced the instinctive rebellion of the painters’.93

In the sixties, beyond the visual arts, the influence of Beat culture would spill over into civil rights movements, youth culture, music (Bob Dylan being a prime example), literature and journalism. Greenberg referred to the Beats only once (and then obliquely), on the pages of

Vogue in 1967, when he merely said that Joyce, Eliot, Stravinsky, Picasso and Pollock had

‘become culture heroes’ – whereas Warhol, Ginsberg, and Robert Lowell ‘enjoyed the status of celebrities’.94 Greenberg never spoke of Cage (who Tomkins sees, like this thesis, as ‘one of the main catalysts’ of ‘the shift in attitude and outlook that [in the fifties] was already well advanced in the work of some younger artists, poets dancers, filmmakers, musicians, and performance artists’).95 In fact Greenberg remained silent on just about everything that summed up the fifties avant-garde, except for his own pantheon – and except to later denigrate those he held responsible for the art of the sixties. To all intents 30

and purposes then, for Greenberg, this swirling mass of fifties culture just did not exist, just as the swirling mass of early twentieth century culture had not existed. Only in the sixties did he bring himself to speak of Rauschenberg, and then only to subsume him into a formalist framework – Rauschenberg’s work in 1967 being simply an ‘overlapping or transition in terms of style… the passage from the “painterly” to the “linear”’, just like

Barnett Newman and David Smith – which neatly skirts a number of issues.96

Significantly, it was Greenberg’s version of modernism which excluded so much, which was carried over into arguments giving the impression that he represented the ideology of

Cold War governments.

For his part, Greenberg, in presenting the heirs to modernist trends as being, at best, the purveyors of academicized corruptions of the modernist tradition, effectively refused to see this art as legitimately following, simutaneously, his own purist path. Yet many of these heirs were genealogically linked to Abstract Expressionism, quite legitimately, in that they either took in and evolved its forms, evolved from others that did, or used it as a definitive point of departure. For Barbara Rose, writing in 1965, the painting of the repetition of a single motif over a surface (such as Poon’s dots or Gene Davis’s stripes) usually meant ‘an involvement with Jackson Pollock’s all-over paintings.’97 And the same could be said for the scale, overall repetitiousness, and flatness of Warhol’s silkscreens, and the ironic, carefully executed ‘drips’ of Roy Lichtenstein. Over in England, the early style of

Hockney, by his own admission, derived directly from his fascination with Abstract

Expressionism.98 However, it was Oldenburg’s work, arguably more than most, which exemplified directly the transition from Abstract Expressionism to pure Pop. Oldenberg 31

didn’t, for instance, like Warhol and Lichtenstein, pay half-hearted early lip-service to

Abstract Expressionism or make stylised designer gestures, but parodied its essence in all its grime and drips before his work evolved to its cleaner forms. But Greenberg, while paying scant lip service to Hockney, Warhol and Lichtenstein, never once mentioned

Oldenburg. Perhaps Oldenburg, unlike Pollock, was not allowed to ‘look ugly’, or perhaps he was just too clearly of the sensibility Greenberg did not want to be involved with.99

Also legitimate heirs were minimal art and land art. According to Frank Stella: ‘Whenever painting gets complicated like Abstract Expressionism there’s going to be someone who’s not painting complicated paintings, someone who’s trying to simplify’.100 Yet, as his early works from 1956-57 demonstrate, it was through a process of early experimentation with the forms of Abstract Expressionism that his black paintings of 1958-60 (the paintings that

Greenberg would later tell Thierry de Duve were ‘plausible, but not good enough’)101 evolved. In this same interview, Donald Judd acknowledged, by implication, the factor of chance in his work to have been directly inherited from this same factor in the work of

Pollock.102 Moving forward in time, Robert Smithson, in a 1970 interview with Paul Toner, was to say that his work had ‘always been an attempt to get away from the specific object’ of minimal art.103 A reaction which inherently refers back to Abstract Expressionism through the negations of minimalism. Greenberg was also slow to speak of these developments, mentioning Stella for the first time in 1965, and then only to say that Stella’s

‘banded paintings’ of 1959 had ‘moved away from Abstract Expressionism even more rapidly’ than Elsworth Kelly’s paintings, and that Jules Olitiski had begun to show at

‘around the same time’.104 32

Not altogether surprisingly, Greenberg’s aesthetic stance had been subject to challenge for some years when, in one short paragraph in February 1958, Lawrence Alloway cast all that

Greenberg had stood for aside. Describing him as ‘an art critic and a good one, but fatally prejudiced when he leaves modern fine art’, Alloway then went on to say that the kitsch activities described in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ were activities which, to Greenberg and the ‘minority’ he spoke for, were (quoting from ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’) ‘ersatz culture… destined for those who are insensible to the value of genuine culture.’105 Unlike

Greenberg, Alloway did not see all kitsch as being academic, on the contrary:

Stylistically, technically, and iconographically the mass arts are anti-academic. Topicality and a rapid rate of change are not academic in any usual sense of the word… Sensitiveness to the variables of our life and economy enable the mass arts to accompany the changes in our life far more closely than the fine arts which are a repository of time-binding values.106

Perhaps Greenberg was unaware of Alloway’s condemnation, for they apparently spent

‘several evenings’ together in New York in May 1958, renewing the acquaintance in

London the following year.107 Whilst it is reasonable to assume any discussion would have revolved around Greenberg’s artists, it might also be expected that Alloway, given his background, would have updated Greenberg on recent British trends – which is to say that by 1959 there can have been no doubt in Greenberg’s mind that America’s Beat generation was part of a compelling international phenomenon, far removed from his own philosophy.

In 1962, Greenberg launched an attack on Alloway, Rosenberg, and various other writers through whose efforts ‘art itself’ had ‘been made to look silly.’108 It was, however, 33

Rosenberg in the main line of fire for having instigated this style of writing with ‘The

American Action Painters’ – a work, as previously indicated, that has been seen as directly connected to Cage through its description of ‘aspects of abstract expressionist painting as

“events” on the canvas’. Given that Rosenberg’s text was influential, not only to writers but to artists themselves, the question of why Greenberg (apparently) took so long to respond might well be tied up with the reason he overlooked so much else of relevance to the period, and why he maintained his formalist method regardless.

In terms of his critical career, the sheer degree of risk taken in rigidly maintaining this position suggests the reason to have been profound. Certainly more profound than that offered by Susan Noyes Platt and, in her wake, Louis Kaplan, which was that Greenberg went into a fear-driven retreat from reality, perpetuated solely by the memory of events overseas during the war. The search for a more feasible reason, or reasons, begins with

Greenberg’s early correspondence. 34

Notes

1 Clement Greenberg, ‘A Symposium: The State of American Art’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 287 (first published in Magazine of Art, March 1949) 2 Ibid., 288 3 Ibid., 287 4 Ibid., 288 5 Idem. 6 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of an Exhibition of André Masson’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 99 (first published in The Nation, 7 March 1942) 7 AGK, 9 (n. 2) 8 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 141 (first published in The Nation, 30 January 1943); Clement Greenberg, ‘Surrealist Painting’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 225 (first published in The Nation, 12 and 19 August 1944) 9 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of the Exhibition Collage’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 262 (first published in The Nation, 27 November 1948) 10 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 302 (lecture delivered at the University of Sydney, 17 May 1968) 11 Idem. 12 Clement Greenberg, ‘Louis and Noland’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 95 (first published in Art International, May 1960) 13 Clement Greenberg, ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 127 (first published in Art International, 25 October 1962) It is worth noting here that Harold Rosenberg, prior to the public emergence of Pop Art, accepted that:

Life and kitsch have become inseparable. Genuine art in our time has made this point again and again – in Cubist collages, the prophylactics of Neo-Plasticism, Surrealist poetry. Using kitsch as one of art’s juiciest devices, and a comic revenge for the looting of art by kitsch. Art drinks the corn of the popular, takes it in limited doses as a poison, as a vaccine. It deals with life in the same way. (Harold Rosenberg, ‘Pop Culture: Kitsch Criticism’, in: Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, 265)

14 Ibid., 126 15 Ibid., 124 16 Ibid., 132 17 Idem. 18 Clement Greenberg, ‘Can Taste be Objective?’, in: Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste, Oxford University Press, 1999, 27 (first published in Art News, Vol. 72, No. 2, February 1973) 19 Idem. 20 Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde Attitudes’, 302 21 Ibid., 300 This assessment of the new art can be compared with that of Rosenberg, who, unlike Greenberg, had met the need for an understanding of this art not only on its own terms, but in relation to its placement within a historical tradition:

In an apparent move away from verbalized or conceptualized art, experiments are being made to produce paintings and sculptures through letting materials “speak for themselves” with a minimum of formal ordering by the artist. Allowing paint, scattered scraps of paper, or flung bits of metal to arrange themselves as they will belongs to the traditional ruse of the art of this century employed to bring forth unknown energies out of its mediums in order to silence in the artist’s mind the directives of aesthetics and art history. The reduction of the arts to their material components corresponds to an awareness of the decomposition of inherited art forms – an awareness that keeps growing more acute. (Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks, London, 1972, 60) 35

In this can be seen an understanding of purpose and history close to that of Robert Smithson, who said that:

The first thing that I did with material was with tar and gravel in 1966… The tar and gravel doesn’t point to a site. That is the first piece that deals with raw materials in the gallery. I was just moving into it, and away from pure abstraction, away from specific object or industrial type object. It decomposed something that you are faced with all the time. (Paul Toner and Robert Smithson, ‘Interview with Robert Smithson (1970)’, in: Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, University of California Press, 1996, 239)

22 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Art World: Marilyn Mondrian’, in: Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 182 (first published in The New Yorker, November 8, 1969) 23 Clement Greenberg, ‘Counter-Avant-Garde’, Art International 15, May 1971, 16 24 Idem. 25 Ibid., 17 26 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Bennington College Seminars: Night Seven, April 20, 1971’, in: Homemade Esthetics, 156-157 27 Greenberg, ‘Counter-Avant-Garde’, 17 28 Idem. 29 Idem. 30 Idem. 31 AGK, 9 32 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of an Exhibition of School of Paris Painters’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 88 (first published in The Nation, 19 June 1946) 33 Clement Greenberg, ‘Picasso at Seventy-Five’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 27 (first published in Arts Magazine, October 1957) 34 Clement Greenberg, ‘Picasso Since 1945’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 235 (first published in Artforum, October 1966) 35 Clement Greenberg, ‘Interview Conducted by Edward Lucie-Smith’, in: O’Brian Vol. 4, 281 (first published Art Forum, April 1968) 36 Idem. 37 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, New York, 1988, 9 38 Ibid., 7 39 Clement Greenberg, ‘On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting’, in: Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, 1961, 174 40 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Pollock; of the Annual Exhibition of the American Abstract Artists; and of the Exhibition European Artists in America’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 16 (first published in The Nation, 7 April 1945) 41 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Role of Nature in Modern Painting’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 275 (first published in The Nation, 8 January 1949) 42 Idem. 43 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Josef Albers’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 286 (first published in The Nation, 19 February 1949) 44 Idem. 45 Goldberg, Performance Art, 78 46 Idem. 47 For details and/or designs of Parade see: John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: Volume II: 1907-1917, London, 1996, passim; Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, 77-8, Philippe D’Arschot, ‘Transfiguration de la mimesis: Portrait d’une Exposition’, Art International, Vol. VIII, No. 8, October 20, 1964, 25-28, and Cyril W. Beaumont, The Complete Book of Ballets: A Guide to the Principal Ballets of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London, 1937, 851-857. Picasso was to work on two other ballets for Massine, Le Tricorne, 1919, and Pulcinella, 1920, and also designed the curtain for Bronislava Nijinska’s Le Train Bleu, 1924, and the sets and costumes for Mercure, 1924. Also to use the ballet as a means of exploration of their work on large scale and in three dimensions 36

were André Derain (La Boutique Fantasque, 1919); Fernand Leger (Skating Rink, 1922 and Le Création du Monde, 1923)); Giorgio de Chirico (La Jarre,1924); Georges Rouault (Le Fils Prodigue, 1929), and André Masson, (Les Presages, 1933). Further to this, the ballet Relâche (discussed in main text), described as an ‘Instantaneous Ballet in 2 Acts and a Cinematographic Entr’acte, and a “Queue de Chien”’, was the first ballet to use the projection of cinematographic imagery featuring Clair’s film Entr’acte. (Beaumont, The Complete Book of Ballets, 833) This was a history which Greenberg refused to acknowledge – a history which had its precedents in Erik Satie’s ‘furniture music’ and in Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique of 1910 and its antecedents in Les Mamelles de Tirésias, influenced by Alfred Jarry and performed a month after Parade. 48 Richardson, A Life of Picasso: Volume II, 421 49 Ibid., 424 50 Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties’, 294 51 For this see: Mary Emma Harris, ‘Black Mountain College: European Modernism, the Experimental Spirit and the American Avant-Garde’, in: American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1919-1933, eds. Christos Joachamides and Norman Rosenthal, exh. cat., The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1993, 96-97 52 Goldberg, Performance Art, 125 53 Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, London, 1995, 175 54 John O’Brian, ‘Chronology, 1950-1969’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3, 287 According to Florence Rubenfeld the title of the Greenberg’s Black Mountain course was ‘The Development of Modern Painting and Sculpture from Their Origins to the Present Time’. (Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, New York, 1997, 145) 55 Linda Wagner and Lewis Macadams Jr., ‘’Robert White Creeley’ (composite interview 1963-1968), Beat Writers at Work: The Paris Review, ed. George Plimpton, New York, 1999, 78 56 Dore Ashton, The Life and Times of the New York School, Bath, Somerset, 1972, 198 For further information about the Club and the Cedar Tavern as a focus of interaction between members of the Black Mountain College and the New York school of painters, and the Beat circle in general, see: Fred W. McDarrah and Gloria S. McDarrah, Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village, New York, 1996, passim 57 Ashton, The Life and Times of the New York School, 224; Alberto Busignani, Pollock, London, 1971, 92 58 Willem de Kooning, ‘Willem de Kooning, “The Renaissance and Order”, 1950’, in: Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp, University of California Press, 1975 (excerpt from a lecture given in 1950 at Studio 35, New York; first published in trans/formation [New York], I, 2 [1951], 86-87), 555 59 Clifford Ross, ‘Chronology’, in Creators and Critics: An Anthology, ed. Clifford Ross, New York, 297 According to Ross, this was ‘the first magazine to deal exclusively with contemporary American art.’ (Idem.) 60 Richard Kostelanetz, ‘From Claes Oldenburg’, in: Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Stephen Henry Madoff, University of California Press, 1997 (excerpt, ‘Claes Oldenberg’, The Theatre of Mixed Means, New York, 1968), 235-236 61 Paul Schimmel, ‘The Faked Gesture: Pop Art and the New York School’, in: Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955-62, ed. Russell Ferguson, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1993, 20 62 Goldberg, Performance Art, 127 63 Idem. 64 Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, 189 65 Ashton, The Life and Times of the New York School, 225 66 Goldberg, Performance Art, 126-127 67 Harris, ‘Black Mountain College: European Modernism’, 94 68 Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, 175 69 Idem. 70 Goldberg, Performance Art, 126 37

71 Claes Oldenburg, ‘I am for an art…’, in: Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1995, 96-97 (previously published in Claes Oldenburg, Store Days: Documents from the Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theater (1962), New York, 1967, 39-42) Missing from Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology is an addition which appears in Store Days (p. 42), reading:

add Im for an art that is combed down, that is hung from each ear, that is laid on the lips and under the eyes, that is shaved from legs, that is brushed on the teeth, that is fixed on the thighs, that is slipped on the foot.

Square which becomes blobby. (Oldenburg’s punctuation)

72 Claes Oldenburg, ‘Ray Gun’ (1959), in: Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, 42 73 Goldberg, Performance Art, 95 74 Ornella Volta, Erik Satie, trans. Simone Pleasance, Paris, 1997, 33 75 For a further account of Rêlache see: Beaumont, The Complete Book of Ballets, 833-836 76 Volta, Erik Satie, 11 77 Goldberg, Performance Art, 123 78 Idem. 79 AGK, 29 80 Clark quoted in: John A. Walker, Art in the Age of the Mass Media, London, 1983, 45, quoted from: T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, London, 1973, 140 81 Idem. 82 Goldberg, Performance Art, 127 83 Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, London, 1997, 409 84 Ibid., 71, 74 85 John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: Volume I: 1881-1906, New York, 1991, 363 86 Robert Motherwell, Symposium: ‘“What Abstract Art Means to Me’, 1951(excerpts), in: Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 562 (from a symposium held on 5 February 1951 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America’; first published in: What Abstract Art Means to Me, Bulletin of The Museum of Modern Art [New York], XVIII, 3 [Spring 1951] ) 87 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Max Beckmann and Robert de Niro’, in: O’Brian Vol. 2, 81 (first published in The Nation, 18 May 1946) 88 Wagner and Macadams Jr., ‘’Robert White Creeley’, 67, 80, 81, 134 89 Park Honan, ‘Introduction’, in: The Beats: An Anthology of ‘Beat’ Writing, ed. Park Honan, London, 1987, x 90 Idem. 91 Graham Caveney, The ‘Priest’ They Called Him: The Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs, London, 1999 (1997), passim 92 Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, 172 93 Ashton, The Life and Times of the New York School, 227 94 Clement Greenberg, ‘Where is the Avant-Garde?’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 261 (first published in Vogue, June 1967) 95 Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, 408-409 96 Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde Attitudes’, 297 97 Barbara Rose, ‘ABC Art’, in: Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York, 1968, 289 (first published In Art in America, October-November, 1965) 98 David Hockney, David Hockney by David Hockney, London, 1976, 41-42 99 The ‘ugliness’ of Oldenburg’s early work, the rough dripped and daubed papier maché and cardboard, can be seen to directly parallel the ‘ugliness’ of Pollock; in relation to which Greenberg said in 1945 that ‘he is not afraid to look ugly – all profoundly original work looks ugly at first’ (Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Pollock; of the Annual Exhibition of the American Abstract Artists; and of the Exhibition European Artists in America’, 17 38

Oldenburg was to acknowledge the direct influence of abstract expressionism on his work in the statement:

Lately, I have begun to understand action painting, that old thing, in a new, vital and peculiar sense – as corny as the scratches on a NY wall and by parodying its corn I have (miracle) come back to its authenticity! I feel as if Pollock is sitting on my shoulder, or rather crouching in my pants.

Quoted in: Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, 14, quoted from: Oldenburg, ‘Egomessages about Pollock’, in ‘Jackson Pollock: An Artist Symposium, Part 2’, Art News (New York) 66, no. 3 (May 1967). Also quoted in: Oldenburg, Store Days, 13. Reproduced in Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology (p72) is a dripped enamel work on paper of 1962, Standing Figure (Final Study for Announcement of a Dance Concert by the Aileen Pasloff Dance Company), is a direct take off of Pollock’s drip paintings. Store Days, however, provides some of the best examples of Oldenburg’s early style. Additionally, Oldenburg’s direct descent from the history of performance in America is apparent in his happening of 1960, The Street and Snapshots from the City, and subsequent events. 100 ‘Questions to Stella and Judd: Interview by Bruce Glaser Edited by Lucy Lippard’, in: Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, (discussion broadcast on WBAI-FM, New York, February, 1964 as ‘New Nihilism or New Art?’), 148 101 For this see: Thierry de Duve, ‘The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas’, in: Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, 301 (n. 5): quoted from a letter to de Duve dated January 23, 1987 102 ‘Questions to Stella and Judd: Interview by Bruce Glaser Edited by Lucy Lippard’, 156 Regarding this interview, what Judd had said, in response to the question of whether the predominance of chance was an element in his pieces, was: ‘Yes, Pollock and those people represent actual chance; by now that’s a foregone conclusion – you don’t have to mimic chance.’ 103 Toner and Smithson, ‘Interview with Robert Smithson (1970)’, 240 104 Clement Greenberg, ‘America Takes the Lead, 1945-1965’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 215 (First published in Art in America, August-September 1965) Beyond the above, Harris has suggested that, ‘like all young artists at the time’, the students of the Black Mountain college ‘had to come to terms with the overwhelming presence of Abstract Expressionism, either by rejecting it as an influence or by translating and assimilating its tenets into their own work.’ Of the latter, Harris cites the work of John Chamberlain and Cy Twombly. Chamberlain’s ‘sculptures of twisted, crumpled and welded automobile parts’ were ‘the most powerful interpretation of the aesthetic of energy and process inherent in Abstract Expressionism’, and Twombly’s ‘enigmatic paintings of cryptic scribbles and symbols’ were ‘a highly personal translation of the automatism of that style.’ (Harris, ‘The Black Mountain College: European Modernism’, 97) 105 Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Arts and the Mass Media’, in: Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History (first published in Architectural Design and Construction, February 1958), 7-8 106 Ibid., 8 107 For this see: Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 212-213, 219 108 Clement Greenberg, ‘How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 144 (first published in Encounter, December, 1962) 39

CHAPTER TWO: EARLY CORRESPONDENCE AND SEMINAL ESSAYS

First formalism, first views

Greenberg graduated from Syracuse University (where he had studied literature) in 1930.

According to his autobiographical statement of 1955, for the next couple of years of apparent ‘idleness’ he taught himself German, Italian, French and Latin, after which he worked for his father for a further two and a half years in St. Louis, Cleveland, San

Franciso and Los Angeles; and then supported himself for a year by translating.1 At the beginning of 1936 he

… went to work for the federal government, first in the New York office of the Civil Service Commission, then in the Veterans Administration, and finally (in 1937) in the Appraisers Division of the Customs Service in the Port of New York.(Greenberg’s parentheses)2

This bald autobiographical statement, except for an indication that he had been interested in art during his college years, reveals little which might serve to explain how a customs clerk could rise to become one of the foremost art critics of the twentieth century.

In 1957, recalling the period in 1938 when he attended art classes and became acquainted with the group of New York artists which included Arshille Gorky, Willem de Kooning,

Lee Krasner and Hans Hofmann, he said that he ‘did not know about everything that was going on’, and that much of what he did know he ‘could not fully understand’.3 This has generally been taken to mean that he had no real understanding of art until this time, yet, as will become apparent, it can only be seen to relate to a specific group of artists and the work they were producing at that time. 1938 was also the year he began attending 40

Hofmann’s lectures on the topic of abstraction. In 1945 he was to say that he owed ‘more to the initial illumination received from [these] lectures than to any other source.’4 This statement has been taken to mean that Hofmann was the progenitor of Greenbergian formalism. It has rarely been taken as being relative to other sources of influence (of which there were many, including Irving Babbitt, T.S. Eliot, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx and Leon

Trotsky).

Perhaps because of Greenberg’s sweeping statements, and the want of any concrete suggestion on his part to the contrary, the common perception of his method of art criticism is that it germinated sometime during 1938-39, and was primarily informed by his contact with the art world of that time, and by the Hofmann lectures. Various versions of this perception have been presented and elaborated upon over the years. For instance, in Serge

Guilbaut’s ‘The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America’ (1980), the formative period of Greenbergian formalism was said to date from 1939-48.5 By 1987, in Sidney

Tillim’s ‘Criticism and Culture, or Greenberg’s Doubt’, we are said, with Greenberg’s early essays, to be ‘present at the inception of [his] major critical ideas’.6 That is, ‘the idea of a

“pure art”, and ‘the emphasis on the role of the medium in modernist art’, each of which supposedly derived from the teachings of Hofmann.7 By 1989, Susan Noyes Platt was suggesting, in ‘Clement Greenberg in the 1930s: A New Perspective on His Criticism’, that

Greenberg’s selection of a ‘purified, abstract art as the law of his aesthetic’ was related to his involvement with the ‘art world’ of 1938, and that Hofmann’s lectures had enabled him

‘to make a rapid leap from a traditional view of art, to a conception of the abstract principles governing modern art.’8 By Platt’s account, these principles related to ‘planar 41

surface’, ‘the important role of the medium and surface’, ‘struggle with the medium’, and

‘purity’.9 Beyond this, and going further than anyone previously, she said that until attending Hofmann’s lectures, Greenberg’s knowledge of art had amounted to a ‘single art class in high school at the Art Student’s League’.10

Casting doubt on these suggestions, and fleshing out the baldness of Greenberg’s autobiographical statement, are his early letters to his friend Harold Lazarus, which were written between 1928 and 1943. For the most part, they are an account of personal matters, work and entertainment; but amongst all this are descriptions of numerous art museum and gallery visits, early evidence of aspects of Greenbergian modernism, and evidence of voracious reading. Although these factors form a minor part, they are significant in terms of understanding his later development as an art critic – demonstrating not only that many of the makings of his later career were there long before 1939, but also that, in terms of influence, Kant came before Hofmann. This might tend to confirm John O’Brian’s opinion, in 1986, that the importance of Hofmann’s lectures to Greenberg has been, ‘perhaps, exaggerated’.11 Looking at the four-year period from 1930-33, when Greenberg was aged twenty-one to twenty-four, what becomes apparent is that his approach to literature, movies, dance and art bore marked similarities to his later formalist criticism.

In her unauthorised biography of Greenberg, Florence Rubenfeld mentions him visiting the

Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum

‘several times a week’ during the months after his graduation.12 But his letters demonstrate that this interest was to continue over the period we are about to address, and included visits not only to art museums and galleries in New York, but also in St. Louis, San 42

Franciso and Cleveland while on the road for his father’s business. In terms of North

American art, most of the artists he was looking at over this period, such as Alexander

Brook and Rafael Soyer, seem to have faded into obscurity.13 Except a couple. At the bottom end of Greenberg’s scale of significance was Walt Kuhn, an American realist specializing in portraits. He was mentioned once in 1931 (‘not so hot’), and never referred to again.14 By contrast, in the same year he was impressed by the work of John Marin, and wrote of him on various occasions, saying, even thirty years later, that he had to be ‘taken into consideration’ as ‘the greatest living American painter’.15 Significantly, Marin’s work was derivative of European modernism, and seemed to have had various influences, primarily Cézanne’s (who stood for ‘clean emotions’) – although there were shades of futurism and cubism.16 This derivative aspect might well have appealed to Greenberg, because, in his later writings, it was a lineage such as this which underpinned the American avant-garde of the forties, placing it within a European tradition. But even in these early years he was seeing American art on the world scale.

In 1932 he discovered Diego Rivera, calling him ‘THE FIRST GREAT NORTH

AMERICAN ARTIST’ (which was, presumably, not to deny Rivera’s true nationality, but it does demonstrate that, from the first, Greenberg was receptive to the possibility of great

American art).17 And up there somewhere near Rivera in this letter was John Marin.

Although he was unimpressed by ‘the American primitives’, which he saw at the same time, and Georgia O’Keefe (a ‘hothouse weed’ who was ‘lousy by the way’), he was sufficiently taken with Rivera and Marin to suggest that ‘THERE ARE GOOD

AMERICAN ARTISTS’.18 Greenberg would barely mention Rivera in later years, but his 43

early appreciation of him is significant, in that Rivera’s politics, along with Leon Trotsky’s and André Breton’s, was to inform the writing of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’.19

Soon after discovering Rivera he saw an exhibition of Italian painting of the 15th, 16th and

17th centuries, with works by Caravaggio, Tintoretto and Veronese etc. This exhibition, he said, had ‘jerked’ him ‘into balance’,20 and this seems to have enabled him to sort out an early modernist hierarchy – first Rivera, then Orozco, then Braque.21 American art, or what passed for it, was now on top. Without wishing to pre-empt the disussion of later chapters, it is significant that Guilbaut saw Greenberg’s championing of American painting to be aligned with the U.S. Government’s Cold War agenda when he later promoted American art as ‘the foremost in the world.’22

As the example of Braque demonstrates, alongside Greenberg’s appreciation of American modernism during the early thirties was an equal appreciation of European modernism which, beyond Braque, stretched, for instance, to Cézanne, Matisse, Klee, a German cubist called Arno Mohr (who he liked enormously) and Picasso, who was described as ‘simply

Decadent!’.23 By comparison, he saw a Rousseau exhibition which he didn’t like at all.24

His early appreciation of cubism is significant in that cubism, especially Picasso’s, was to become his all-time benchmark against which to measure the American avant-garde. And the same could be said for his early appreciation of Klee – who, along with Picasso and

Matisse, was subsequently to be seen as a precursor to Pollock.

A point to consider here is that the modern art Greenberg was appreciating was a comparatively recent phenomenon – one which might still not have been understood by 44

many Americans. And of this art, he was asking informed questions, such as: why wasn’t

‘Rouault a pure modern’, and why were the objects of Rouault and Segonzac ‘so opposite while at times their techniques [were] so similar’.25 His view of art, then, at this time, might be seen as sophisticated, rather than, as Susan Noyes Platt suggests, ‘traditional’. Of specific interest is that Greenberg’s taste in art was almost solely confined to painting. And painting, in his canon, was to become the art to which the other arts deferred.

Returning to Platt’s suggestion that until attending Hofmann’s lectures, Greenberg’s knowledge of art had amounted to a ‘single art class in high school at the Art Student’s

League’, even this ‘single art class’ amounted to a fair few lessons. For, in 1925, at the age of sixteen, he travelled to this class in Manhattan twice weekly for three months.26 After a break of thirteen years, during which he continued to draw (and later to paint) in his spare time, by May 1938 (i.e. prior to Hofmann’s lectures in the winter of that year) he was attending a ‘sketch class at a WPA studio… every Tuesday’ with Harold Rosenberg, which, according to Rubenfeld, was a life-drawing class run by Igor Pantukhov.27 As the story goes, it was through Rosenberg that Greenberg met Lee Krasner, who then introduced him to ‘her friends at the Hofmann School and to Hofmann’s ideas.’28 From here, and from his obvious interest in modern art, he went on to attend Hofmann’s lectures. More famously, it was through Krasner that Greenberg was later to meet Jackson Pollock. On another level, it was through Greenberg’s friendship with Rosenberg (and Rosenberg’s friend Lionel Abel) that he became involved with Partisan Review.

45

But this is only to speak of Greenberg’s forays into art practice prior to Hofmann’s lectures, and his accounts of exhibitions seen, each of which demonstrate a wider curiosity about art.

In 1937 these two factors were to merge when, according to Rubenfeld, he ‘began to have fantasies about making a career as a painter and became curious about the New York avant- garde’.29 Another of Platt’s assertions refuted by both Rubenfeld’s account and Greenberg’s letters was that, except for the single art class in high school, Greenberg ‘had been entirely immersed in the study of literature and language’.30 Even at college he was clearly immersed in more than simply these subjects, for he had also studied art history – and it is significant that in his letters to Lazarus the only lecturer he speaks of from Syracuse is Irene

Sargent who, as Janice Van Horne informs us, was Greenberg’s and Lazarus’s art history professor (for whom they each seemed to have a particular fondness, and with whom they each seemed to share a special relationship).31 In August 1930, Greenberg referred to

Sargent’s offer to find him a job – an offer he was then seriously considering since his job- hunting was not proving successful. Between the lines of Sargent’s offer might reasonably be read that art history was a subject at which Greenberg excelled, particularly since, as

Lazarus informed him, she referred to him familiarly as ‘Clem’.32 But this was not a self- serving bond on the part of Greenberg, for, on 7 September 1932, he was expressing extreme solicitude for her terminal illness, saying: ‘I’m sorry to hear about Dr. Sargent.

Don’t let her die, please… Dr. Sargent isn’t meant for it, she’s too good.’ Just two weeks later, commiserating on her death, he said:33

I knew Dr. Sargent and I liked her – like other people I’ve known and liked, and will never see again. They’re still living, “I knew them well” – once, and Dr. Sargent joins that once… They should have cremated her. Why didn’t they? I feel pity for her though. Why not monuments, garlands, “Opferrauch”, poems, multitudes? Why not? (Greenberg’s underscoring)34 46

In mid-October, he wrote: ‘Have you visited Dr. Sargent’s grave? Do.’35 Such solicitude suggests that Sargent, who had been a significant figure in her day, had had a considerable impact on Greenberg. Not only was she the second woman to receive honorary membership in the American Institute of Architects and Allied Arts, she was also a noted authority on the Arts and Crafts movement and an art critic of some reknown.36 In terms of Greenberg’s future career direction, this last is of possible significance in that, given his undoubted admiration, she might have provided an early role model. Beyond this, she could well have been responsible for his interest in art appreciation and understanding of the modern in relation to earlier movements in art. Although the possible influence of Sargent with regard to Greenberg’s understanding of Arts and Crafts (for which he never had much time) will be discussed in Chapter Nine, for now it is sufficient to suggest that Greenberg’s ability to analyse and evaluate art might well have stemmed from Sargent’s teaching. And, of course, during 1930-33, Greenberg was seriously looking at modern art. All of which tends to place in question another assertion of Platt’s that at ‘the time that Greenberg attended the

Hofmann lectures… he had only a cursory knowledge of art and even less of modern art.’37

Although during these early years Greenberg did not analyse specific works much beyond the judgment of relative merit, he did make the occasional comment which suggests that he was analysing art formally, such as (of Rivera) that, compared to his murals, his canvases were ‘weak – except one or two early cubist ones’, and (of the painter Bernard Karfiol) that

‘he handles two figures better than one; he can get a blue against a tan rose.’38 Possibly reflecting an early tendency to look beyond the subject to formal concerns, he’d said of 47

Daumier and Corot that ‘that old bugaloo of subject matter troubles neither, because if you’re good, you’re good.’39 The reason for believing that his method of analysis was, overall, formal, even at this early stage, is a comment he made, in March 1931, that ‘the basis for a criticism of [the German dancer] Mary Wigman is naturally the same as for criticism of (especially) modern art’.40 And the previous month he’d written of Wigman that her dancing was too self-expressive (‘there’s too much German lyricish – “the dancing because I must express myself.” Disgusting hooey.’) – except one dance, which was

‘wonderful’ because it was ‘the first genuinely modernistic composition’ he’d ‘ever seen’.41

Yet despite this apparently natural tendency towards formalism, by April 1931 Greenberg was searching for what he called a ‘Method’ to be able, as a writer, to ‘stand off and slap the world from a Position’ – a search which led to his reading The Anatomy of Science, presumably Gilbert Lewis’s book of the same name published in 1926.42 Given that, over the years, Greenberg has been criticized for his neglect of biographical and other human detail, it is interesting to note Lewis’s observation that: ‘In order to create a science out of a great body of freely growing thought, it is necessary, first of all, to eliminate as far as possible the human and subjective elements…’43 Whether or not Greenberg was trying to create such a science with his formalism, he certainly saw links between science and art, first in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, where he said that ‘the birth of the avant-garde coincided chronologically – and geographically, too – with the first bold development of scientific revolutionary thought in Europe’, and then in ‘Modernist Painting’ of 1960, where he said that Kantian self-criticism had ‘found its fullest expression in science’ and that ‘when it 48

began to be applied in art, [art] was brought closer in real spirit to scientific method than ever before.’44

This link between Kantian philosophy and scientific method was possibly first made back in 1931. The reasoning for this belief is circumstantial but compelling, for just five weeks after (presumably) reading The Anatomy of Science, Greenberg said of the writer Henry

James:

Notice his Method: the peeling off of layers of ignorance to get at the novel; I’d say he wrote about novels rather than wrote them. The purest conception of a novel as organic form: all parts relate to one center and to each other mutually, nothing enters but what is strictly necessary to make the novel move.(Greenberg’s underscoring)45

This analysis appears to be both a reflection of Gilbert Lewis’s argument and a precursor to

Greenberg’s own argument, almost thirty years later, in ‘Modernist Painting’, when, expanding on the concept of Kant’s use of logic to establish the limits of logic, he wrote that the ‘essence of Modernism’ lay in ‘the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself’.46 This, in turn, resulted in ‘purity’.47

Significantly, just eight days after writing about Henry James in 1931 he was calling Kant

‘one of the few good German philosophers’, along with Leibniz and Wolff.48 So he was clearly aware of Kantian philosophy at the point of reading Henry James – and the fact that he later attributed the self-critical method of modernism directly to Kant, suggests the strong possibility that Kantian philosophy underlay Greenberg’s reading of James. Kant, then, may well have provided the means for him to have applied the type of scientific method suggested by The Anatomy of Science to an analysis of literature. If Kant can be 49

seen as having influenced Greenberg’s analysis of Henry James, as he had the essay

‘Modernist Painting’ (which seems likely, given the similarities) then this would categorically call into question the perception that Kant’s influence on Greenberg occurred later than Hofmann’s. Incidentally, and bearing in mind that Greenberg’s method was intended to encompass all the arts, the fact that this very early example of Greenbergian formalism occurs in relation to literature rather than art is not a revelation, for as Sidney

Tillim said: ‘The idea of a “pure” art is raised early in [Greenberg’s] literary essays.’49 In

1942, for instance, we find him suggesting that the better poet wrestled with and exploited

‘the difficult material offered by his own temperament.’50 That is, a struggle with the medium.

These early forays into formalist analysis fly in the face of Platt’s insistence that ‘in approaching the Hofmann lectures, [Greenberg] was almost entirely unfamiliar with the principles that Hofmann presented’.51 For instance, in relation to her suggestion that

Greenberg had learned from Hofmann the notions of planar surface, the important role of medium and surface, struggle with the medium, and purity, if James’s ‘writing about novels rather than writing them’, and ‘peeling off of layers of ignorance to get at the novel’ can be seen to equate with the important role of medium and struggle with the medium, and if ‘the purest conception of a novel as organic form’ wherein ‘nothing enters but what is strictly necessary to make the novel move’ can be seen to equate with purity, then all there is left that Greenberg might have learned from Hofmann are planar surface and the important role of surface, which are problems peculiar to art – but which are still, for all that, issues of significance. And Hofmann may well have been the catalyst for Greenberg to begin using 50

the same language for art as he was using for literature, primarily because Hofmann’s language was so similar. For instance, echoing Greenberg’s reference to Henry James writing about novels rather than writing them, we find Hofmann saying in 1938 that: ‘when an artist works by heart he takes the nature of his medium as the basis for his creation.’52

Lending further weight to the theory that Greenberg’s concept of struggle with the medium was not derived from Hofmann is that Henry James’s ‘peeling off of layers of ignorance to get at the novel’ equates directly with a couple of passages in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ of 1940, in which the Impressionists were ‘trying to get at the structure beneath the color’, and Debussy was ‘trying to get at the sound underneath the note’.53 Because this equation is so direct, it then seems reasonable to suggest that this concept can be dated to 1931, not

1938. By the same token, lending further weight to the theory that his concept of purity was not derived from Hofmann is his description, in 1932, of the Russian film The Golden

Mountain as being ‘the first example of pure form on the screen’ that he had ‘ever beheld.’54 And here, the notion of ‘pure form’ could have derived directly from Kant, who in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, said, for instance, that: ‘what we call pure in a simple kind of sensation is its uniformity, undisturbed and uninterrupted by any alien sensation. It pertains only to form…’.55 Lending weight to the supposition that Kant, not Hofmann, was the progenitor of Greenbergian formalism, Kant said that: ‘When we judge free beauty

(according to mere form) then our judgment of taste is pure… we presuppose no concept

[as to] what the object is [meant] to represent.’56 And this is precisely how Greenberg had analysed Henry James. But then Gilbert Lewis, too, had talked about the elimination of human and subjective elements, so, in this, even his influence cannot be discounted. 51

Whether or not one holds to these arguments, Kant was certainly there from an early stage, and this much tends to confirm Mark Cheetham’s opinion in Kant, Art and Art History, that

Kant’s influence is evident in Greenberg’s first essays despite the fact that (according to

Cheetham) he first mentioned Kant in a published work in 1943 (although it was, in fact, in

1941, only six months after the publication of ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, with the line:

‘As Kant says, you only find what you look for’).57

Running counter to the argument that Greenberg’s notion of modernist self-criticism came from Kant is Donald Kuspit’s Clement Greenberg: Art Critic, in which this notion (which

Kuspit calls a ‘reciprocity of taste or criticism and creativity’) is said to have stemmed from

T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood, from which Kuspit quotes that:58

… it is fatuous to say that criticism is for the sake of ‘creation’ or creation for the sake of criticism. It is also fatuous to assume that there are ages of criticism and ages of creativeness, as if by plunging ourselves into intellectual darkness we were in better hopes of finding spiritual light. The two directions of sensibility are complementary; and as sensibility is rare, unpopular, and desirable, it is expected that the critic and the creative artist should frequently be the same person.59

Which is taken by Kuspit as translating into Greenberg’s view of the essence of modernism as outlined in ‘Modernist Painting’ (i.e. the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline etc.).60 True, there was some reciprocity in that by criticizing ‘from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which [was] being criticized’, modernism, through the very act of creation, was setting up new boundaries, opening the way to further rounds of self- criticism.61 However, the fact that Greenberg attributes this self-criticism to Kant, and not to Eliot (and that Kant, in all likelihood, influenced some of the first examples of 52

Greenbergian formalism) suggests that Eliot’s undoubted influence (to be discussed in the following chapter) did not extend to informing Greenberg’s first understanding of self- criticism. Certainly, Greenberg’s brief references to Eliot around the time of searching for a method demonstrate none of the rapture apparent in his references to German literature. But then, Kuspit would not have had the benefit of consulting these letters.

An argument directly challenged by the evidence of Greenberg’s early interest in Kant is that of Louis Kaplan in his ‘Reframing the Self-Criticism: Clement Greenberg’s

“Modernist Painting” in Light of Jewish Identity’.62 For Kaplan saw what he called the

‘essentialist rhetoric’ of ‘Modernist Painting’ as having derived not from Kant, but from a

Jewish form of self-criticism evident in Greenberg’s 1947 article ‘The Jewish Joke: Review of Röyte Pomerantzen, edited by Immanuel Olsvanger’.63 Whether or not Jewishness underlay Greenberg’s understanding of self-criticism, Kaplan fails to make his point for numerous reasons, not least by the suggestion that Kant was first ‘invoked’ by Greenberg as an ‘authority figure sometime around 1950’.64 Indeed, his entire argument rests on the premise that Greenberg had studied the self-critical tendencies of the Jewish joke during

1947, and prior to becoming acquainted with Kantian logic. Yet, as Greenberg’s letters attest, with or without Kant, his observation of the self-critical tendency of modernism which he later attributed to Kantian logic predates the Jewish joke review by sixteen years.

But this is not to place too much emphasis on Greenberg’s Kantianism, for, as Sidney

Tillim suggested, it has, perhaps, been ‘overinterpreted’ and ‘used to discredit his formalism’.65 Indeed, Greenberg’s interpretation or misinterpretation of Kant (which is of 53

less importance to this thesis than the way Kant’s influence impacted upon Greenberg’s work) has been the subject of much discussion. For instance, Ingrid Stadler, in ‘The Idea of

Art and of Its Criticism: A Rational Reconstruction of a Kantian Doctrine’, sought to illustrate, through Greenberg’s essays, ‘the modernist penchant for treating art as though it were not significantly different from science.’66 Using the arguments found in §47-50 of

Kant’s The Critique of Judgment, she felt tempted to ‘fault the Greenbergian “New

Formalism” for verging on the vacuously formal, or a penchant for bloodless abstractions.’67 Yet this is to take a decidedly one-sided perspective on Greenberg’s formalism, ignoring the wealth of other ideology underlying it, which will be covered over the ensuing chapters.

As with critiques dwelling on the influence of Hofmann, those based solely on Greenberg’s

Kantianism tend to overlook the many other influences on Greenbergian formalism. Even during the thirties, Greenberg’s adoption of Kantian philosophy must be seen as representative of a wider passion for the German Enlightenment (evident during this period in his reading of Leibniz, Wolff, Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann etc., and in his interest in the music of Mozart, Gluck and Handel). In a letter of October 1932, noting his father’s offer to send him to Europe, he said:

If it were the 18th century I’d go to Germany, or if I knew of some place in Germany where the 18th century is guaranteed… The 18th century in Germany is all music and it’s all in Hofmann. The richness of it is one of my most important discoveries.68

Beyond the Germany of the eighteenth century, it was Greenberg’s interest in modern

German literature (also notably apparent around this time) which was to cast up another 54

significant influence on his first essays, Bertolt Brecht – whom he seems to have discovered in late 1931.69 In 1974 he was to say that he began thinking about ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ partly ‘on account of Brecht’, and partly on account of an ‘emigré German magazine’.70 But ‘it was Brecht most of all’.71 The probable nature of Brecht’s influence will be discussed in the following chapter.

Alongside self-criticism and the formalist issues of medium and surface, over the years

Greenbergian modernism would place particular emphasis on the relation of the avant- garde to its opposites, kitsch, Alexandrianism, academicism and avant-gardism. And then there were avant-garde genealogies. All factors which were nascently apparent in

Greenberg’s letters. In 1930, for instance, referring to a group of writers he called ‘fakers’, he said that style ‘in their case’ violated a postulation by Leibniz that ‘between what is conceived and what is imagined there must be an inner correspondence.’72 In 1939, in

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, kitsch, like these ‘fakers’, would be described as ‘faked sensations’ – an imitator of affect.73 Opposed to the fakeness of kitsch, the avant-garde, in this essay, was presented as genuine and pure. And purity, to quote Kuspit, was both ‘an effort to make explicit emotion without creating a literary illusion about it’ and an ‘effort to make explicit the implicit medium of an art by charging it with emotion.’74 That is, as in

Leibniz’s postulation, it represented some form of inner correspondence between what was conceived and what was imagined. And so, Leibniz might be taken as having influenced this aspect of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ – an aspect which was to recur in later essays. But the main point here is that, early on, Greenberg was demonstrating the juxtaposition of opposites which was to mark his later criticism. 55

In terms of avant-garde genealogies, in 1932 he wrote that:

Medieval literature was in the Gothic river. But when they made it flow through Greek and Roman canals it became muddy. German literature flowed in its own channel longest, therefore it is the healthiest in Europe right now…75

This related to the German literary avant-garde, mostly poets such as Hölderlin, George, and, significantly, Gottfried Benn (who Greenberg was later to criticize for his Nazi sympathies). But it bears marked similarities to Greenberg’s artistic genealogies in which

Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Surrealists (except for a select few, i.e. Miró,

Arp, Masson, Picasso and Klee – the last two of whom were ‘claimed by the Surrealists without their ever having formally attached themselves to the movement’) could be seen to equate with the muddy canal.76 Conversely, Impressionism, cubism, and modernist abstraction could be seen to equate with the purer channel. Greenberg’s genealogies were a way of demonstrating that the avant-garde existed within a pure tradition. And this was also the case for individual avant-garde artists. In 1961, for instance, Jackson Pollock was said to have descended from three distinct lines: from Picasso, Miró, and Klee; from Matisse; and from Siqueiros, Orozco, and Ryder.77 A precursor to this occurs in 1931, when T.S.

Eliot was said to have descended from Goethe, without whose precedence, said Greenberg,

‘he would have been content to just write good poetry.’ 78 For Greenberg, it was a constant expansion of the boundaries set by past precedent which kept the avant-garde moving. By contrast, academicism and kitsch stood still in terms of development.

Greenberg’s letters, then, suggest that he had a fair conception of both art and abstract principles some years prior to 1938, and that his selection of ‘a purified, abstract art as the 56

law of his aesthetic’ could more reasonably be put down to these early conceptions than to the art world of 1938. It also seems reasonable to suggest, from the evidence of these letters, that the dating of the formative period of not only Greenbergian formalism, but also of Greenbergian modernism as a whole, should be taken from 1931, and not, as Serge

Guilbaut suggests, 1939. As for Hofmann’s lectures enabling Greenberg to make ‘a rapid leap from a traditional view of art to a conception of the abstract principles governing modern art’, again the evidence of these letters suggests otherwise. For the leap, if indeed there was one, could not possibly have been as rapid as Susan Noyes Platt said. Not with so much already in place.

That Greenberg’s deliberate search for a method in 1931 led to his first attempts at formalist criticism, as his letters testify, there is little doubt. And this much tallies with

Donald Kuspit’s opinion that Greenberg had ‘not only offered the most carefully thought out and operational plan of art criticism… but the only contemporary art criticism with a plan to it.’79 Above all, they demonstrate what Greenberg brought with him, not only to the art world of 1938, but also to Partisan Review and, not least, to the writing of his first essays. His thirst for knowledge was, from the start, prodigious, ranging, as we have seen, from languages and literature to art, science and philosophy – and even dance and movies.

Beyond all else, Greenberg’s early quest for knowledge reveals a remarkable degree of single-mindedness, one which was to remain until the end. As his widow Janice Van Horne states in her introduction: ‘Underlying all [the letters] is the quest to satisfy his seemingly unquenchable curiosity about everything and his ability to immerse himself completely 57

while on the journey’.80 Denoting that this was a life-long propensity (and hence a significant point of continuity) Van Horne then proceeds to relate that:

In 1994, on one of Clem’s last visits to the emergency room, barely able to breathe, he sat on the gurney re-reading a shredded volume of Heidegger, in German of course, impervious as the tubes and needles invaded.81

This sheer determination to keep on going despite the odds is, perhaps, a side of his character that has not been adequately understood, yet which must be seen as crucial to understanding his maintenance of a formalist position for the better part of sixty years – often out of kilter with his peers, a point he had noted in 1955 with the comment ‘I do get referred to, rather unfavourably on the whole, in an occasional article or book.’82

Also of significance in understanding Greenberg are his Jewishness and his politics, references to which are also dotted amongst the personal matters which form the bulk of this correspondence. Whilst his attitude to Jewishness over these years could be described, in the main, as almost cavalier in its humour, the amount of space given over to the topic demonstrates that it was more to Greenberg than simply an accident of birth. This much becomes apparent with some of the more serious entries; for instance, in 1935 regarding the appearance of his new-born son, Daniel, he said:

He looks disappointingly Nordic… Anglo-Saxon eyes… Very fair skin, I feel that my Pa is a closer relation than he is, although he is half me… He looks neither like me nor Jewish. As gentile as an Anglo-Saxon with Irish in his blood… Oh my son. He’s going to grow up such a stranger…83

Greenberg’s concern here for his Jewish heritage was to resound, more menacingly, in a letter of mid-1940 in which he said his past didn’t ‘flow into Hitler’s future’.84 Given the 58

time of writing, this remark clearly relates to Hitler's intent to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth. Needless to say, in a world yet unaware of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ (the first inklings of which would only become commonly apparent during 1938), Greenberg’s politics of the mid-thirties did not reflect such a concern – as is evident from his assessment of the world situation in 1933:

About the State of the World: of course, there won’t be any war. What’s happening in Europe is the “reassertion of its normal alignment of powers.”… It’s absurd to have had England on Germany’s side against France and for France to have been the chief opposition to Russia. Now these things are getting back to their true balance… Without Germany Western Europe would be pretty much of a reconciled unit, but Germany is bursting with her own unfulfilled destiny and persists… in charging all comers. Someday when she goes Communist she’ll communize the rest of W. Europe at one stroke… And then everybody will find out they don’t like Germany’s kind of Communism – Russia’ll like it least of all – and then all of a sudden we’ll have the real Untergang, and maybe the final one.85

This early assessment might go some way to explaining the anger apparent in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. No longer was there any reason to believe that Germany might eventually go

‘Communist’. And however distasteful ‘Germany’s kind of Communism’ might have been in 1933, it would have paled against the kind of fascism evident by 1939. Also in 1933,

Greenberg was attending communist mass-meetings ‘often’ to ‘cheer’ himself up.86 Yet, despite his more sympathetic opinion of Russian than German politics, by late 1936 his anti-Stalinism (made plain in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’) was inherent in his hope that

Trotsky would get ‘safely out of Mexico’.87

A facet of Greenberg’s character which is only occasionally latent in his formal writings is his subversive sense of humour – a prime example of which occurs in early 1931, when he recounts his ‘first squabble’ with his stepmother.88 According to Greenberg: 59

She began to call herself a damn fool for tolerating the things she does from me, such as late-arising, complaints about cooking, etc. I said I agreed with her… i.e. that she is a damn fool. There was some fun after that. I began handling the carving scissors in a savage way referring to Hamlet and his uncle. She had never read Hamlet… It was all funny as hell…89

And so, Greenberg had turned his angst back on the perpetrator. That the latter’s unawareness of this move was the source of a certain delight became evident three days later, when he wrote:

I’m still in Streit with the stepmother. She won’t sit in the same room with me; a state of affairs which has its good points. My father however refused to explain to her just what connection my references to Hamlet had to her.90

It is these (perhaps unacademic) points, such as a particular brand of humour and the personal views on Jewishness evident in these early letters, which help to explain

Greenberg. For instance, it is precisely this type of humour, turned back on the antagonist, which could well have underlaid a seemingly parodic element in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, discussed in Chapter Five, in which Greenberg appears to have turned Nazi ideology on its head.

All told, Greenberg’s early letters provide a remarkable portrait of a person (albeit an intellectual) coming of age during the turbulent years leading up to the outbreak of the

Second World War. As such, they serve as a salutary reminder that behind the formalist critic was a complex human being – which tends to undermine the feasibility of framing

Greenberg within the narrow constraints of a single issue, be that Kantianism, Jewishness or formalism. Beyond this, these letters demonstrate that what he gained from others can 60

only be seen to have augmented an already wide-ranging fund of knowledge. That he became involved with the Partisan Review circle is not surprising, since it too shared his interest in politics, a virulent anti-Stalinism, and a leaning towards Trotskyism. Until the point of his involvement with this circle, however, there is no evidence to suggest that his views on art had become infused with politics. In fact, the first inkling of this occurs in

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’.

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ and ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’

In bringing together a raft of concerns then current to the Partisan Review circle, Greenberg formulated, in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, a thesis proposing that avant-garde culture imitated, not nature, but the processes of art. Running counter to the avant-garde was its diametrical opposite, kitsch:

… popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc.91

Kitsch, according to T.J. Clark, ‘is an art and a culture of instant assimilation, of abject reconciliation to the everyday, of avoidance of difficulty, pretence to indifference, equality before the image of capital’.92 In other words, kitsch was ‘easy’, but it had its darker side.

The specialization of the avant-garde, according to Greenberg, had alienated it from society in general promoting a backlash or ‘reactionary dissatisfaction’ expressing itself in

‘revivalism and puritanism, and latest of all, in fascism’.93 It was precisely because kitsch was the culture of the masses that its encouragement then became ‘another of the 61

inexpensive ways’ utilized by totalitarian regimes to ‘ingratiate themselves with their subjects.’94

Beginning with what Thierry de Duve describes as a ‘simplistic explanation for the success of kitsch’, this essay builds up to a tirade directed at the cynical aesthetics of Hitler,

Goebbels, Stalin and Mussolini.95 Perhaps the most scathing criticism is reserved for

Goebbels and Mussolini, who had each possessed good taste in that they had strenuously courted the avant-garde, yet who each had publicly abandoned this taste in favour of kow- towing to the masses for the purpose of fascist indoctrination.

“Towards a Newer Laocoon’, whilst very different in essence and tone to the former essay, is generally considered to be its sister in that it takes Greenberg’s investigation into the avant-garde one step further, and thus formulates a theory proposing that the dominant art form of the time, through an ‘imperative’ stemming from history, was painting, specifically abstract painting.96 From imitating the processes of art, the avant-garde artist was now surrendering progressively to the resistance of the medium (which amounted to much the same thing). From a confusion of the arts brought about by Romanticism, each art was now, ‘by virtue of its medium… uniquely and strictly itself’.97 The arts, for Greenberg, now lay ‘safe… each within its “legitimate” boundaries’.98

Whilst the second essay could be seen as a depoliticised version of the first, it is clear that, from the outset, Greenberg was thinking along political lines, lines which suggest that the second essay is not as apolitical as might be supposed, particularly since, as he wrote to 62

Lazarus in 1939, ‘We’ve come to a place where politics must enter any conceivable aperçu’.99 And, as he had said in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, it was ‘too difficult to inject effective propaganda’ into avant-garde art and literature.100

Citing Gotthold Lessing’s Laokoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry as recognizing ‘the presence of a practical as well as a theoretical confusion of the arts’, he then used Lessing’s failure to adequately address the confusion of painting and poetry to introduce an argument which pittted academicism against the true avant-garde.101 Talent itself was not an issue in the formation of the avant-garde, for beguiling talent had also been responsible leading art into an ‘all-time low’ with Vernet, Gérome, Leighton, Watts,

Moreau, Böcklin, the Pre-Raphaelites, etc., etc.102 It had, for Greenberg, taken talent ‘to lead art that far astray.’103

So if talent was not the issue, what was it? The issue seems to have been, at bottom, revolution in art through experimentation with the medium: looking back, historically, to place avant-garde art in the context of the forward-looking present and producing, therefore, something which could not be mistaken (if we are to read this essay in conjunction with the first) for the ‘easy’ art which beguiled the masses not only in totalitarian regimes, but also in the free world under capitalism. In this, popular, commercial art and literature were not now the only culprits, but also slickly talented academic art: the art of ‘realistic illusion in the service of sentimental and declamatory literature’.104 Guided by none but themselves, the avant-garde arts had ‘by a notion of purity derived from the example of music… achieved a purity and a radical delimitation of 63

their fields of activity’ for which there was ‘no previous example in the history of culture’.105

It seems widely accepted that within this discourse was the notion of battle. In ‘Avant-

Garde and Kitsch’, for instance, kitsch is introduced, in good military terminology, as the

‘rear guard’.106 In ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ Greenberg makes the point of revolution clear in his introduction of Courbet as the ‘Communard’.107 Taking for his subject matter

‘prosaic contemporary life’, itself a revolutionary step, a ‘new flatness begins to appear in his painting’.108 With the impressionists, subject matter becomes subservient to the effects achieved through the emulation of ‘the detachment of science’.109 Manet’s ‘insolent indifference to his subject… and his flat color-modeling were as revolutionary as

Impressionist technique proper.’110 Revolution and radicalism, then, become the hall-marks of the avant-garde – that which sets it apart from the art of imitation.

Setting the battle lines from the start, Greenberg, through an act of secession, placed the avant-garde firmly on neutral ground. Politically speaking, while it was too late in Stalinist

Russia, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy to save the avant-garde from the reign of terror which had caused its annihilation, there was still time in the free world to protect it (or for it to protect itself by knowing what it was – or, rather, what it wasn’t) from the ravages of right-wing reactionary government control. Artistically speaking, ‘abstract’ or ‘non- objective’ art, ‘art for art’s sake’ and ‘pure poetry’, which had been the result of the avant- garde poet or artist’s complete retirement from the public in search of the absolute, had 64

become something in which ‘subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague’.111 In reference to these essays, T.J. Clark says that it

… seems that modernism is being proposed as bourgeois art in the absence of a bourgeoisie, more accurately, as aristocratic art in the age when the bourgeoisie abandons its claims to aristocracy.112

What he appears to be suggesting is that Greenberg had, in theoretically casting adrift the

‘umbilical cord of gold’ which once tied the avant-garde to the bourgeoisie, given the avant-garde credit for, in effect, placing itself in the cultural ascendence – an ascendence which, one might then suggest, in its purity of purpose, could be seen to be beyond the clutches of totalitarian control.113 Furthermore, stripped down to its spartan essentials, avant-garde art could not now be susceptible to the pseudo-mythologizing efforts of the fascist and Stalinist regimes.

When seen in terms of Greenberg’s strident condemnation of the fate of art under totalitarian rule in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, the beginning of ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ takes on new and poignant meaning, particularly the sentence: ‘A great deal of purism is the translation of an extreme solicitude, and anxiousness as to the fate of art, a concern for its identity.’114 In the former essay he had shown how gullible and vulnerable to the wiles of totalitarian politics the most supposedly serious of artists could be when he noted that the

Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn had been ‘welcomed with great fanfare’ by the Nazis, only to be dropped when the Nazis decided that ‘the only true art and literature’ was that in accord with mass taste.115

65

In their various ways, then, each of these essays expresses succinctly the mood of the times.

With Greenberg’s formalism now infused with politics, the stage was set for a path he would follow for a further half century. This half century would see changes in the arts as drastic as the changes in politics seen during the late thirties and early forties. 66

Notes

1 Clement Greenberg, ‘Autobiographical Statement’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3, 194 (first published in Twentieth-Century Authors [first supplement], New York, 1955) For further information on Greenberg’s early career, see: John O’Brian, ‘Chronology to 1949’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 253-255. 2 Idem. 3 Clement Greenberg, ‘New York Painting Only Yesterday’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 19 (first published in Art News, Summer 1957) 4 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of an Exhibition of Hans Hofmann and a Reconsideration of Mondrian’s Theories’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 18 (first published in The Nation, 21 April 1945) 5 Serge Guilbaut, ‘The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America: Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the “Vital Center”’, October 15, Winter 1980, 61 6 Sidney Tillim, ‘Criticism and Culture, or Greenberg’s Doubt’, Art in America, May 1987, 123 7 Idem. 8 Platt, ‘Clement Greenberg in the 1930s: A New Perspective on His Criticism’, 50 9 Ibid., 50, 51 10 Ibid., 50 11 O’Brian,’Introduction’ (Vol. 1), xxi 12 Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 41 13 November 8, 1932 (where he speaks of Alexander Brook, who he was ‘liking more than ever’, and Glenn Coleman, who was ‘almost great within his subject’) 14 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letters dated: June 16, 1931 (where he records seeing work by Walt Kuhn and Arthur Davies) 15 December 17, 1931, (where he speaks of seeing works by Alexander Brook, Rafael Soyer and John Marin), and December 29, 1931 (where he speaks of Marin’s watercolours selling for $350 and his oils for $3,500 up); February 3, 1932 (where he speaks of a Marin show, Georgia O’Keefe and Arthur Stieglitz) Although the line that Marin had to be ‘taken into consideration’ as ‘the greatest living painter’ was said in 1958, seven years after Marin’s death, it was a reworking of a 1948 review in which Marin simply had the ‘reputation’ of being the greatest living American painter. For these examples, see: Clement Greenberg, ‘John Marin’ (1958 version), in: Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, Boston, 1961, 181-183, and Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of an Exhibition of John Marin’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 268 (first published in The Nation, 25 December 1948) Other American artists whose work he saw in this period were: Bernard Karfiol (letter dated July 7, 1930; Arthur Davies (letter dated June 16, 1931); Karfiol again (who wouldn’t ‘amount to anything’ despite being ‘so good’), William Zorach, and Robert Laurent (letter dated February 4, 1933); Brook and Zorach again (letter dated June 22, 1933) Early in his art critical career, Greenberg would again speak of Brook, though not favourably. For this see: Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, and Wassily Kandinsky’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 65 (first published in The Nation, 19 April, 1941): ‘one begins to realise that the unsuccessful pictures of a good many abstract painters are more interesting than the brilliantly successful pictures of such painters as Grant Wood, Alexander Brook, etc., etc.’. 16 For Cézanne’s ‘clean emotions’, see: MacKinley Helm, John Marin, Boston, 1948, 33: ‘[Ernest] Haskell [the etcher]… had first seen Marin in Paris… early in 1910… Marin “cared for what Cézanne stood for – clean emotions”’. 17 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated February 3, 1932 18 Idem. 19 It is widely accepted that ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ was informed by André Breton and Diego Rivera’s article, ‘Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’, Partisan Review, Vol.VI, No.1, Fall 1938, 49-53 (said to have been co-authored by Trotsky). What Breton and Rivera called for was ‘the independence of art – for the revolution’ and ‘the revolution for the complete liberation of art.’ (p 53) 20 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated March 12, 1932 67

At this exhibition Greenberg also saw works by Giaquinto, Giulio Campi, Bronzino, Tiepolo, Canaletto, and Ghisolfi (Greenberg, The Harold Letters, March 12 1932). 21 Idem. 22 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, The University of Chicago Press, 1983, 168 23 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letters dated: July 7, 1930 (In addition to Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, here Greenberg speaks also of seeing Pascin, Rouault, and Dufy), and February 22, 1931 (‘..have you seen any cubistic still-lifes by a German named [Arno] Mohr? I saw 2 in water-color, the best ever and I never got such a kick before. He’s my own Discovery’) Other letters demonstrating the extent of Greenberg’s art appreciation at this time include letters dated: October 30, 1930 (where he speaks of seeing a Daumier-Corot exhibition); March 13, 1931 (where he sees Toulouse-Lautrec, Odilon Redon show – only ‘4 good pictures’ by Lautrec, who left him ‘cold’ and Redon he told Lazarus he could ‘have’.); February 22, 1931 (sees works by Otto Lange ‘very good’, Willard Nash, Bertram Hartman, and three works of Klee which he had to catalogue because they were ‘genuine discoveries’); June 16, 1931 (where, at the Balzac Galleries, he discovers ‘a good man by the name of Laszlo [Moholy-Nagy], and a ‘great show at the Mod. Art Gallery’ which allows him to work out another hierarchy: ‘Wonderful Cézannes, one great Gauguin, 3 or 4 Picassos in the cubistic period which were equally as good, then Seurat, Walt Kuhn (not so hot), 1 good and 1 fair Matisse and Arthur Davies who is a good artist gone wrong.’); January 13, 1933 (recounts seeing a Maillol exhibition and Pissarro paintings, and ‘got a pleasant disillusionment’ when he ‘saw how good’ some of the Pissarro’s were.) 24 Ibid., letter dated February 4, 1931(where of the Rousseau exhibition Greenberg said that there were ‘only 4 good paintings in the whole exhibit. The remainder was pure junk.’) 25 Ibid., letter dated March 13, 1931 26 Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 37 27 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated June 2, 1938; Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 50 28 Idem. 29 Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 50 30 Platt, ‘Clement Greenberg in the 1930s’, 50 31 Janice Van Horne, ‘Preface’, in: Greenberg, The Harold Letters, 18 32 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letters dated: August 2, 1930 33 Ibid., letters dated February 24, 1932, and September 7, 1932 34 Ibid., letter dated September 23, 1932 35 Ibid., letter dated October 16, 1932 36 For the information that Sargent was a ‘widely-known art critic’ and for her ‘honorary membership in the American Institute of Architects and Allied Arts’ (which was presented to her in 1926) see: reproduced newspaper clipping (Herald Tribune, n.d.) in Ibid., 69 (presumably enclosed with letter of September 23, 1932). For other information about Sargent (including that she taught in Syracuse University’s College of Fine Arts from 1895-1932) and for The Irene Sargent Papers, see: archives.syr.edu/arch/faculty (/isarg.htm; /sargscope.htm, and /sargcon.htm) 37 Platt, ‘Clement Greenberg in the 1930s’, 50 38 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letters dated: February 3, 1932 (Rivera), and February 4, 1933 (Karfiol’s ‘smaller canvases’ were ‘damn good’, but he wouldn’t ‘amount to anything’) 39 Ibid., letter dated October 30, 1930 40 Ibid., letter dated March 13, 1931 41 Ibid., February 4, 1931 42 Ibid., letter dated May 2, 1931, Greenberg’s underscoring. 43 Gilbert N. Lewis, The Anatomy of Science, Yale University Press, 1926, 60 44 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 90 (broadcast for the Forum Lectures [Washington, D.C. Voice of America] 1960) 45 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated June 30, 1931 46 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 85 47 Ibid., 86 48 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated July 8, 1931 49 Tillim, ‘Criticism and Culture’, 123 68

50 Clement Greenberg, ‘Poems: A Note by the Editor’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 94 (first published in Partisan Review, March-April 1942) 51 Platt, ‘Clement Greenberg in the 1930s’, 50 52 Hofmann quoted in: Ibid., 51, quoted from: Transcription by Lenita Manry, ‘Hans Hofmann Lectures, Winter 1938-1939’. Lecture 1, pp 4,6, Microfilm Roll 151, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 53 TNL, 31 54 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated April 18, 1932 55 Immanuel Kant, ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’, in Critique of Judgment: Including the First Introduction, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, 1987 (1790), 71 56 Ibid., 77 57 Mark A. Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline, Cambridge University Press, 2001, 88-90; Clement Greenberg, ‘The Renaissance of the Little Mag: Review of Accent, Diogenes, Experimental Review, Vice Versa, and View’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 46 (first published in Partisan Review, January-February 1941) 58 Donald B. Kuspit, Clement Greenberg: Art Critic, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1979, 136 59 Eliot quoted in: Idem., quoted from: T. S. Eliot, ‘The Perfect Critic’, in: T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, London, 1920, 96 (n.b. this is not the publication of The Sacred Wood referred to elsewhere in this thesis) Regarding Greenberg’s early references to Eliot, see: Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letters dated: October 9, 1930 (where he mentions receiving a gift of a year’s subscription to Eliot’s ‘Criterion’); July 24, 1931 (mentions Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ only in regard to Goethe’s precedence); March 12, 1932 (where, in a statement related to a criticism of the poet Robert Frost, he says ‘…you can only fight Rhetoric by embracing it or poisoning it. See T. S. Eliot for the first, Eluard for the second.’). When next he mentions Eliot it is to praise his poem ‘The Rock’ in a letter dated February 19, 1935. 60 Idem. 61 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 85 62 Kaplan, ‘Reframing the Self-Criticism’, in: Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, 180-199 63 Ibid., 184; Clement Greenberg, ‘The Jewish Joke: Review of Röyte Pomeranzen, edited by Immanuel Olsvanger’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 182-187 (first published in Commentary, December 1947) 64 Kaplan, ‘Reframing the Self-Criticism’, 190 65 Tillim, ‘Criticism and Culture’, 123 66 Ingrid Stadler, ‘The Idea of Art and of Its Criticism: A Rational Reconstruction of a Kantian Doctrine’, in: Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, eds. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, The University of Chicago Press, 1982, 195 67 Ibid., 216 Despite the concern of this thesis being how Greenberg did use Kant (and not how he may, or may not have misinterpreted Kant), it is worth noting that even amongst Kantian scholars, there is no definitive agreement on the manner in which Kant was interpreted by Greenberg. For examples of various explanations of Greenberg’s Kantianism, see: Deane W. Curtin, ‘Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40, Vol. XL, No. 3, Spring 1982, 315-326; Paul Crowther, ‘Kant and Greenberg’s Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 42, Summer 1984, 442-445; Paul Crowther, ‘Greenberg’s Kant and the Problem of Modernist Painting’, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 25, No. 4, Autumn 1985, 317-325; Stephen Melville, ‘Kant After Greenberg’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56:1, Winter 1998, 67-74; Jason Gaiger, ‘Constraints and Conventions: Kant and Greenberg on Aesthetic Judgement’, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 39, No. 4, October 1999, 376-391 68 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated October 1, 1932 69 Ibid., letter dated December 17, 1931 (‘The new constellation in the German sky that I’ve found now is Bertolt Brecht… He’s catastrophic, he’s everything! He writes, I think, a German approximation of American slang.’) Additionally, the following letters provide an example of the extent of Greenberg’s interest in things German during the period when he discovered Kant and Brecht: March 3, 1931 (Kleist); July 8, 1931 (Leibniz, Wolff, Kant, Hölderlin, George, Rilke, Werfel and Benn); July 24, 1931 (Hölderlin, Rilke, George, Hofmannsthal, Goethe); August 19, 1932 (Brecht, Hesse); September 23, 1932 (Gluck, Handel, Mozart – 69

likens Hofmannsthal’s poetry to Mozart’s music), October 16, 1932 (Kleist); November 2, 1932 (Mozart, Kurt Weill’s music to Brecht’s ‘Three Penny Opera’) 70 Greenberg quoted in: Trish Evans and Charles Harrison, ‘A conversation with Clement Greenberg’, Art Monthly, No. 73, February 1974, 4. The remainder of this interview was published, respectively, as: ‘A conversation with Clement Greenberg Part II’, Art Monthly, No. 74, March 1984, 10-14, and ‘A conversation with Clement Greenberg Part III’, Art Monthly, No. 75, April 1984, 4-6 According to Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ was ‘the fruit of three or four years thinking about the subject [of] culture and the masses’ – that is, ‘the business of making high art that a broad public could get’. (Idem.) 71 Idem. 72 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated October 1, 1930 73 AGK, 12 74 Kuspit, Clement Greenberg: Art Critic, 46 75 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated February 15, 1932 76 Greenberg, ‘Surrealist Painting’, 227 77 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Jackson Pollock Market Soars’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 109 (first published in The New York Times Magazine, 16 April, 1961) 78 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated July 24, 1931 79 Kuspit, Clement Greenberg: Art Critic, 154 80 Van Horne, ‘Preface’, in: Greenberg, The Harold Letters, viii 81 Idem. 82 Greenberg, ‘Autobiographical Statement’, 196 83 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated March 8, 1935 84 Ibid., letter dated June 24, 1940 The certain sense of insecurity attached to being Jewish during the late thirties to mid-forties stands in stark contrast to the sense of security it brought Greenberg during the early thirties during his travels for his father’s neck-tie business. Although couched in humour, this sense of security (however claustrophobic) is evident in the following passage (dated February 18) from a letter written between February 15 and 18, 1933:

There are 65,000 warm-hearted Jews in St. Louis, and ‘tis they I have to fear. They would seat soft- spoken polite young strangers from N.Y. so swiftly in their bosoms. And there’s the real foolishness of the Wandering Jew business; wander, hell! wherever there’s another Jew it’s home.

85 Ibid., letter written between October 27 and 29, 1933 (this passage dated October 28) 86 Idem. (ref. to communist mass-meetings dated October 27) 87 Ibid., letter dated December 22, 1936 (at this point all he professed to be interested in ‘outside’ himself, besides Trotsky’s safety was that ‘the Loyalists win the Spanish war… and that Mrs. Simpson gets the syph and that govt employees [of which he was one] are put on a 5 day week and that it comes on to snow.’) Greenberg’s sympathy towards Trotsky had been evident nearly four years prior to this in a letter dated March 23, 1933, in which he said to Lazarus: ‘What you said about my business was wonderful… Your saying a thing like that proves my theory about Trotsky. A good man is a good man wherever you put him.’ 88 Ibid., letter dated February 22, 1931 89 Idem. 90 Ibid., letter dated February 25, 1931 91 AGK, 11 92 Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 147 93 AGK, 18-19 94 Ibid., 20 95 De Duve, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, 48 96 TNL, 37 97 Ibid., 32 98 Idem. 99 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated February 16, 1939 100 AGK, 20 70

101 TNL, 25 102 Ibid., 27 103 Idem. 104 Idem. 105 TNL, 32 106 AGK, 11 107 TNL, 29 Greenberg’s depiction of Courbet as a revolutionary is possibly taken from Venturi, who said ‘From the revolution of 1848 dates the realistic campaign of Courbet. He wishes to paint “the common and the modern”, and signs himself “Courbet without ideal and without religion.”’ (Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism, trans. Charles Marriot, New York, 1964 (1936), 251). That Venturi was consulted we know from ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ (p. 37), wherein Greenberg says ‘To argue from any other basis’ than the ‘historical justification’ for the superiority of abstract art ‘would… involve an entrance into the politics of taste – to use Venturi’s phrase – from which there is no exit – on paper.’ Further, in James D. Herbert, The Political Origins of Abstract-Expressionist Art Criticism: The Early Theoretical and Critical Writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg (Stanford Honors Essay in Humanities, Stanford, California, 1985, 5), Herbert suggests that, for Greenberg, the avant-garde was itself revolutionary in that it ‘recognized the need for change and offered a means of developing consciousness so as to make that change possible.’ Thus the continuation of the avant-garde was ‘raised to the level of a political imperative.’ 108 Idem. 109 Idem. 110 Ibid., 29-30 111 AGK, 8 112 Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 147 113 AGK, 11 114 TNL, 23 115 AGK, 20 71

CHAPTER THREE: THE PARTISAN REVIEW CIRCLE

Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald and Leon Trotsky

Partisan Review was formed in 1934 as an organ of the New York John Reed Club. Reed represented, in the words of James Gilbert, ‘the epitome of the revolutionary journalist’.1

He had travelled to Mexico, sending in ‘firsthand accounts on the progress of the revolution’.2 He travelled from strike to strike, and where he saw revolution, says Gilbert, he also saw literature and art. ‘Wherever, in the West, there is an I.W.W. [International

Workers of the World] local,’ Reed wrote in 1918, ‘you will find an intellectual centre – a place where men read philosophy, economics, the latest plays, novels, where art and poetry are discussed, and international politics.’3 It is clear that, from the first, the Partisan Review circle, which later became the hub of what were to be known as the New York Intellectuals, saw themselves as just such an ‘intellectual centre’: among its concerns being the creation of an ‘international’ of intellectuals ‘devoted to the preservation of avant-garde culture’.4

To the ends of its international outlook, the magazine solicited articles from foreign writers such as Leon Trotsky, Ignazio Silone (each of whose work was highly political), Franz

Kafka and Victor Serge. By 1939 it was attracting correspondence from Ireland, France and

Canada.

The significance of Partisan Review, according to Terry A. Cooney, was its range across politics and culture: a range which is undoubtedly evident in the early work of Greenberg, whose first article for the magazine was a piece on Brecht, criticizing the extension of the playwright’s Threepenny Opera into a novel. A subsequent article for the English magazine 72

Horizon, following hot on the heels of ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, was ‘a piece on politics’ (‘An American View’) in which Greenberg denounced the British and French governments for being pro-capitalist and therefore dangerously close to the fascism they were ostensibly at war to overcome.5 In these early days, as we have seen, Greenberg’s vision was as eclectic as his sources, and reflected his wide-ranging interests spanning the subjects of poetry, novels and cinema to languages and politics.

During 1936, publication of Partisan Review was suspended. Its revival in 1937 signalled the abandonment of pro-Soviet Communism by its founding editors, Philip Rahv and

William Phillips, and an alignment with Trotskyism – Trotsky being seen by the editors as a fellow intellectual. (By contrast, Stalin was seen as somewhat of a philistine. That this view was shared by Greenberg is evident in the latter part of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in

‘the personal philistinism of Hitler and Stalin’ was seen as being ‘not accidental’ to the roles they played.)6 Beyond this, Trotskyism, according to Gilbert, provided ‘an answer to the question of what had gone wrong with Communism; it explained from a Marxist viewpoint what had happened to distort and twist the revolution.’7 And what had happened to ‘distort and twist the revolution’ was the fabrication, through lies and deceit, of ‘an heroic myth’ exalting the ‘leader’ Stalin.8 For instance, a painting representing Stalin as the organizer of the Tiflis strike in March 1902 was reproduced in the official government paper Izvestia. ‘However’, said Trotsky, ‘it appears from documents long known to the public, that Stalin was in prison at that time’ and not in Tiflis.9

73

The new magazine (continuing in the tradition of John Reed, in essence, by maintaining contact with political hotspots through its connections in various parts of the world including Mexico, France, England and Switzerland) was now ‘devoted to the most advanced literature, adopting the style of earlier magazines of aesthetic revolt.’10 Despite this promise of ‘aesthetic revolt’, many articles in Partisan Review were political in nature.

According to Gilbert, the separation of politics from literature became the cornerstone of the writing that characterised the new Partisan Review.11 Yet this ambition seemed impossible to fulfil. In 1936, for instance, the unrevamped Partisan Review could excuse

T.S. Eliot for ‘steering close to fascism’ on the grounds that ‘that by no means signifies that his poetry… is automatically suffused with the fascist spirit’.12 But by 1938 Trotsky’s open letter ‘Art and Politics” (solicited by Partisan Review) railed against the Stalinist totalitarian control of writers and painters and pronounced that in the field of painting the

October Revolution had ‘found her greatest interpreter’ in the work of Diego Rivera in

‘faraway Mexico’.13

By the summer of 1939, from the content of the ‘Statement of the L.C.S.F.’ (the League for

Cultural Freedom and Socialism), signed by thirty-four people including the staff of

Partisan Review and Greenberg, it was clear that, on the home front, American government censorship was seen to be crippling WPA theatre, art and literary projects.14 Even the

Catholic church was seen to be exercising ‘terrorism’ over the movies.15 By this stage it was also clear that the infusion of the arts with politics was not simply a product of totalitarian rule overseas. This statement, moreover, makes it abundantly clear that parallels were being drawn between the political climate of totalitarian states and that of right wing 74

capitalist governments, in that extreme censorship of various forms was the hallmark of totalitarianism.

Quoting Randolph Bourne from 1917, and likening that situation to the present, Dwight

Macdonald wrote in Partisan Review (two issues before the publication of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’) that

… it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of the war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself…16

The ‘brain-trusters in the capital’ had ‘turned their attention from slum clearance to military aviation’.17 The intellectuals had retreated to the ‘solid base’ of bourgeois democracy and

‘forgotten the very idea of socialism’, which had vanished – in its place appearing “anti- fascist” fascism’.18 The first result, said Macdonald, of a ‘war against foreign fascism’ would be ‘the introduction of domestic dictatorship.’19 Given the ‘advanced stage of decomposition’ of the democratic capitalist system, the result of such a war would not be a

‘return to democratic government’ as it had been in 1918.20 The only result of such a war would be the victory of fascism in America because fascism was ‘born from within a democratic society, as the Third Reich was born of the womb of the Weimar Republic.’21

From Partisan Review’s viewpoint, the main enemy, for Americans, was within their own borders. This fact is crucial to any understanding of Greenberg’s early writing because it opens up the possibilities as to whom he was addressing when writing ‘Avant-Garde and

Kitsch’ and ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ – possibilities which are addressed in Chapter

Five. 75

In the same issue as Macdonald’s article, Sidney Hook wrote an equally scathing report of the then state of affairs in America. The Roosevelt administration was seen as a popular front government which had ‘already spent its force’ and was ‘in retreat’.22 The government’s ‘inflated armament program’, at worst, was seen as a ‘preparation for war, the last resort of every capitalist statesman or politician who desires to stave off fundamental social change’, and war meant ‘fascism in full military dress’.23 Depressingly,

Hook then observes that the ‘arc of Popular Front futility spirals downward to the bloody mire it sought to avoid’.24 In joining a Popular Front, the working class would thereby accept and publicize ‘a program of stabilizing capitalism which, on its own economic theory, is doomed to fail, leaving its credulous followers easy picking for Fascism’.25 Hook, here, is making making specific parallels with the lessons learned from recent history.

Germany, once a democracy, was now ‘ruled by a minority dictatorship, resting, as all dictatorships must, on bayonets, a vast secret police, and concentration camps.’26 By implication, such was the fate of Americans should America decide to enter the war.

This linking of American reaction with full-blown fascism is also evident in the ‘Statement of the L.C.S.F’, which had declared that:

Not in this country alone, but everywhere, culture is threatened by advancing reaction… German and Italian fascism have at the same time compelled the revival of obsolete modes in art and science… nor are signs lacking of deepening social reaction in the United States.27

This revival by German and Italian fascism, as also of Stalinism, of obsolete modes was the point to which Greenberg’s entire argument in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ was leading 76

before calling on Socialism to save the day. But in leading up to this point he had demonstrated a clear understanding of the workings of kitsch in America. Like Sidney

Hook, he had, by implication, drawn close parallels between America and the totalitarian regimes.

Published in the subsequent issue to the ‘Statement of the L.C.S.F.’, ‘Avant-Garde and

Kitsch’ uses as its role model for the lover of kitsch the Russian peasant who admires

Repin above the modernist Picasso. Yet though, in this, Greenberg has ostensibly safely removed his argument from home territory, he too, like the authors of the statement, can be seen to have implicated America. This was not done directly in terms of politics (although

Alexandrianism, in a political sense, could be taken for social reaction in that it represents, in its immobility, a static refusal to accept change) but in his explanation for the commercialisation of kitsch as being a phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution, itself an international phenomenon. Further to which he introduces his essay with comparisons between T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song – Eliot representing the culturally mobile avant-garde, and the (American) Tin Pan Alley song representing, by contrast, the culturally immobile kitsch, which changed ‘according to style’, but remained, in its

‘vicarious experience and faked sensations’ always the same.28 With his subsequent comparison between a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover, Greenberg places this phenomenon, in accordance with the aspirations of Partisan Review, on an internationalist level.

77

According to Sidney Tillim, Greenberg ‘wrote first for domestic consumption, but Art and

Culture (published in 1961) is addressed to history and the world.’29 Yet it is apparent that, from the first, Greenberg, like Partisan Review, had an eye toward an international audience – the nature of Partisan Review’s readership making this abundantly clear as does

Greenberg’s dropping of the names of Dali, Cezanne, Hokusai, Mallarmé, Matisse and

Brancusi, etc. as readily as he drops those of Hart Crane, Pound and Stevens. ‘Towards a

Newer Laocoon’, although ostensibly Greenberg’s apology for the historical inevitability of the ascendence of abstraction, can be viewed in this same light: not only because the

Industrial Revolution which had started the ball rolling was an international phenomenon, but also because he takes us back to the German Gotthold Lessing when, in fact, his argument could have been amply supported through the American Irving Babbitt. As

Michael Leja has noted, his treatment of Lessing is ‘crude and dismissive’.30

Of the editors and staff of Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald is generally perceived as being the most influential to Greenberg’s thinking (with their thoughts along the same political lines, their 1941 joint article ‘10 Propositions on the War’ was to echo the same pro-revolutionary sentiments as Greenberg’s ‘An American View’ of 1940). Joining Rahv and Philips on the editorial board in 1937, it was the last of Macdonald’s three articles on the Soviet Cinema which provoked Greenberg to write ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. For

Macdonald, the halcyon days of the Revolution, when Lenin had turned a blind eye to the advanced art, poetry and architecture he could not understand, were long gone. For the

Stalinists, the backwardness of the masses had become the ‘justification for the banalities’ which were produced ‘in the name of socialist realism’.31 With cinema this had meant its 78

degradation to an ‘instrument of factional warfare’.32 What was required of directors in the thirties which was not required in the twenties was the churning out of propaganda specifically for the Kremlin, resulting in perpetuation of the ‘lie’ that socialism had been built in Soviet Russia.33 The equally ‘escapist’ movies of Moscow and Hollywood were seen by Macdonald as synonymous.34 For the Russian masses life was ‘grim and penurious’ and a film studio could be ‘a dream factory, whether it is on the shores of the Black Sea or of the Pacific’ (and Hollywood movies, it will be remembered, rated under Greenberg’s list of kitsch manifestations).35 The cultural decline of the Soviet cinema, as with the success of the Soviet Thermidor, was only possible with the complicity of the masses, and this because Russia was a backward nation with a high level of illiteracy. When given the choice between the Museum of Western Art in Moscow, containing ‘a famous collection of modern French paintings’, and the Treyakov Gallery ‘devoted mostly to the works of the

Russian academicians of the last century’ (works by ‘Repin, Surikov, Kramskoi, Perov and other equally celebrated painters of battle scenes and winter sunsets’), the Russian masses chose the latter.36

In ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ we see Macdonald’s sentiments echoed, but, almost inevitably, Greenberg paints a far grimmer picture because, in his reference to both the

American and the German masses is the implication that they, unlike their Russian counterparts, were not illiterate (the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe and America, he tells us, having established ‘universal literacy’).37 Yet still it was kitsch or propaganda which they preferred as their leaders were well aware. ‘Hitler’, said Greenberg, ‘is a bitter enemy of the avant-garde… yet this did not prevent Goebbels in 1932-3 from strenuously 79

courting avant-garde artists and writers.’38 Later, however, when the Nazis ‘realised that it was more practical to accede to the wishes of the masses in matters of culture than to those of their paymasters’, it then became ‘necessary to promote on a much more grandiose style than the democracies the illusion that the masses actually rule.’39 In Stalinist Russia as in

Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, kitsch had become ‘merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects.’40 In

America too, the masses were obviously, through ‘popular, commercial art and literature’, getting precisely what they wanted. America, then, was only one step removed from the totalitarian states overseas.41

Macdonald’s ‘ignorant’ Russian peasant (for whom we can, on account of Greenberg’s introduction, equally read the artistically ignorant yet literate American masses) was now, in Greenberg’s analysis, confronted with two paintings, one by Picasso, one by Repin.

Naturally, the peasant prefers the Repin because the values are of the ‘vividly recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic’.42 ‘It is lucky’, said Greenberg, ‘that the peasant is protected from the products of American capitalism’ for Repin ‘would not stand a chance next to a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell.’43 This latter might seem a passing quip by Greenberg, but what it means, in the context of both Greenberg’s and

Macdonald’s arguments, is that American kitsch was more beguiling and thus, one could argue, more ready to lend itself to propaganda than the Russian variety. Indeed, according to Macdonald, at the height of the great period of Soviet cinema, one found the masses showing a preference for the Hollywood product, preferring The Thief of Baghdad to

Potemkin.44 80

One aspect of Macdonald’s argument was that certain effects could be appealing, through their emotive qualities, to all stratas of society. Esthetes and peasants, in Macdonald’s account, responded with ‘the same visceral reaction to stimuli like the well-known machine gun bit in October or the massacre on the steps in Potemkin’ (a movie which Greenberg had seen in 1933).45 This use of effects was not accidental but well orchestrated by the

Eisenstein-Pudovkin-Kuleshow school to affect the audience ‘at its most primitive level, striking through the layer of conscious culture down to the reflexes and the Freudian unconscious’. And this, of course, is precisely how kitsch operates.46

Whilst Greenberg does not dwell on the propensity of the subliminal to straddle all classes, esthetes and peasants alike, he does acknowledge that a magazine like the New Yorker ‘is fundamentally high-class kitsch for the luxury trade (which) converts and waters down a great deal of avant-garde material for its own uses.’47 Echoing Macdonald’s argument, kitsch, for Greenberg, was deceptive, having ‘many different levels… some of them high enough to be dangerous to the naïve seeker of true light.’48 Hermann Broch in ‘Notes on the

Problem of Kitsch’, suggests that ‘the kitsch system requires its followers to “work beautifully”, while the art system issues the ethical order “work well”’.49 For Greenberg, as we have seen, beguiling talent (not an issue in the formation of the avant-garde) was responsible for leading art as far ‘astray’ as Vernet and the Pre-Raphaelites, etc.50 Kitsch, for Broch, is the ‘element of evil in the value system of art’.51 This concept of the beguiling qualities of kitsch as the element of evil is fundamental to the culmination of Greenberg’s argument regarding its totalitarian utilization. 81

The problem for Macdonald was that the kitsch system and the art system, through totalitarian control, had become inextricably intertwined. In bringing the argument closer to home, Greenberg had been able to emphasise the insidious enormity of the problem of the totalitarian control of kitsch, its evil, philistine ‘double darkness’, and, in so doing, and by implication, to emphasise the propensity of the medium to lend itself to similar misuses in

America.52 In this, Greenberg had seen beyond Macdonald, who had merely suggested that

American kitsch was appealing to the Russian masses.

At the end of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ Greenberg was looking to socialism ‘simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now’.53 By the time of writing

‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ this was no longer the case. War had broken out, a war in which an Allied victory ‘would but weaken the power to survive of capitalism’.54 For

Greenberg, as for many others in these dark times, the threat of totalitarianism was, as we have seen, never far from the door. And totalitarianism, of necessity, meant isolationism, as

Macdonald had made abundantly clear: ‘If the masses are to accept the present totalitarian dictatorship as a fully realized socialist society, they must be cut off from contact with more advanced cultures.’55 By Macdonald’s account, the international character of the Eisenstein cinema had so alarmed the Kremlin that Soviet borders had become ‘the most hermetically sealed in the world, and against foreign books, newspapers, movies, ideas, even more rigidly than against persons’.56 In his isolation of the avant-garde to a place beyond politics,

Greenberg could now be seen as fighting on two fronts, the aesthetic and the political.

Isolationism was something he had learned, through Macdonald, from Soviet politics. 82

In his book The Critic is Artist, Donald Kuspit portrays ‘Modern art’, as described by

Greenberg, as being basically indifferent to ‘the condition of war that dominates our personal and collective lives’.57 But here, it might be said that Kuspit has not taken into due consideration the underlying politics of Greenberg’s seminal essays and his 1940 essay ‘An

American View’, in which are spelled out feelings similar to those expressed by Macdonald and Hook. The reason the British and French ruling classes had been reluctant to go to war with Germany was that the raising of anti-fascist slogans would have gone against their capitalist class interests. If Europe were to remain capitalist, it must become fascist. The victory of socialism over capitalism/fascism was by no means assured. It could not be taken on ‘promise’, but required a ‘socialist revolution in the West.’58 To imagine such a revolution might seem like wishful thinking today, but it was, according to Martin

Greenberg, an aspiration common to many intellectuals at that time.59

Yet such a revolution did not seem to be immediately forthcoming and, in the interim,

‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ (unlike ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’) looked not to socialism for the preservation of living culture, but to the avant-garde itself: that aspect of civilization whose most important function, Greenberg had told us, was to ‘keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence.’60 Where the Soviets had isolated culture, culture, for Greenberg, had isolated itself:

Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relatives and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point.61

83

Of course this function of the avant-garde artist was not possible in totalitarian states such as Russia, Italy and Germany, where avant-garde art was vetoed by terror: but in its isolation, the avant-garde – which had come to represent all of quality remaining in culture

– was perceived to have become an international phenomenon. So here we have an isolation, not on national, religious, or even class and cult lines: but simply on lines of quality. Purists, for Greenberg, made ‘extravagant claims for art, because usually they value it much more than any one else does’ – a point emphasised by the opening line: ‘The dogmatism and intransigence of the “non-objective” or “abstract” purists of painting today cannot be dismissed as symptoms merely of a cultist attitude towards art’, which instantly removes the avant-garde from the clutches of devious politics.62

For Greenberg, ‘art for art’s sake’ and ‘pure poetry’ (wherein, as qoted previously, ‘subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague’) had defined their place against mass culture.63 The avant-garde, for Greenberg, was incompatible with the

‘mechanical’ formulaic condition of kitsch with its ‘faked sensations’.64 Elitist and devoid of subject matter, the finer arts could not now be usurped for totalitarian ends. This move of

Greenberg’s can be seen to echo the sentiments in Trotsky’s ‘Art and Politics’ of 1938, wherein he states that: ‘Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity’.65 Art could only become a ‘strong ally of the revolution’ insofar as it remained ‘faithful to itself’.66 In a subsequent letter of the same year, Trotsky maintained that: ‘The struggle for revolutionary ideas in art must begin once again with artistic truth… in terms of the immutable faith of the artist in his own inner self’ (Trotsky’s italics).67 The nature of true revolutionary art was that it sought an outlet from ‘intolerable 84

social suffocation’, rejected orders from outside, and found its salvation from within; a sentiment which can be seen to have been taken up by Greenberg in that ‘the first and most important item’ on the agenda of the avant-garde was ‘an escape from ideas, which were infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society.’68

By Trotsky’s account, bourgeois society had ‘showed its strength through long periods of history’ through a combination of ‘repression and encouragement, boycott and flattery’, enabling it to ‘control and assimilate every “rebel” movement in art and raise it to the level of official “recognition”’.69 This naturally resulted in an academicism against which new waves of avant-gardists would revolt, only to be themselves assimilated with time. Echoing this account, Greenberg, in recognition of the economic stranglehold of ‘an elite among the ruling class’ (the bourgeoisie), noted in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ that the avant-garde had always been attached to that which it had ‘assumed itself to be cut off… an umbilical cord of gold’.70

In ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, he skirts the issue of patronage (except historically) by raising his argument to a purely formal level. As to the question of why he does this, the answer is not hard to find. As noted above, the ‘Statement of the L.C.F.S.’ (to which, it will be remembered, Greenberg was a signatory) had condemned Government censorship for crippling WPA arts projects. ‘Covert sabotage’ was seen as hindering ‘the publication of work by independent and revolutionary writers’.71 These conditions were seen to be ‘a challenge to independent intellectuals’, yet it was felt that ‘no existing cultural organisation’ was ready ‘fully to meet the challenge’.72 In America, cultural circles, while 85

ostensibly combatting the letter of fascism were perceived as capitulating to its spirit – and the ‘umbilical cord’ by which the avant-garde was trying to survive was government rather than bourgeois controlled.

Greenberg had suggested the controlling elite to be the bourgeoisie, when in fact he knew that control was more insidious than that, something (if the claims of the LCFS were to be believed, which they probably were) bordering on the totalitarian. In raising his argument to the level of the formal (in depoliticizing the function of the avant-garde) he left the avant-garde free to indulge in ‘art for art’s sake’ free from government interference, at least in theory. And here we look to ‘Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’, published in Partisan

Review in 1938, ostensibly written by André Breton and Diego Rivera, but said to have been co-authored by Trotsky. Denigrating the regimes of Hitler (which had ‘rid Germany of all those artists whose work expressed the slightest sympathy for liberty’) and Stalin

(which, through ‘working through the so-called “cultural” organizations’ it controlled in other countries was seen to be spreading over the entire world ‘a deep twilight hostile to every sort of spiritual value’), Breton and Rivera called for the ‘independence of art – for the revolution’ and the ‘revolution – for the complete liberation of art’.73 In his personal

‘revolution’, Greenberg had seemingly taken this at face value.

What Trotsky was for, however, was an art (such as Rivera’s) which subjectively assimilated the social content of the revolution. This was not ‘socialist realism’, for that was the style of ‘official Soviet painting’. But neither was it the kind of art Greenberg had in mind.74 Trotsky, then, had not provided Greenberg with a model for revolutionary art; 86

but what he had provided was a challenge, for he had said that art suffered most from ‘the decline and decay of bourgeois society’ and that the finding of a way out of this ‘impasse’ through art itself was ‘impossible’.75 Contrary to Trotsky’s assertion of this impossibility,

Greenberg had found a way out through the championing of abstraction – an independent art, liberated from the necessity for overt subject matter, and hence liberated from politics entirely. This depoliticization of the avant-garde can thus be seen as a revolutionary move, concomitant with Breton’s and Rivera’s stated aims, and, as such, could be taken as being radically political in nature. As Greenberg was to write in 1960:

Abstract art was the main issue among the painters I knew in the late thirties. Radical politics was on many people’s minds, but for these particular artists Social Realism was as dead as the American scene. (Though that is not all, by far, that there was to politics in art in those years; some day it will have to be told how “anti-Stalinism”, which started out more or less as “Trotskyism”, turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.) (Greenberg’s parentheses)76

It is quite clear when looking at the evidence precisely how Trotskyism did turn into art for art’s sake (at least on paper). What Greenberg had done was, firstly, to position the avant- garde in historical relation to its support base and, subsequently, to position it in historical relation to the inevitability of its form, and in so doing to relieve it of the external pressures which would force it, against its will, away from this inevitability. Despite everything, the natural course of culture could, in some small way, remain alive. For Greenberg, the avant- garde was now, paradoxically, performing a rear-guard action of working to rule – even though that rule was its own: the rule which stated that the problems of painting were ‘first and foremost problems of the medium’, and that purity in art consisted in ‘the willing acceptance… of the limitations of the medium of the specific art.’77 87

What Greenberg had introduced into his argument, in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ was the concept that the history of avant-garde painting was that of ‘a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium’, a concept which, as we have seen, dates back to 1931. It is a concept, moreover, which implied a sense of measure within the avant-garde, not against the norms of society, but against itself.78 In May of 1938, William Phillips wrote a rather cynical article about Thomas Mann called ‘Humanism in Exile’. Humanism, said Phillips, had:

… long been the official uniform of the bourgeoisie; and in these times of stress, when it can maintain its existence only through ever greater oppression of other classes, the bourgeoisie appropriates the full rhetoric of idealism.79

However, what we find in this article is a quotation from Mann that:

Measure… is light, the music of creation and the creative world. It means also what is achieved, what is wrested from chaos: it is the anti-barbaric, the triumph of the human… It abhors the mediocre, as it abhors the trivial, the tasteless, and the low despicable cliché; for it is pure quality, it stands for the unsatisfied, insatiable demand.80

The sentiments in this quotation could be seen to echo directly Greenberg’s traversal from

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ to ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, whereby we are taken from ‘the brutality and double-darkness’ of kitsch in the hands Nazism and Stalinism to the measured, enlightened, almost halcyon environment of purism.81 Although the writers for

Partisan Review were basically of the same political persuasion, they did not always agree on specifics. Despite Phillips’s suggestion that Mann’s antifascism rested its hopes on the very source of fascism, Greenberg seems to have been influenced in some way by Mann’s 88

humanism (particularly since he himself had said that Mann ‘deals with important questions explicitly’)82 in that he had taken the avant-garde out of the chaos and barbarism to which the lesser arts had fallen foul and given unto it a sense of itself, pure and simple.

This was the triumph of the individual artist, the human, over the barbarism of mass control. Humanism, then, as we shall also see later when the influence of Irving Babbitt is addressed, was a defining factor in the formulation of Greenberg’s ideas.

The tasteless, and the low and despicable cliché which so readily lent themselves to other uses had now been removed from the equation, leaving only that of quality against which the avant-garde must judge itself. This argument for the avant-garde’s specialization of itself was flagged in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ with the comment that its best artists were artists’ artists, and its best poets, poets’ poets.83 Even at the early stage of writing this first essay, Greenberg was seeking to differentiate between the avant-garde and kitsch in order to preserve the avant-garde from succumbing to barbarism (perceived as ‘gaining ground so fast in a capitalist society’).84 And the fight against barbarism seems to have been a common goal for the Partisan Review circle, as evidenced by the editorial for Winter 1939, the issue prior to the publication of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, which saw fascism as ‘no less than the latent barbarism of our declining social system coming into the open.’85

From all of this we can deduce that Greenberg was not only speaking to an international audience in that the readership of Partisan Review spanned two continents, but also speaking in terms of the revolutionary language of Trotskyism – and, moreover, that all along he was taking a political stand against the forces of barbarism both at home and 89

abroad. This view is thrown into sharper focus when we look to the influence of Bertolt

Brecht and T. S. Eliot.

Brechtian, Eliotic Trotskyism

Describing Greenberg’s stance, first in relation to his questions in an interview with Ignazio

Silone, and then in relation to ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, ‘the cadencies [sic] shifting line by line from “Socialism or Barbarism” to “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca”’,86

T. J. Clark introduces us to the much-used phrase of ‘Eliotic Trotskyism’.87 Yet Clark never fully explains himself in this regard except in saying that Greenberg’s essay provided a

‘serious and grim picture of culture under capitalism’,88 finding its ‘proper echoes in Eliot,

Trotsky… and Brecht.’89 Clark might have expanded his description to read ‘Brechtian,

Eliotic Trotskyism’. Given that we have seen how Trotsky influenced Greenberg, what might this phrase mean in relation to Brecht and Eliot?

Michael Fried, in his response to Clark’s essay, said that Clark ‘provides no specific examples for his central argument’ except, in the case of Eliot, in a footnote at the request of the editor wherein he quotes from Eliot the lines: ‘shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion.’, lines which, for Fried, are irrelevant to

Clark’s discussion.90 And Fried’s comments hold almost as true for Brecht; for when he is mentioned it is partly to introduce him as the ‘most doctrinaire’ example of an art which says that we ‘live in a period of cultural decline’, when the set of meanings of the

‘cultivated classes… is fitfully contested by those who stand to gain from their collapse’.91

Prior to which Clark notes that Brecht’s example was ‘especially vivid for Greenberg in the 90

years around 1940’, and then ventures that he represented a ‘powerful counterexample to all the critic wished to see as the main line of avant-garde activity: standing for active engagement in the ideological struggle, not detachment from it.’92 Yet, as has so far been demonstrated, Greenberg, influenced by Trotsky, in pitting the avant-garde against the reactionary kitsch and in portraying avant-garde practice as a revolutionary act, had himself stood for active engagement in the ideological struggle which was the maintenance of a semblance of culture under the extreme stress of oppression on all fronts. Thus Brecht could not be seen as providing a counter-example, but rather an example.

To Greenberg’s way of thinking, Brecht’s portrayal of the underworld was that it was ‘the truest and frankest expression of the society whose hypocritical rules it disregards’: the object of the novel’s attack being ‘capitalist society in the specific’ – the underworld being no longer ‘cut off cleanly from the remainder of society as its illegal expression’, but rather merging with it ‘imperceptibly behind the veil of public hypocrisy.’93 In this nether world

MacHeath is a ‘grim racketeer who operates a chain of stores with stolen goods and succeeds so well in crushing competition that he is able to force his way into respectable financial institutions and pose as a pillar of society.’ 94 All of which could be taken as a metaphor not only for the thuggery of totalitarian rule overseas, but also for the barbarism of life under reactionary late capitalism – topics which, as we have seen, were central to the thinking of the Partisan Review circle at that time. And, as we have also seen, Nazism was a not entirely latent force lurking imperceptibly behind the public veil of hypocrisy of the

American reactionary right.

91

If Greenberg’s description of Brecht’s portrayal of the London underworld and the ‘grim racketeer’, MacHeath, could, as suggested, be taken as a metaphor for overseas thuggery and capitalist barbarism, then so too could it be taken as synonymous, in many respects, with kitsch. MacHeath is a spiv. Kitsch is also essentially spiv-like. Not only is it

‘essentially its own salesman’, but the source of its profits is, like the goods pushed by

MacHeath, the stolen article: the ‘debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture.’95 Kitsch then, like MacHeath, is a fraudster, dealing in the stolen forms of the genuine; borrowing, for its own ends, the ‘devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb’ of ‘a fully matured cultural tradition’.96 Like Brecht’s underworld (the ‘shadowy transitional milieu peopled by lumpenproletariat, racketeers, shady speculators, coney-catchers, future criminals, beggars’ etc.),97 and like the implications of a character such as MacHeath, kitsch is ‘the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.’98

What seems to have happened here, in this transposition brought about by the anthropomorphism of what is essentially a phenomenon or thing, is that Greenberg has invested in kitsch the qualities of a type, which is itself a metaphor for the political conditions then prevailing. Through Macdonald, as we have seen, he had learned that the purpose of the Russian cinematic use of effects was to affect the audience at the subliminal level – and it is at this level that the presence of kitsch makes itself felt in ‘Towards a

Newer Laocoon’. If kitsch is the stated opposite of the avant-garde in ‘Avant-Garde and

Kitsch’ it is, of necessity, its unstated opposite in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ – there in essence because we have read the former essay. Academicism, like MacHeath and kitsch, is exploitative in the sense that it stemmed from a history of Western painting which had 92

always been biased towards a ‘realism’ that tried to ‘achieve allusions by overpowering the medium’ and was ‘more interested in exploiting the practical meanings of objects than in savoring their appearance’.99

The subject of capitalism, while stated in the Brecht review and implicated in the formation of kitsch, is not evident in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’. When we come to ‘An American

View’, however, we find that Greenberg has returned to this subject, to the expedient politics of those who would rather gamble with defeat at the hands of Hitler than to proclaim an anti-fascist crusade. Capitalism here, by suggestion, is veering dangerously close to the fascism that the Western democracies were supposedly at war to conquer.

Social and economic democracy, mass participation in the guidance of the nation and integral freedom of speech are here portrayed as equally antithetical to capitalism as to fascism. Here we see that Greenberg’s train of thought, from his comment in the Brecht review that London during the Boer War ‘might just as well be capitalism among the

Yahoos’, to his portrayal of kitsch as a product of the Industrial Revolution and equally as aligned with capitalism as with fascism, has not only been sustained, but extended to directly accuse those who are seen as responsible for the political status quo in the so-called free world.100 Caught in the loop of this clearly evident train of thought, one could say that

‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, written just a month prior to ‘An American View’, latently expresses the subject of capitalism and its evils in that, again, the avant-garde’s true opposite is kitsch of which academicism is a subsidiary. And kitsch is itself child of both capitalism and totalitarianism.

93

It is through this link between capitalism and totalitarianism in both ‘Avant-Garde and

Kitsch’ and ‘An American View’ that, as we have seen, the political influence of the

Partisan Review circle comes into play. That politics is ever-present in Greenberg’s thoughts around this time tends to confirm the premise that the motivation for writing both

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ and ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ was political in intent – the one essay being the natural successor to the other.

Returning now to Clark, problematic for him are Greenberg’s notion of art becoming an independent source of value, his reading of ‘medium’ in avant-garde art, and his overlooking or belittling of aspects of avant-garde practice which Clark believes to be

‘bound up’ with those Greenberg ‘sees as paramount’.101 What Clark means here are the

‘practices of negation in modernist art’ which seem to him to be ‘the very form of the practices of purity (the recognition and enactments of medium) which Greenberg extols’.102

Clark’s approach to these problems is to suggest that it was the interplay of the values of art and the values of life which made the distinction between them an active and possible one: yet he does not acknowledge that, for Greenberg, it was the very interplay between art and the values of life (as they were then) which made for the negation of the avant-garde, the subtraction of itself from the bourgeois/reactionary stranglehold the only possible solution.

Eliot’s lines now take on some significance in that they can be seen to describe the motionless Alexandrianism to which the avant-garde was opposed and from which it had been subtracted.

94

Eliot had been of interest for some years not only generally within the Partisan Review circle, but also (as we saw in Chapter Two) to Greenberg personally. In terms of Eliot’s poetry, what D.E.S. Maxwell wrote could well be applied to Greenberg’s efforts with

‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’ and ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’:

The alignment of past and present, of reality and myth, is his way of ‘controlling, ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’. In this sense past and present are of equal importance.103

What Greenberg had done in separating the avant-garde from the rest of culture, yet placing it within its own specific history, was not only to give shape and significance to those efforts which under totalitarianism had become increasingly futile, but also to give the results of those efforts, that is the avant-garde arts (which, by nature, under totalitarian rule, were seen to be anarchic) their own inalienable self-governing framework.

Despite Greenberg’s early interest in Eliot, a new depth of appreciation is apparent in the way he uses him several times in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ to exemplify that which is of value in culture – a depth of appreciation possibly related to his involvement with Partisan

Review. According to Bradford Collins, the single work of Eliot’s which was most influential to the Partisan Review circle, and hence to Greenberg, was not his poetry, but his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’.104 This tallies with Donald Kuspit’s opinion that The Sacred Wood, from which this essay came, had helped to shape Greenberg’s ideas.

Although it is doubtful that Eliot, rather than Kant, was responsible for Greenberg’s understanding of modernist self-criticism, it could well be that Eliot’s understanding of history, particularly during these troubled times, would have augmented Greenberg’s long- 95

standing feeling for history. This feeling for history, which first demonstrated itself publicly in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ and ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ in relation to the arts and politics, was later to do the same in relation to his understanding of Jewish history

– an understanding which ranged from Halachic history dating back to the Old Testament, to the position of Jews in nineteenth century Eastern Europe, and specifically (through his interest in Franz Kafka) to the Jewry of Prague. And it was precisely this sense of history, transferred to the avant-garde, which, from the first, set the avant-garde firmly within its own international, classless tradition.

And here we see how Eliot would have augmented this, for central to his argument in

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is the concept of multi-layers of history residing in the work of each individual. The poet (for which we might also read ‘artist’) cannot operate on the single plane of the present alone but requires a historical sense which ‘involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.’ 105 This historical sense compelled a person to write:

… not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense… is what makes a writer traditional.106

For Eliot, the poet’s or artist’s significance resided in his ‘appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.’107 He or she must be set, ‘for contrast and comparison, among the dead.’108 Aligned with the poet’s placement within a recent and distant past, and a far and near geography, is the concept that he has not ‘a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and 96

experiences combine in unexpected ways.’109 This impersonal reference back to the medium is addressed in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, wherein there is:

… a common effort in each of the arts to expand the expressive resources of the medium, not in order to express ideas and notions, but to express with greater immediacy sensations, the irreducible elements of experience.110

This notion then provides a counterargument for Greenberg’s theory that, firstly, the avant- garde, following this path in ‘its attempt to escape from “literature” had set out to treble the confusion of the arts by having them imitate every other art except literature’, and, secondly, that the way out of this impasse was to have purism, through willingly accepting the ‘limitations of the medium of the specific art’, achieve a ‘purity and radical delimitation of their fields of activity for which there [was] no previous example in the history of culture.’111

Yet still the avant-garde was rooted in history, if only its own, that is: the progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium and the move toward flatness through the progressive destruction of realistic pictorial space. Where Greenberg does refer to history per se, it is in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, and then to the history of culture in decline. In his reference back to ancient Byzantium and Alexandria using lines quoted from Yeats (‘Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence.’) Greenberg takes us back, by insinuation, to a time of the ‘imitation of imitating’ which paralleled the present.112 The end of the Byzantine empire could then be seen to stand for the barbarism and disintegration of society which, cyclically, was the natural result of that society’s descent into decadence: a decadence spelled out for Greenberg in Brecht’s Beggar’s Opera 97

wherein the distinctions between the murky underworld and the society in which it operates are no longer clear cut. In this, as we have seen, Greenberg is making similar parallels between history and the present (decadent London of the Boer War period and modern

America) as he is to those between the end of the Byzantine empire and modern America in

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. Again, we see the ‘alignment of past and present’ which

Maxwell saw in the work of Eliot and which Eliot himself had suggested in his observation that a man must write ‘with a feeling of the whole of history’ etc.

Here too there are shades of Oswald Spengler, whom Greenberg had ‘taken seriously’ from as early as 1932; yet Greenberg does not share Spengler’s anti-modernist vision nor his pessimism of the condition of modern art.113 By 1926 Spengler had come to the ‘bitter conclusion’ that it was ‘all irretrievably over with the arts of form of the West.’114 For him, the ‘whole of painting and music’ in Europe at that time lacked intelligence, taste, character and capacity; whereas for Greenberg, society might have been disintegrating all around but in its midst was the avant-garde, anthropomorphically raising itself from the ashes to preserve the last shreds of culture remaining in an almost hopelessly decadent, reactionary world.115 This anthropomorphism could thus be seen as Greenberg’s method of detachment of the personal as a means of making the avant-garde less easy pickings for fascism.

Individuals could be picked off one by one for indoctrination or extradition, but an insidiously widespread movement, such as an avant-garde fortified by an imperative which came from history, did not so readily lend itself to such treatment – for this imperative suggested that art itself preserved its own values above and beyond those of politics.

98

The identification with such a movement as Greenberg was proposing would inevitably stengthen the resolve of its individual, disparate and isolated artists to resist the powers of reaction: an astute move on the part of Greenberg, but one which would cause Clark to ask the ‘Wittgensteinian’ question:

What would it be like, exactly, for art to possess its own values? Not just to have… a set of distinctive effects and procedures but to have them be, or provide, the standards by which the effects and procedures are held to be of worth? (Clark’s italics) 116

Inherent in this question (or questions) seems to be an insufficient sympathy with the politics of the time and with Greenberg’s purpose in writing these essays. It seems to deny the sheer ambition underlying Greenberg’s motivation for writing them. When he said, in

1932, that to ‘be the understanding of an age is a grand mission’, he might just as well have been writing of himself, as also with his statement, in the opening of ‘Towards a Newer

Laocoon’ that purists ‘make extravagant claims for art, because usually they value it much more than anyone else does.’117 He was a purist, pure and simple, making extravagant claims for art, and on a grand mission to rescue the best of art from external control.

And so we see that where Trotsky and company had provided Greenberg with the concept of a revolutionary art which was true only unto itself (which in so being was furthering the cause of revolution), Brecht had provided a sinister vision of decadence under late capitalism – one which could be equated directly with a similar decadence under Nazism.

Eliot, compounding Greenberg’s own sense of history, provided for him a paradigm for the historical setting of both essays, for the imbuing of his argument with historical allusion, and for the medium as being not only a discrete entity possessing its own expressive 99

resources, but also for its being a repository of all the history which had gone before to make it so; inherent in which is the fact that that history, in spreading its tentacles world- wide, had now (like Nazism, yet differently) crossed the Atlantic. For Greenberg, if

America was now a repository for reactionary, conservative politics, it was now also the repository for modernist abstract art – an art which was seen to be under threat in the rest of the world.

And this is where Ignazio Silone comes in, for he, more than Brecht, can be seen to have shaped Greenberg’s vision of the sheer malignancy underlying modern decadent society at that time. Going beyond Trotsky, it was Silone who furnished Greenberg with the model of the revolutionary artist as being not only an independent practitioner, but also the mouthpiece of a new and ideal state.

Ignazio Silone

Silone, an Italian anti-fascist novelist then living in exile in Switzerland, was hailed by

Partisan Review as ‘the most famous literary exile from fascist Italy.’118 The two basic themes of his work were fascism and propaganda. We can ascertain from a 1936 review by

James T. Farrell that Silone’s first novel Fontarama dealt with ‘the Fontaramans, their humor, their interests, their economic and social position, and behind this, with the unfolding of how Fascism works as a process.’119 Farrell’s review was followed later that year with an excerpt from Silone’s follow-up novel Bread and Wine, in which the workings and processes of propaganda were again discussed.120 Lionel Abel’s subsequent review in late 1937 noted that, in the latter novel, Italy had ‘been transformed into the land of 100

propaganda’ where ‘the poison of servility flows in everyone’s blood’ (a sentiment echoed later in Breton’s and Rivera’s ‘Towards a New Revolutionary Art’ in which, in the Third

Reich, workers and artists were seen to be reduced to ‘the status of domestic servants of the regime’).121 In the Fall of 1938, Partisan Review published a chapter from Silone’s soon to be published The School for Dictators, and here the editor’s note is worth quoting at length, for it amply outlines the excerpt’s content, and introduces two of the three main characters of the book:122

This chapter is headed: ‘On Fascist mythology, its obscurities, its fetishes, and its idols, and on the modern technique of hypnotizing and subduing the masses’. It must be explained that Mr. W. is an American fascist politician who aspires to become ‘the future dictator of the United States’. He is traveling through Europe, accompanied by his chief brain-truster, Professor Pickup, in order to learn from German and Italian experience how to seize power.123

In Europe this happy pair meet up with Thomas the Cynic, who fills them in on fascist ideology and the methods and processes of propaganda. In response to Mr W.’s concern that propaganda could not be successful in a country, like America, without a historical tradition such as Italy’s dating back to Roman times, Thomas the Cynic encourages him to put his trust ‘in mankind’s possible return to barbarism’, for even ‘without a great historical tradition behind them’, the masses could ‘easily return to barbarism with the potent aid of war or famine.’124 Return to barbarism of one form or another was obviously a concern for the Partisan Review circle, as the last section of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ had made quite clear. The processes of propaganda, as outlined by Thomas the Cynic (in that they necessitated the pre-existence of a public concept of some form of historical tradition, be it mythologised or otherwise) could well be seen to parallel the processes by which kitsch operated, appealing (like the emotive effects of Soviet cinema) equally to the most 101

primeval of instincts and basic of sensibilities. With reference to America, Thomas the

Cynic states that:

Physical insecurity and uncertainty about livelihood, if protracted for years, lead even the most normal, most cultured, best-educated men back into a state of primitive anxiety… That… is the state of grace in which fascists are formed.125

To which Professor Pickup responds that the essence of fascism is in its idea, yet ‘Mass- man is the brute force which the fascist idea uses in order to triumph’.126

Closely paralleling Greenberg’s depiction of kitsch as a market-driven phenomenon,

Thomas the Cynic says that the ‘symbols and fetishes of the new idolatry… belong to the market-place; the eagles, the swastikas, the lictor’s fasces, and the banners…’.127 Further to which he tells Professor Pickup that fascist fetishism and mythology in Germany and Italy were only effective because of the ‘nervousness and discouragement to which the masses were reduced as a consequence of the war, the economic crisis, and the failure of the

Socialist attempts at revolution’128 – conditions, therefore, except for the Socialist attempt at revolution, closely paralleling those in America – which, for Mr. W., was ‘Fascism’s

Promised Land’.129 As a result of the Depression, then, the American masses, as their counterparts in Germany had been some years previously, were ripe for fascist indoctrination.

Mass man, mass taste, propaganda, swastikas, banners. It is almost possible to hear

Greenberg’s brain in action as he read this chapter (or perhaps even the entire novel which had lifted sizeable chunks from Mein Kampf to demonstrate the reasoning behind fascist 102

propaganda). Six months after its publication he was in Switzerland interviewing Silone.

And here the questions Greenberg asks are as interesting as the replies, for they clearly demonstrate his line of thought at that time. ‘What’, he asks, ‘in the light of their relations to political parties, do you think should be the role of revolutionary writers in the present situation?’ 130 ‘What is your opinion of contemporary left-wing literature?’131 ‘Have you read Trotsky’s pamphlet , Their Morals and Ours? What do you think of it?’132

Clearly by now Greenberg, as he considered writing ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, was also considering himself to be amongst the ranks of revolutionary writers. Perhaps the most pertinent of Silone’s replies, in relation to ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, was that socialism does not need to lie in order to give itself a morality, its ‘moral content’ lying in its

‘insistence that man comes before nature and industrial technique, and in its demand for a society where the primacy of the human shall be assured.’133 When this is viewed against the dehumanising effects of the Industrial Revolution, commercialism and fascism, and the movement of abstract art away from the imitation of nature, away from the kitsch techniques of industrialism, it is possible to see strands of Greenberg’s argument taking shape.

According to Susan Noyes Platt, what Silone offered Greenberg was the concept of a ‘third front’ (‘politically independent, and to which writers would belong’, and which ‘must be kept pure as an ideal’), and the concept of the work of art as ‘beautiful, quite apart from the intentions of the artist’.134 Aside from this, Silone’s language, ‘courage’, ‘idealism’, ‘risk’,

‘beauty’, ‘easily found its way into Greenberg’s youthful aesthetic and political 103

vocabulary.’135 Whilst Platt’s is probably the most detailed assessment of Silone’s influence on Greenberg to date, what is problematic is that she (besides failing to give

Greenberg, who had studied literature and written for many years prior to joining Partisan

Review, due credit for choosing his own vocabulary) does not touch on The School for

Dictators at all, but merely on the interview: and nor does she adequately explain the relevance of the artist to the ‘third front’, or the context of Silone’s discussion of art.

On reading Greenberg’s interview with Silone, what becomes apparent is that it wasn’t so much that the writer could ‘belong’ to this third front, but more that the ‘revolutionary’ writer was to be its ‘herald’ and representative.136 The third front itself was an ideal state somewhere between the conservatives (i.e. ‘the democracies and other partisans of collective security’) and the ‘revisionists or fascists’.137 For Silone, real peace depended upon the ‘rapidity’ with which that third front was created.138 The essential similarities between the right wing democracies and fascist dictatorships were, as we know, already of some concern to the Partisan Review circle, as were conditions in America paralleling those in pre-fascist Germany (i.e. economic decline, and government dictatorship of the arts). If one then looks at Greenberg as perceiving himself to be a herald and representative of this third front, it is then possible to read ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (in its pitting of the avant-garde against the worst in culture both in America and overseas) as being his effort to analyse and denote, culturally, what the avant-garde wasn’t in order to place what it was within the parameters of Silone’s third front. ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ could then be read as the extraction of this (albeit cultural) third front for the purpose of placing the avant-garde firmly, as has been previously discussed, outside of the confines of external 104

interference – a position which had been called for by Trotsky, Breton and Rivera in their cry for a free revolutionary art, an art which was true to itself and took no orders. Politics, then, was a force in both essays.

Silone’s comment that a ‘work of art is thus beautiful quite apart from the intentions of the artist’139 (taken out of context by Platt to suggest that it alone was influential on

Greenberg)140 was, in fact, in answer to Greenberg’s question, ‘Have you read Trotsky’s pamphlet, Their Morals and Ours?’ In reply, what Silone was attempting to do was to explain the relationships between ethics and morals and a work of art and its beauty. For

Silone, a work of art is ‘beautiful quite apart from the intentions of the artist’ because it

‘retains its beauty even after the utilitarian ends it was designed to serve have become obsolete.’141 Being utilitarian was ‘not morality’ but was ‘a theory which is helpful in criticising the decadence of the bourgeois order, but… entirely inadequate for the construction of a new society.’142 Morals, for Silone, had to ‘be considered in relation to the ethical ideal which they embody’.143 By taking the moral and aesthetic high ground (that is, a position which has often been described as elitist) in his argument, by constructing a concept of an avant-garde that was only answerable to itself and its medium, Greenberg was able to divest the arts of utilitarian necessity thereby allowing them to embody a purely ethical ideal devoid of politics in general, but specifically of the kind of politics which was dragging civilization into various forms of barbarism. In his comparisons between T. S.

Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, and a Braque painting and a Saturday Evening Post cover,

Greenberg can be seen to have tipped the fascist order on its head, for as Thomas the Cynic says, in The School for Dictators: 105

There is a fascist kind of eloquence, false and artificial (which) when used upon the masses who have known war and prolonged unemployment… is infinitely more effective than the old ‘operatic’ eloquence of Gambetta, Jaures, Lassalle [etc.]. It is superior to the old in the way in which Al Jolson is superior to Caruso. Fascist eloquence is reinforced by the technique of fascist propaganda…144

In Greenberg’s order, the finer arts of the avant-garde now lay safe ‘each within its

“legitimate” boundaries’:145 safe, that is (in one way of reading Greenberg’s intention), from their utilization as propaganda: not safe from the masses who Platt implies Greenberg

(being ‘more elitist than either Trotsky or Silone’) to have ‘disdained’.146 What Greenberg actually said in this regard was that the urban masses, though losing ‘their taste for the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and discovering a new capacity for boredom’, had not won ‘the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the city’s traditional culture’.147 In this, Greenberg was demonstrating an element of sympathy for the masses and their taste.

What he was railing against was that which was being cynically presented to the masses for their consumption, and of this he was quite contemptuous. ‘There has always been’, he said:

… on one side the minority of the powerful – and therefore the cultivated – and on the other the great mass of the exploited and poor – and therefore the ignorant. Formal culture has always belonged to the first, while the last have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary culture, or kitsch.148

And it was precisely what they had had, of necessity, to content themselves with which was of concern, and not the taste which, in its ignorance, was being exploited. After all, how could someone who looked to socialism ‘simply for the preservation of whatever living 106

culture we have right now’, be seen to be utterly disdaining mass taste?149 This call to socialism, as versus its opposite fascism and ultra-conservatism, might be seen as

Greenberg’s attempt to herald the third front, and his argument in ‘Towards a Newer

Laocoon’ might be seen to represent that third front in the realm of art, in its ‘ideal state’. If art, for Trotsky, had suffered most from the decline and decay of bourgeois society, its eventual rotting away an inevitability, then Greenberg, through Silone, can be seen to have found a remedy. If only in this sense alone, Greenberg’s project can be seen to have been highly ambitious and revolutionary in its aims.

To further determine why Silone’s views would have influenced Greenberg, we have only to look to the propagandist potential of the American mass media. It is only in understanding this potential, and the actual impact of the mass media on Greenberg, that the full impact of Silone’s grimly humorous picture becomes apparent.

Greenberg, an ardent movie goer despite his disavowal of kitsch, and who had obviously read the New Yorker to be able to discuss its conversion and watering down of ‘a great deal of avant-garde material for its own uses’,150 would have been well aware of the actual and potential propagandist uses of the American (as opposed to foreign) mass media, particularly since movies at that time came as a package with cartoons and newsreels.

Unlike feature movies which took longer to produce, cartoons and newsreels could be adapted rapidly to serve the most recent ends. Whilst Greenberg does not precisely address the propagandist potential of American kitsch, he does say that kitsch (‘deceptive’, virulent and irresistably attractive)151 was the culture of the masses in Germany, Italy and Russia, as 107

it was ‘everywhere else’.152 And he says this before going on to state, later in the essay, that

‘kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects’.153 It was, then, the same kitsch, the same masses, but different governments – and, as we have seen, the American government at that time was perceived to be bordering on the totalitarian.

Beyond this, we do get an inkling in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ that it is precisely this potential of which he is talking, in that kitsch was a market-driven phenomenon arising out of the pressure put on society by the bored urban masses to provide them with a new cultural commodity ‘fit for their own consumption’.154 It was directly in response to this pressure that Goebbels and Mussolini had, against their own personal tastes, dropped their allegiance to the avant-garde in favour of the taste of the masses. We also, from the Harold

Letters, get an inkling of Greenberg’s awareness of the sheer seductive power of the mass media when, in 1938, he recounts hearing Orson Welles’s Invasion from Mars broadcast – the version of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds which, in its realism, delivered as a news broadcast, panicked half a nation:

The radio broadcast…affected me. I heard the last half of it, and was therefore able to feel the humor of the thing better than otherwise. But the panic, with its cause, is fast food for fancy. I mean it, serious fancy. The combination was so perfect. It is something not to be passed over quickly. We live in momentous times, when the gap between reality and the dream is once more closing, when the things we hope and fear actually happen. I could explain myself better, but I’m satisfied to agree with everybody that we live in momentous times.155

This ‘fast food for fancy’ served up as a serious enterprise connotes precisely the dangers underlying the facility of kitsch to close the ‘gap between reality and the dream’. For Gillo 108

Dorfles, kitsch denotes a realm in which the ‘visions and dreams, the indistinct and vague ocean of our imaginary activity are enslaved by new mechanical methods of transmission and communication the moment they become their prey.’156 Kitsch, then, is not simply ‘bad taste’ as it is so often presented to be. It, like the avant-garde, has a life of its own. Where, however, the avant-garde operates from within itself purely for its own ends, kitsch insidiously spreads its tentacles far and wide. Using as its raw material ‘the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, kitsch is ‘mechanical and operates by formulas’; it ‘changes according to style, but remains always the same’; it is ‘the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times’, and it ‘pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time’ – fast food.157 Borrowing ‘devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb [and] themes’ from a ‘fully matured cultural tradition’, kitsch ‘converts them into a system, and discards the rest.’158 Thus kitsch, in its capacity for rapid, expedient change and in its almost magical ability to take on ever newer forms, becomes the perfect tool for the hypnotism of the masses into complete submission: the perfect tool for adjusting pre-existing myths to suit newer ends. Eagles and swastikas, leftovers from previous eras, are again taken up to represent the rise of newer, stronger, powers. Indeed, much of the paraphernalia attached to Nazism can, in its false mythologizing, be designated kitsch.

Further to the above, America did have a very real history of propagandizing which seems to have emanated, in an official capacity, in First World War newsreels. In an unofficial capacity it had emanated in magazines and cartoons, which had, for example, sent-up Hitler since at least 1923 and 1933 respectively. In 1923 American Monthly, asking the question 109

‘What does Hitler Look Like’, responded with ‘an array of Hitlers: fat Hitlers, thin Hitlers, blond Hitlers, bald Hitlers, bearded Hitlers, every Hitler but the actual Hitler’.159 In 1933

Hitler first appeared in a Warner Brothers cartoon chasing Jimmy Durante with an axe.160

Radio, too, had covered Hitler’s march to Vienna in 1938 – and news, in its obvious bias, has always been a form of propaganda.161

To recap to this point, what we have seen is that Greenberg was, in his own way, reacting to the forces of barbarism – forces which were clearly perceived by the Partisan Review circle as not being simply confined to totalitarian regimes overseas. American society was potentially no less barbaric and prone to the threat of fascism than any other nation, not least because fascism had, at least by February 1939, already reared its head in the U.S.A. at the Nazi meeting in Madison Square Garden. The conditions in America, at that time, were certainly seen, in many respects, to resemble those in pre-Nazi Germany. Kitsch, then, could be put to precisely the same purpose in America as it had been in totalitarian states.

This fact, though unstated directly in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, is inherent in Greenberg’s argument precisely because he uses as his final illustration for the uses of kitsch the examples of Goering, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.

We have also seen how, through articles in Partisan Review, Greenberg was educated in current politics – politics which suggested that the reactionary right was already on the ascendant in America. His alignment with the magazine dictated that he was already anti-

Communist, anti-fascist and pro-Trotsky, and that he agreed, at least in essence, with many of the views expressed in the magazine. Thus, while the Partisan Review circle’s influence 110

was considerable, its influence was only possible because Greenberg was already of a similar persuasion, and therefore already half-convinced. Indeed, his receptiveness to the ideas of Silone might well have been facilitated by the fact that, in 1935, he had translated from the German a book called The Brown Network: The Activities of the Nazis in Foreign

Countries – whose title, though the book is out of print, leaves little doubt as to its content.162 And certainly he had a first hand appreciation of the sheer power of the

American mass media and hence of its propagandist potential – a potential foretold not only by Silone, but also apparently by Thomas Mann, who was cited by Harold Rosenberg as saying:

Propaganda promises a total renovation of life. The declaration EVERYTHING MUST BE CHANGED flashed on Berlin electric signs, and the gates to power opened before Hitler. But against these lying promises of utter novelty, the artist… asserts a different principle of change, a law whose characteristic it is that it does not alter without preserving, that it forever combines the new with the old, the original with the traditional.163

If kitsch Nazist propaganda stood for change, and change of the worst kind, then it was clearly up to the artist to preserve whatever was left worth saving in culture. If, for ‘artist’, we might also read ‘writer’, then this idea of the retention of tradition was, as we have seen, fundamental to Eliot’s argument, and, as we shall see, fundamental to that of Irving

Babbitt’s in his plea for a saving remnant of culture. 111

Notes

1 James Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America, Columbia University Press, 1992, 32 2 Idem. 3 Reed quoted in quoted in: Ibid., 33: quoted from John Reed, ‘The Social Revolution in Court’, Liberator, I (September 1918) 4 Ibid., 191 5 Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and its Circle, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1986, 3; Clement Greenberg, ‘The Beggars Opera – After Marx: Review of A Penny for the Poor by Bertolt Brecht’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 3-5 (first published in Partisan Review, Winter 1939); ‘An American View’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 38-41 (first published in Horizon, September 1940) 6 AGK, 21 7 Gilbert, Writers and Partisans, 168 8 Leon Trotsky, ‘Art and Politics’ (letter to the editors dated June 18, 1938), Partisan Review, Vol. V, No. 3, August-September 1938, 4 9 Ibid., 5 10 Gilbert, Writers and Partisans, 159, 186 11 Ibid., 186 12 Philip Rahv, ‘A Season in Heaven’, Partisan Review, Vol. III, No. 5, June 1936, 11 13 Trotsky, ‘Art and Politics’, 7 14 ‘Statement of the L.C.S.F.’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No.4, Summer 1939, 125, 127 15 Ibid., 125 In another article in this same issue, Philip Rahv bemoans the fact that intellectuals were drifting to the right. For him it was an inevitability that ‘the theory of maintaining the cultural heritage by means of supporting our decrepit social system, including the wars it gives rise to, cannot but lead in practice to the same consequences as fascism itself.’ (Philip Rahv, ‘This Quarter: Twilight of the Thirties’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 4, Summer 1939, 4) It is also clear from this article that Rahv does not share Greenberg’s faith in the avant-garde as a thriving movement, noting instead that ‘the younger writers of today, instead of defying, instead of going beyond, are in fact imitating and falling behind their elders.’ There are, says Rahv, ‘still remnants, but no avant-garde movement to speak of exists any longer.’ There was, however, despite this, a small minority which had ‘learned how to resist the reactionary Zeitgeist.’ (p. 5) 16 Dwight Macdonald, ‘This Quarter: War and the Intellectuals: Act Two’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 3, Spring 1939, 3. Bourne is quoted from ‘The War and the Intellectuals’, The Seven Arts, 1917. 17 Ibid., 4 18 Ibid., 11 Macdonald clearly sees the American bourgeoisie as a threatening force when he says:

When they can no longer maintain their dominance under the old forms of parliamentary democracy… then the bourgeoisie will try to freeze fast their rule in the rigid forms of totalitarianism. When and if fascism comes to this country, it will be because the internal contradictions of capitalism have reached a point where they can only be… controlled within its iron hoop. (p. 14)

19 Ibid., 12 20 Idem. 21 Ibid., 14 22 Sidney Hook, ‘The Anatomy of the Popular Front’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 3, Spring 1939, 38 23 Idem. 24 Idem. 25 Ibid., 39 26 Ibid., 43 Ominously, given the direct parallels being made between America and totalitarian states, Hook then says: 112

If a planned economy needs frame-ups, torture, false confessions wrung even from children, purge by murder, and purges of purgers, as oil for its wheels it will be the bloodiest Juggernaut that has ever run amok in human history. To the extent that anyone fails to condemn these practices in Russia where the evidence for their existence is overwhelming, there is no assurance that he will be opposed to them elsewhere. (p. 45) (‘elsewhere’ obviously given to mean America included should things take a turn for the worse)

27 ‘Statement of the L.C.S.F.’, 125 28 AGK, 12 29 Tillim, ‘Criticism and Culture: or Greenberg’s Doubt’, 127 30 Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 224 31 Dwight Macdonald, ‘Soviet Society and Its Cinema’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter 1939, 81 32 Ibid., 84 33 Idem. 34 Ibid., 85 35 Idem. 36 Ibid., 86-87 37 AGK, 11 38 Ibid., 20 39 Ibid., 20-21 40 Ibid., 20 41 Ibid., 11 42 Ibid., 16 43 Idem. 44 Macdonald, ‘Soviet Society and its Cinema’, 86 45 Ibid., 91; Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated December 10, 1933 46 Macdonald, ‘Soviet Society and its Cinema’, 91 47 AGK, 13 48 Idem. 49 Hermann Broch, ‘Notes on the Problem of Kitsch’, in: Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles, London, 1969 (text of a lecture given by Broch to the students of the faculty of German at Yale University, Winter, 1950), 63 50 TNL, 27 51 Broch, ‘Notes on the Problem of Kitsch’, 63 52 AGK, 21 53 Ibid., 22 54 Greenberg, ‘An American View’, 40 55 Macdonald, ‘Soviet Society and Its Cinema’, 93 56 Idem. 57 Donald Kuspit, The Critic is Artist: The Intentionality of Art, UMI Research Press, 1984, 361 58 Greenberg, ‘An American View’, 41 59 Letter from Martin Greenberg dated March 28, 2002 60 AGK, 8 61 Idem. 62 TNL, 23 63 AGK, 8, 64 Ibid., 12 65 Trotsky, ‘Art and Politics’, 10 66 Idem. 67 Leon Trotsky, ‘Leon Trotsky to André Breton’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter 1939 (letter dated December 22, 1938), 127 68 Idem., TNL, 28 69 Trotsky, ‘Art and Politics’, 3 113

70 AGK, 10-11 71 ‘Statement of the L.C.S.F.’, 125 72 Idem. 73 Breton and Rivera, ‘Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’, 49, 50, 53 As we have seen, Greenberg was an early admirer of Rivera, which might have had some bearing on his early sympathies towards Trotskyism. 74 Trotsky, ‘Art and Politics’, 7 75 Ibid., 4 76 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Late Thirties in New York’, in: Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, 1961, 230 (previously ‘New York Painting Only Yesterday’) The date of revision, 1960, is included at the end of this essay. The parenthesized line is missing from the earlier version of 1957. 77 TNL, 30, 32 78 Ibid., 34 79 William Phillips, ‘Thomas Mann: Humanism in Exile’, Partisan Review,Vol. IV, No. 6, May 1938, 9 80 Mann quoted in: Ibid., 5, quoted from: Thomas Mann, ‘Measure and Value’, Life and Letters Today, Winter 1937 (n.b. This publication is described by Phillips as an antifascist magazine.) Prior to this, Mann is quoted as saying:

The truth is… that measure and value are lost in our time. Whole countries, groups, parties, and party dogmas to-day assert and pursue unrestrained their subjective values; every universal criterion has been frightfully done to death in the mad, destructive struggle which is tearing our world in pieces.’ (p. 4)

Further to which, it is easy to see how Mann’s humanism, through Phillips’s essay, might have shaped Greenberg’s thoughts, for it was natural for Mann:

…who thinks of society as a mass of individuals… and from whose grasp the ideas of order and light are constantly slipping, to conceive of the artist as destined by the very laws of his being to preserve the values of our civilization. (p. 6)

81 AGK, 21 82 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated January 13, 1939 83 AGK, 10 84 Editorial, ‘This Quarter’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 1, Fall, 1938, 7 85 Editorial, ‘This Quarter’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter, 1939, 6 86 Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 148 87 Ibid., 143 88 Ibid., 148 89 Ibid., 149 90 Michael Fried, ‘How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark’, Critical Inquiry 9, September 1982, 218; Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 155 (n. 10) 91 Ibid, 155 92 Ibid., 143 93 Greenberg, ‘The Beggar’s Opera’, 3, 94 Ibid., 4 95 AGK, 12, 13 96 Ibid., 12 97 Greenberg, ‘The Beggar’s Opera’, 3 98 AGK, 12 99 TNL, 27 The link between academicism and kitsch had been made in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in that kitsch, which had become the ‘dominant culture in Soviet Russia’. (AGK, 14) Included in its realm, as we have seen, were ‘socialist realism’ and painters like Repin, whose work represented the ‘values of the vividly recognizable’ 114

and the academic. (Ibid., 14, 16) The academic, no longer having an ‘independent existence’, had ‘become the stuffed shirt “front” for kitsch’. (Ibid., 12-13) 100 Greenberg, ‘The Beggar’s Opera’, 4 101 Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 149 102 Idem. Clark’s emphases and parentheses. 103 D.E.S. Maxwell, The Poetry of T. S. Eliot, London, 1952, 118 104 Bradford R. Collins, ‘Le Pessimisme Politique et “La Haine de Soi” Juive”: les origines de l’esthéthetique puriste de Greenberg’, Les cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, Automne/Hiver 1993, 75 105 T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in: T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, London, 1932 (1920), 49 106 Idem. 107 Idem 108 Idem. 109 Ibid., 56; 110 TNL, 30 111 Ibid., 30, 32 112 AGK, 9,10 113 In an interview of 1989, Greenberg said that he took Spengler seriously ‘from the beginning’ although he ‘detested his flavour’, for which see: Saul Ostrow, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Fifty Years Later: A Conversation with Clement Greenberg’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 4, December 1989, 57 Greenberg first mentions Spengler in relation to physiognomy in a letter dated April 18, 1932 (Greenberg, The Harold Letters). Of the influence of Spengler, Bradford Collins (‘Le Pessimisme Politique et “La Haine de Soi” Juive”, 63) says: ‘Le scepticisme politique de Greenberg était imprégné, et en partie formé, par les deux volumes de Spengler, Le Déclin de l’Occident (1918 et 1922), qu’il lut au début des années trente.’ 114 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Volume I, Form and Actuality, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, London, 1980 (1926), 293 115 Idem. 116 Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 150 117 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated September 23, 1932; TNL, 23 ‘To be the understanding of an age is a grand mission’ was said in the context of Greenberg’s having seen two ‘great’ old Russian silent movies (New Babylon and China Express), which were ‘enough to start one talking about Great Art and Community Genius’. Following from the statement that to be the understanding of an age is a grand mission, he says that ‘Spengler might say it’s the only possible path for a really great poet nowadays’ 118 ‘This Month’, Partisan Review, Vol. III. No. 6, October 1936, 2 119 James T. Farrell, ‘Theatre Chronicle’, Partisan Review, Vol III, No. 5, June 1936, 26 Of Fontarama, Farrell also said (p. 25) that: ‘There are few books …which can rival (it) for the picture of Fascism at work that it contains’ 120 Ignazio Silone, ‘Two Syllables’, trans. Samuel Putnam, Partisan Review, Vol. III, No. 6, October, 1936, 3-5 121 Lionel Abel, ‘Ignazio Silone’, Partisan Review, Vol. IV, No. 1, December 1937, 34; Breton and Rivera, ‘Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’, 49 122 Silone, ‘The School for Dictators’, 20-42 123 Ibid., 20 124 Ibid., 29 125 Ibid., 30 126 Idem. 127 Ibid., 40 128 Ibid., 41 129 Ibid., 33 130 Clement Greenberg, ‘An Interview With Ignazio Silone’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 5, Fall 1939, 23 131 Ibid., 26 115

On this page we also find clear evidence that Greenberg had read The School for Dictators and that it had, in all probability, been a topic of discussion outside of the interview: ‘I will try’ said Silone, ‘to write a sequel to that School for Dictators you already know.’ 132 Ibid. 27 133 Ibid., 30 134 Platt, ‘Clement Greenberg in the 1930s’, 54, 55 135 Ibid., 55 136 Greenberg, ‘An Interview With Ignazio Silone’, 23 137 Ibid., 22 138 Idem. 139 Ibid., 28 140 For this see: Platt, ‘Clement Greenberg in the 1930s’, 55 141 Greenberg, ‘An Interview With Ignazio Silone’, 28 142 Idem. 143 Idem. 144 Silone, ‘The School for Dictators’, 31 145 TNL, 32 146 Platt, ‘Clement Greenberg in the 1930s’, 55 147 AGK, 12 148 Ibid., 17 149 Ibid., 22: Greenberg’s italics 150 Ibid., 13 151 Ibid., 13, 14 152 Ibid., 19 153 Ibid., 20 154 Ibid., 12 155 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated November 1, 1938, 187 156 Gillo Dorfles, ‘Kitsch’, in Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles, London, 1969, 30 157 AGK, 12 158 Idem. 159 George Viereck, ‘Hitler the German explosive’, in American Monthly, October 1923, cited in: Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, New York, 1998, 168, 410 (endnote for p.168) 160 The Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion, http//www.spumco.com/magazine/eowbcc-c.html 161 ‘Radio and television advertising’, in The 1995 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, version 7. 0. 2. for Macintosh: this coverage was by Edward Murrow for CBS. 162 O’Brian, ‘Chronology to 1949’, 254 163 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Myth and History’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter 1939, 20 As to how humanism, through this essay too, might have influenced Greenberg, Mann is described by Rosenberg as having seen ‘the abdication and beating down of the individual mind the basic catastrophe of modern times.’ Further still, his introduction to the German émigré magazine, Measure and Value, is described thus: (Ibid., 19)

… a rallying cry to individuals in the name of their cultural independence and creative will… the direct response of the sentiment of artistic culture to political utilitarianism. Asserting that culture is menaced with destruction by Pure Politics, Mann sees it rising to save itself by its own action and self- affirmation. And the central force in this cultural subjugation of politics is the individual. Mann’s thesis begins by counterposing culture’s measure and value to “revolutionary propaganda”. (Idem.)

Here in Rosenberg’s article is not only further demonstration of the impact of humanism on Greenberg’s essay; but also what might be seen as a sketchy blueprint for it. 116

CHAPTER FOUR: IRVING BABBITT AND GOTTHOLD LESSING

Greenberg’s association with Partisan Review can be seen to have provided for him not only the means for establishing a career, but also a means to make concrete his ideas. Also influential on his thinking were the writings of Babbitt and Lessing, each of whom are acknowledged in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’. It was most likely, according to Martin

Greenberg, through his interest in Eliot that Greenberg discovered the writing of the cultural critic Babbitt, and possibly through Babbitt that he discovered the writing of

Gotthold Lessing.1 Babbitt, who had been Eliot’s teacher at Harvard, where he taught

French and Comparative Literature, was also a humanist of some reknown whose ideas were the subject of some controversy in the 1920s and 1930s, causing him to caution his students against using his name (in which respect, Greenberg’s acknowledgment of

Babbitt’s influence could be seen as a revolutionary act, particularly if one considers that the highly-regarded Eliot, whose name is dotted throughout ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, does not receive a mention in the second essay).2

In his essay ‘Imperfect Critics’, published in the same volume as ‘Tradition and the

Individual Talent’, Eliot uses the American Babbitt, alongside Paul More, for contrast with the English critics, Swinburne, Wyndham and Whibley. The American critics were said to have ‘endeavoured to establish a criticism which should be independent of temperament’.3

In this Babbitt was seen to have succeeded where More had failed, expressing his thought

‘more abstractly and with more form’.4 Given the difference in tone and content between

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ and ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ (the one being highly charged 117

politically and emotionally, the other being its opposite in this regard), it is possible that

Greenberg had taken heed of Babbitt’s lesson sometime between essays: for it is clear that in the second, Greenberg too was expressing his thought more abstractly and with more form than in the first – the first being somewhat unevenly balanced between the first three quarters and the last. The fact that Babbitt, although ‘not primarily occupied with art’, was

‘on the side of the artist’ would have made him a compelling read for Greenberg who, equally, in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ was not primarily occupied with art, but with ‘living’ culture – a position which later translated into his solicitude for the ‘purist’ artist.5

Babbitt’s The New Laokoön: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (footnoted in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’)6 sets out to contrast the pseudo-classical confusion of the arts dealt with in Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (of 1766) with a

Romantic confusion which Lessing had (obviously) neither met nor tried to meet. Outlining the nature of this confusion of the arts, Babbitt argues that Poe, in attempting to ‘transcend the special harmony of his own art and attain the harmony of the musician… resorting to all the arts of suggestion’, was already ‘standing on the dangerous edge of what poetry can safely do.’7 Attempting to ‘push on still further toward the Eldorado of musical suggestiveness’, Mallarmé and other of Poe’s French followers had ‘tumbled into chaos.’ 8

Here it is possible to see just how compelling Babbitt was for Greenberg, in a world in which chaos screamed from every headline and in which, with the war, nothing could be taken for granted. It was out of this chaos (a chaos which had led the avant-garde so dreadfully astray and now seemingly threatened its very existence) that Greenberg sought order, measure and value – good humanist imperatives echoing both Mann and Babbitt. 118

Extending Babbitt’s argument, Greenberg argues that, for the early avant-garde, music was

‘the art which the other avant-garde arts envied most’, and whose effects they ‘tried hardest to imitate.’9 It was only through discovering the abstraction and pure form of music that these arts began to specialize and define themselves, not in relation to the other arts, but purely in relation to themselves. Mallarmé is here transformed from a poet who had tumbled into chaos into one who, through experimentation, and the acknowledgment that sound was less material to poetry than previously because poetry was now read not recited, had moved forward towards a purer art form. It was necessary, said Greenberg, to ‘free words from logic’ in order to ‘deliver poetry from the subject and to give full play to its true affective power.’10

For Babbitt, writing in 1910, the nineteenth century had ‘witnessed the greatest debauch of descriptive writing the world has ever known [and] witnessed moreover a general confusion of the arts’.11 By 1939, with the decadence that was Stalinist Russia and fascist Italy and

Germany, this confusion had reached an all-time low with Socialist Realism, jingoism etc.

On the home front culture was looking no less grim, with rampant commercialism and academicism. Speaking of decadence in general, and not related solely to totalitarian regimes, Greenberg was to note, with shades of Spengler, in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ that:

A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writers must depend in large part for communication with their audiences. It becomes difficult to assume anything. All the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question… the really important issues are left untouched… creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form…12 119

This grim picture of culture in decline, however, was not without hope. It was in the ‘midst of the decay’ of society as it stood then that Greenberg could write that ‘we – some of us – have been unwilling to accept this last phase for our own culture.’13 (‘We’ meaning the avant-garde, and ‘some of us’ undoubtedly meaning Greenberg included.) Given that he did see himself as part of a culturally progressive movement, concomitant with his connection with Partisan Review, and that he had read Babbitt’s essay, it then becomes easy to appreciate that Babbitt’s influence went deeper than the ostensible: for Babbitt’s argument does not stop at distinguishing between a pseudo-classical and a Romantic confusion of the arts. What he calls for, in conclusion, is a ‘clear-cut type of person’ who would ‘incline toward the clear-cut type of art’ and ‘be guided in deciding what is sufficiently clear-cut and what is an unjustifiable hybrid, by tact and a sense of measure…’.14 Such a person would ‘desire each art and every genre to be itself primarily.’15 In criticism what was required was the bringing ‘once more into honor the broad, masculine, and vigorous distinction’ the revival of which ‘could alone save us from the confusions that [had] crept into modern life and literature.’16 In theory what was required was that of the ‘saving remnant’: a remnant to which anyone who made a stand for a ‘humane and vital concentration’ might look on himself as belonging, in the surety that he belonged to an

‘infinitesimal minority.’17

In portraying himself as part of the avant-garde of which he writes, it is clear that

Greenberg saw himself, along with the avant-garde, as belonging to that saving remnant of living culture. From looking simply to socialism for living culture’s preservation, 120

Greenberg was now looking also to the avant-garde to perform this function. From the beginning, as we have seen, and seemingly quite naturally, Greenberg had inclined toward the clear-cut in art: a fact which made it easier for him to sort the wheat from the chaff, and the confused from the focussed, not only in terms of what was to be allowable under the avant-garde umbrella, but also in terms of what could be separated out as susceptible to propagandist usage. A clear-cut formalist logic combined with a didactic delivery lent authority to his argument for the historical necessity of abstraction. ‘Broad, masculine and vigorous’ could well describe his dogmatic style of writing, with its sweeping judgments, generalizations and distinctions – so it is little wonder that Babbitt’s work appealed to him sufficiently to warrant one of only two footnotes in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’. Babbitt’s humanist model was ready-made for a young, ambitious budding critic, particularly one who sought to champion the cause of culture in opposition to the barbarism all around.

Thus it might be supposed that Babbitt provided Greenberg with the model and the motivation to depoliticise the highly political argument begun in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’.

In all of this Greenberg leaves us unclear about precisely why he includes Lessing into his argument, as Lessing’s argument, it could be said, was superceded by that of Babbitt. In this respect, given the small amount of space allowed for Greenberg to express his thoughts, Lessing’s inclusion might be seen as gratuitous. Yet Greenberg was not noted for his gratuitousness, but for a strident, perfunctory, dogmatism: so why does he use Lessing?

Michael Leja, as noted previously, points to Greenberg’s use of metaphor in ‘Towards

Newer Laocoon’, the nature of which he explains thus: Winckelmann’s argument that the 121

Laocoön sculpture is inferior to Virgil’s poetic portrayal in that it is less dignified, is argued against by Lessing, who saw them both as ‘equally powerful and affecting’; their differences stemming from ‘the different strengths and inherent limitations of the media involved.’18 Lessing had ultimately (through ‘attributing specific powers and weaknesses to the visual arts’, and treating them collectively for contrast with ‘the powers he found inherent in the nature of poetry’) ‘envisioned art and poetry as equitable and friendly neighbors sharing common boundaries, across which minor incursions were permissible’.19

In response to this, Babbitt, in his call for a (somewhat flexible) separation of the arts and genres, had argued that to

… allow romantic primitivism and naturalism to continue to reign unchecked by humanist constraint was… to pave the way for… the imperialism and militarism peculiar to epochs of decadence.’20

Coming to ‘Greenberg’s contribution to the discussion’, Leja says that the ‘friendly neighbours’ of the different arts had now ‘retreated to their jealously guarded inner sancta.’21 With this ‘new intransigence of the argument, Laocoön begins to take on a different and metaphorical significance’, becoming ‘a symbol for the separation of the arts’ and, just as Laocoön had ‘counseled protection of the perimeters of Troy and the refusal of intrusion by alien elements… for the sake of the well-being and preservation of the entity’; so too Greenberg ‘reads and approves that strategy for the arts in the twentieth century.’22

In this, we can suppose that Lessing was included precisely because he provides us with a direct historical link, through Babbitt, to the Laocoon character himself.

122

All of which seems reasonable, as far as it goes, and Leja notes, correctly, the crude dismissiveness of Greenberg’s treatment of Lessing; and yet, when we hone in on Lessing a further reason for his inclusion becomes apparent. Lessing, like Babbitt, was arguing the case for a new form of criticism, in Lessing’s case this being one which would counteract the ‘false taste’ and ‘unfounded judgements’ of ‘spurious criticism’, which had, to some degree, misled even the masters of the arts.23 This criticism had, in poetry:

… engendered a mania for description and in painting a mania for allegory, by attempting to make the former a speaking picture, without actually knowing what it could and ought to paint, and the latter a silent poem, without having considered to what degree it is able to express general ideas without denying its true function and degenerating into a purely arbitrary means of expression.24

In this we can see precisely how Lessing had influenced Greenberg for, to restate the obvious, painting or poetry which went beyond its legitimate boundaries was (in running counter to its impeccably-timed historically inevitable destination, the abstract) leaving itself (in its falsity of taste) open to expedient control, misuse or misinterpretation. False taste rather than simply bad taste (in that false taste holds within itself a propensity for mythologization of the banal or disreputable) being the potentially evil essence of kitsch. In this we can see that Greenberg’s reference back to Lessing then provides a metaphorical allusion, covertly, back to the images and paraphernalia redolent, not only of totalitarian regimes, but also of the most chauvinistic of nations such as America. Through this it is possible to see a direct continuation in thought between ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ and

‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’. Kitsch now, in the name of academicism, becoming the other to which the avant-garde is opposed – whereas previously the other, in the name of kitsch, and under the broad umbrella of Alexandrianism, had been the doubly-dark and brutal 123

‘personal philistinism’ of Hitler and Stalin. As also it had been to the more innocent philistinism of the American and Russian masses.25

If one now supposes that Greenberg, in metaphorically referring us, as Leja suggests, back to the Laocoön character himself, had also referred us back to the fate of Troy, then it is possible to detect that we have been led, through an almost biblical genealogy, directly to a prime concern of Silone’s: that of fifth-columnism – the existence of an organised group of turncoats within any given nation, in this case America, which is ready-primed to act in the cause of the enemy.26 In this we can see that Greenberg takes us back in time from the present to Babbitt’s essay of 1910; to Lessing’s essay of 1766; to the Laocoön sculpture; to

Laocoön himself; to the Greek fifth-columnist who advised the Trojan king that the wooden horse was hollow, and then, through this tale of treachery, forward in time to Silone’s warning in The School for Dictators and thence back to ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, which, as we have seen, was influenced by the thinking of Silone. The title ‘Towards a Newer

Laocoon’ then takes on deeper significance as denoting Greenberg’s attempt to put right the mistakes of the past, at least in the arts; and this through using a politically highly-charged metaphor to introduce an aesthetically highly-charged tract. This metaphorical shifting in time was something Greenberg had used to great effect in the first essay with his reference, through Yeats’s poetry, back to Byzantium and across to ancient Alexandria – a device which is addressed further on in this thesis.

In answer to the question, in the introduction to this thesis, as to whether this metaphorical shifting in time might denote an insidious form of treachery, it could be said that it does 124

because it was at the precise moment that Laocoön and his sons were being crushed to death by a sea serpent that the king of Troy was letting the wooden horse into the city on the advice of that Greek fifth-columnist.27 And fifth-columnism was precisely what Silone had been warning against in his The School for Dictators.

And here we return to Eliot’s influence in that it was a historical sense which compelled a man ‘to write with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer… has a simultaneous existence and comprises a simultaneous order’.28 This simultaneity, then, in

Greenberg, can now be seen to have emanated as a metaphorical likening of the past to the present – treachery, of the kind outlined by Silone, being the linking factor.

Lending credence to this theory is that the idea of treachery, in its various guises, was of itself a concern amongst the Partisan Review circle around this time: aside from Trotsky’s own conviction, in absentia, for treason (itself a treacherous move against Trotsky), and aside from Silone’s warnings of fifth-columnism, of particular concern was treason within the ranks of intellectuals who were seen to be defecting from their illustrious positions in droves. ‘In what sense’, asked Philip Rahv in 1938,

… can we speak of the treason of the intellectuals?… On all sides today, human beings are emptying themselves of their individuality, finding it safer to become tools… the intellectuals are again rushing off to staff the propaganda agencies of the war-makers.29

For William Phillips, writing in the same year, the modern intellectual was characterized as a liberal anti-fascist – yet, ‘it is he who in the name of progress clamours for insurgency, in the name of peace clamours for war, in the name of truth condones lies’.30 The editorial for 125

the Fall 1938 edition noted that: ‘The intellectuals in America as well as in the other countries of democratic imperialism have already made their decision. Most of them have taken their stand with capitalism.’31

When viewed in the light that capitalism, for many at Partisan Review, most particularly for Greenberg and Macdonald, spelled war and war, in turn, would have spelled fascism, it is not difficult to draw some obvious conclusions as to what the results of the treason of the intellectuals might be, at least for those remaining ‘on-side’. Breton and Rivera had made this quite clear in their manifesto ‘Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’ when they made their comment about writers and artists being reduced to the status of domestic servants of the regime. Further to this, in October 1938 Sian Niall reported from Paris that artists had grown ‘more and more uncomfortable in the increasingly smelly Stalinist ambience’.32 Less than three months later he was reporting on the ‘new establishment’ of concentration camps in France for ‘undesirable foreigners’ (which, by Niall’s implication, might have included certain intellectuals). And, as noted above, dissenting artists and intellectuals in America were already perceived to be faring little better under Government and church dictatorship.33 Intellectual treason, we know, was a fundamental tenet of Greenberg’s argument against key fascists in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in which Goebbels (from

‘strenuously courting avant-garde artists and writers') and Mussolini (‘a perfect example of the disponibilité of a realist’) had each expediently discarded their own aesthetic principles in favour of pandering to the masses.34

126

To this point we have seen how influential Macdonald, Trotsky, Eliot, Brecht, Silone,

Lessing and Babbitt were to the thinking behind Greenberg’s seminal essays. We have also seen how their concerns, both political and aesthetic, interface in many respects.

Humanism, through Babbitt and Mann, seems to have been a pivotal factor in the shaping of Greenberg’s ideas – not least because humanism put its faith in the power of the individual (and not the masses or the government) to determine one’s own fate. And

Greenberg, it could be said, was determining his own fate through the writing of his seminal essays, which were unashamedly ambitious in their intent. We have also seen that he pitted the avant-garde, as the only remaining vestige of living culture in a decadent society, against its opposite Alexandrianism (or academicism), which in its most vulgar forms emanated in the modern phenomenon of kitsch. In so doing, in what can be termed a politically revolutionary move, Greenberg can be seen to have raised avant-garde art to a level of impartial control whilst simultaneously giving it a life of its own, anthropomorphising it to an almost personal level, reserving for it an almost untouchably rarified place. Relating directly to why he felt compelled to do this is the question of the extent to which his own Jewishness was a driving force. 127

Notes

1 Corrrespondence from Martin Greenberg dated April 18, 2002 2 A good source of information about Babbitt is the Irving Babbitt Project, http://www.nhinet.org/babbitt2.htm 3 Eliot, ‘Imperfect Critics’, in: Eliot, The Sacred Wood, 40 4 Ibid., 41 5 Ibid., 42 6 TNL, 30 7 Babbitt, The New Laokoon, 156-157 8 Ibid., 157 9 TNL, 31 10 Ibid., 33 11 Babbitt, The New Laokoon, viii-ix 12 AGK, 6 13 Ibid., 6-7 14 Babbitt, The New Laokoon, 249 15 Ibid., 248 16 Ibid., 244, 245 17 Ibid., 240-241 18 Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 223 19 Idem. 20 Ibid., 223-224 21 Ibid., 224 22 Idem. 23 Lessing, Laocoön, 5 24 Idem. 25 AGK, 21 26 The term ‘fifth-column’ originated in the Spanish Civil War with General Emilio Mola’s boast that he had four columns of troops marching against Madrid, and a fifth column of sympathisers inside the city itself. The term was popularised by Ernest Hemingway’s 1938 play The Fifth Column reviewed, incidentally, by Lionel Trilling in: ‘Hemingway and his Critics’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter 1939, 52-60. 27 For accounts of Laocoön’s fate in Lessing, see ‘Chapter Five’, Lessing, Laocoön, 33-9. For a succinct account of the Laocoön saga see also, same volume: McCormick, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, ix-x 28 Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 49 29 Philip Rahv, ‘Trials of the Mind’, Partisan Review, Vol. IV, No.5, April, 1938, 9 30 Phillips, ‘Thomas Mann: Humanism in Exile’, 3 31 Editorial, ‘This Quarter’ (Fall, 1938), 8 32 Sean Niall, ‘Paris Letter’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 1, Fall, 1938 (letter dated 7 October, 1938), 101 33 Sean Niall, ‘Paris Letter’, Partisan Review, Winter, 1939 (letter dated Christmas Day, 1938), 103 34 AGK, 20, 21 128

CHAPTER FIVE: ‘JEWISHNESS’

Anti-Semitism

Greenberg was born in the Bronx, the son of first generation Jewish immigrants from

Lithuania, and spoke Yiddish ‘as soon as he did English’.1 This early bilingualism was possibly responsible for his later facility with languages, particularly German. His parents were ‘free thinking socialists’ who maintained, in addition to their Yiddish, ‘certain vestiges of folk life in the Pale, and an insistence upon specifying themselves as Jews’.2 ‘I believe’, said Greenberg in 1944, ‘that a quality of Jewishness is present in almost every word I write… It may be said that this quality derives from a heritage and not from a racial psychology.’3 This quality of Jewishness was also ‘very informal, being transmitted through mother’s milk and the habits and talk of the family’.4 It is apparent then from whence his historical interests stemmed (particularly his interest in Jewish history) and that they, like his writing, were deeply rooted in Judaism. Speaking of Kafka in 1955 he wrote:

There was a Jewry of that city [Prague], and its past, and the larger past of all Central and East European Jewry. Kafka carried with him a kind of ‘racial memory’ of that past. Though he was an emancipated Jew, he was still its product and after effect.5

If Prague were changed to New York, this might equally apply to Greenberg, who, according to his brother Martin, was not especially religious, yet his dogmatic nature, his laying down of the law, was a result of not wanting to be perceived as a ‘little’ Jew.6 Also according to his brother, he was ‘pugnacious’ and would ‘punch somebody on the nose for making an anti-Semitic remark.’7 Despite its avoidance of the subject of anti-Semitism, the last quarter of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ displays evidence of a similar pugnaciousness – a 129

quality common to many articles in Partisan Review around this time. In these articles, the pugnaciousness made itself apparent in what might be termed an extreme sensitivity to the threat of a barbarism which could any day turn in to full-blown fascism. In turn, this sensitivity might be accounted for by realising that the make-up of the New York intelligentsia at that time was predominantly Jewish. As Sidney Tillim has said, the main extra-artistic and political issues for radical intellectuals of Greenberg’s generation were

‘alienation and Jewishness’.8 Even most of those who were not Jewish felt Jewish through

‘pervasive empathy’, and Jewishness was not just another ‘issue’ to Greenberg, because he was ‘simply too immersed in it’.9 It is easy to see, then, how the Partisan Review circle, with its predominantly Jewish make-up and its socialist leanings, yet disassociation from established organized political parties, might have been attractive to the young Greenberg.

If the fear amongst the Partisan Review circle of a descent into barbarism in America might seem extreme, it should be borne in mind that barbarism was not a phenomenon new to

America, with its history of Ku Klux Klanism. In terms of anti-Semitism it had reared its head in a reactionary attitude to Jews for nearly half a century since a wave of eastern

European Jews had streamed into the new country, settling in urban centres, mostly into the overcrowded tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. It was, according to Chaim Potok, this wave of Jewry (of which Greenberg’s parents were a part, his father rising from

‘storekeeper [clothing] to manufacturer [metal goods]’)10 which built the American Yiddish

Theatre and the Yiddish press. Their ‘heavily felt presence’, according to Potok, was responsible for a reactionary anti-Semitism which emanated in signs saying ‘No dogs and

Jews allowed here’, job discrimination and exclusion from certain clubs and hotels.11 130

During these years, the most notorious single exponent of anti-Semitism was Henry Ford.

Ford not only refused to employ Jews in his car factories, but also disseminated his anti-

Semitic propaganda nationwide during 1919-21, both on the street and through his car dealerships: and this by means of his reactionary newspaper the Dearborn Independent which ‘ranted about the international Jew who was the enemy of Anglo-Saxon civilization

[and] the Jewish Bolsheviks who were set on conquering the Christian world.’12

Worldwide, his anti-Semitism was disseminated through his popularisation of ‘The

Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ (a forged document, later seen as Hitler’s ‘warrant for genocide’).13 This document, which comprised counterfeit minutes of a meeting of a ‘secret

Jewish world conspiracy’, had apparently been ‘the bible of anti-Semites since 1905’ and was later published by Ford in the form of a book called The International Jew.14

According to Ron Rosenbaum in Explaining Hitler, Ford’s book was used to disseminate

Hitler’s own ‘malignant vision’ amongst a ‘gullible German public’; and ‘indelibly shaped

Hitler’s own vision of the Jews’.15 According to Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Ford’s book, a ‘best-seller’ in Germany, was found ‘on the desk of the as yet largely unknown

Adolf Hitler, along with a large photograph of Ford’ by a New York Times reporter in

1922.16 In 1938, on his seventy-fifth birthday, Ford ‘accepted with great publicity’ Hitler’s award of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle – an event publicised in America in Time magazine of August that year.17 Similarly honoured and publicised, in the same year, was the American Charles Lindbergh.18 Evidence of Hitler’s gratitude to Ford was his hanging of a ‘life-size oil portrait of the car-maker on the wall of his personal office in party 131

headquarters in Munich’ and his offering ‘to send in storm troopers to America to help

Ford’s proposed campaign for presidency.’19

Whilst Greenberg would have been unlikely to have known about Ford’s portrait and the storm troopers, it is distinctly probable that he would, given his milieu, have got wind of

Hitler’s awards to Lindbergh and Ford, and possibly knew also about Ford’s notoriously anti-Semitic views and of the existence of further influential Nazi supporters. The year

1938, in addition to reportage of Ford’s and Linbergh’s awards, saw reports coming in of anti-Semitic barbarism overseas. News of Kristallnacht, the precursor of the Holocaust (in which synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked and destroyed and, according to Robert S. Wistrich, ninety-one Jews were killed and thirty thousand Jewish men over the age of sixteen were shipped off to concentration camps)20 which took place on the night of 9-10 November, was widely disseminated throughout America through The

Nation, Time, Newsweek, The New Republic, and Collier’s sparking a wave of condemnation across the nation.21 This catastrophe left little doubt as to what Jews might expect were fascism to take hold in America. Significantly, the wealthy and influential Jew- hating Ford with direct connections to the Third Reich, remained alive (and thus a real threat) until 1947.

The Partisan Review circle’s fear of a fascist takeover of the free world (and one might say its unspoken fear of what that might bring) was based, then, not on emotive fiction, but on cold, hard fact. With the publicity engendered by reactionary events both at home and further abroad it would have been impossible for the leftist, largely Jewish intelligentsia in 132

general, or the Partisan Review circle and Greenberg in particular, to have been unaware of the depth of anti-Semitism existing world-wide: nor even of the personal threat this posed.

Perhaps this is a reason why Partisan Review (curiously, considering its vociferousness on most areas of politics) steered clear of the Jewish issue, in that, by nature of its pre-eminent position within the leftist political press, it could not be sure that it would not, inadvertently among its readers, attract the interest of the reactionary right. If this were to have happened, its writers might well have become prime targets in the event of a fascist takeover.

If the threat of fascism, and hence the undoubted fate of Jews under fascism, was very real, there was also, as we have seen, an existing substructure (an adjunct to the human substructure of a lurking fifth-column) to facilitate the dissemination of fascist propaganda

– a substructure which Greenberg had outlined in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. This was the substructure of kitsch, which covered the areas of popular, commercial art and literature,

Hollywood movies and, presumably, radio broadcasts. A substructure, moreover, which had not only been been ‘taken for granted’ (and thus, by implication, not analyzed for its dark potential), but which also had a prior history of being used for propagandist ends.22

Thierry de Duve, Susan Noyes Platt and Robert Storr

Of those who have broached the subject of Greenberg’s Jewishness (including Bradford

Collins, Margaret Olin, Susan Noyes Platt, Robert Storr and Sidney Tillim) Thierry de

Duve, in his ‘The Silences in the Doctrine’, is the only one who forms an explication of

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ primarily and directly founded upon its basis.23 First, de Duve asks the question as to whether kitsch, for Greenberg, was not ‘similar to his own 133

Jewishness’ – and this because what Greenberg says about introspection indicated a ‘form of generalisation from the individual to the social group which [is not] entirely foreign to the way he looks at art, and concludes in favour of the avant-garde over kitsch.’24 The introspection to which de Duve is referring is that of Greenberg’s remarks in a text on

Jewish self-hatred, that: ‘The problem has to be focused directly in the individual Jew and discussed in personal, not communal, terms. For self-hatred is as intimate a thing as love.’25

This de Duve relates to a phrase in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in which Greenberg determines the necessity of examining ‘more closely and with more originality than hitherto the relationship between aesthetic experience as met by the specific – not the generalized – individual’.26

De Duve’s linkage between the ‘specific individual’ and ‘the specific Jew’ provides for him the basis for asking if Greenberg, ‘in order to take a stand with the avant-garde as he did… did not have to feel within himself a secret attraction for the enemy’s iniquitous charms’, for wasn’t the love of kitsch ‘nothing other than the pleasure taken in the corruption of one’s own taste, and therefore… the aesthetic expression of self-hatred.’27 De Duve here has pounced on a throwaway comment made by Greenberg, in his old age, that he had admired Norman Rockwell in his youth to suggest that he had a secret hankering after kitsch; a hankering which in the context of de Duve’s discussion would have included all that Greenberg had argued against in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’.28

However, the love of kitsch, as we have seen, is not, for the masses, the pleasure taken in the corruption of their own taste, but the pleasure taken in a commodity which has been 134

marketed directly to reflect that taste. Or, if not directly to reflect it, to be sold as such so that the masses believe it does (there could, for instance, be no pleasure taken in Nazi swastikas, eagles and banners unless one were firmly convinced, through persuasion or otherwise, of the rightness of the cause). It only becomes the former when it is taken up as a perverse commodity, and for its own sake, by those who feel themselves, because of their superior sensibilities, able to understand the difference between ersatz culture and the real.

When Greenberg went to the movies, as he seems often to have done, he wouldn’t have gone with the nihilistic intention of taking some form of perverse pleasure in the corruption of his taste, but with the intention of taking pleasure in a commodity for its own sake. And equally, given that the nature of the ‘enemy’ in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ was directly connected to reaction, barbarism, fascism and the darkest side of philistinism, it would seem fallacious to suggest that he felt any ‘secret attraction’ for that enemy’s ‘iniquitous charms’. That he once admired Norman Rockwell, and that he enjoyed the movies is a matter of an entirely different nature. This was Greenberg the realist, living in the real world, needing, like the rest of us, to be occasionally entertained.

De Duve then goes on to say that his introduction to Greenberg via his Jewishness is a way to suggest that ‘“Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and the other “dogmatic” texts should be read against a highly troubling relation to otherness’.29 The otherness of which he speaks is that of the relation of the Jew to the gentile – the former being the ‘other’ to the latter. For the assimilated ‘individual’ Jew, such as Greenberg, this meant ‘living his own identity in the mode of “the other of the other”’30 The extent to which this ‘difficult relation to otherness 135

and identity’ drove him ‘into a simplistic explanation for the success of kitsch’ is, for de

Duve, only a matter of degree.31

However, it wasn’t Greenberg’s own identity, or his relation to it, of which he was writing, but the identity of the avant-garde and socialism in relation to their various others:

Alexandrianism; kitsch; conservatism, and totalitarianism. There was, one might suggest, nothing ‘highly troubling’ about this. Indeed, the dogmatism and confidence displayed in each of Greenberg’s seminal texts demonstrate that he was very sure of his position.

Further to which, in 1939 he was sufficiently comfortable in his Jewishness to quip that, if he were a gentile, both Lionel Abel and Harold Rosenberg (each part of the Partisan

Review circle), ‘Judische Intellektuellen’, would make him ‘a Catholic anti-Semite’, and that ‘Dante should’ve provided a special circle for them somewhere on the periphery of

Hell.’32 Far from being simplistic, Greenberg’s explanation for the success of kitsch was not only based on knowledge and information gleaned from various sources, but also quite complex in that it argued from numerous angles – the aesthetic, the cultural and the political.

Further to this, de Duve suggests that in 1939 the concentration camps were ‘still unimaginable’.33 Perhaps by this he means the full horror of the camps, for there is evidence to suggest that the camps themselves were a known entity. Trotsky, for instance, in his letter to André Breton dated December 22, 1938 (and published in Partisan Review at the beginning of 1939), used the term ‘fascist concentration camp’.34 And perhaps

Americans had gained an inkling of the dark purpose of these camps some weeks 136

previously, for, according to Michael Zalampas, in the American popular press there were reports from Germany that ‘Sixty-two Jews were made “to run a bloody gantlet (sic)” at

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp – twelve were beaten to death.’35 From other reports in the American press, it seems that by the end of 1938 Hitler’s intention towards the Jewish people was becoming commonly apparent.36

Inherent in de Duve’s assessment of Greenberg’s sense of otherness is the implication that it was somehow self-imposed through a ‘Jewish guilt-complex’ which was ‘a fertile ground for the blossoming of an exacerbated sensibility to the threat of kitsch’.37 Yet, as the above examples demonstrate, Greenberg, sufficiently at ease with his own Jewishness to express humor and to demonstrate against the other, clearly did not perceive himself as victim to some ‘guilt-complex’. As he himself was to write in 1950:

What I want to be able to do is accept my Jewishness more implicitly, so implicitly that I can use it in my own right, and as a Jew in my own right. I want to feel free to be whatever I want to be and delight in being as a personality, without being typed or prescribed to as a Jew or… as an American. I am both Jew and American naturally… I do not want to make any more issue of being a Jew – unless I am forced to by such things as anti-Semitism.38

Where we first find evidence of Greenberg’s fear of anti-Semitism is in his attendance, in the same year, at the Nazi demonstration in Madison Square Garden – a fear which made itself apparent through his obvious anger. Yet here, one has to say that the other, in this case, was clearly the Nazi party (it being in the minority in America) and not Jews in general, or Greenberg himself; all of whom, unlike their counterparts overseas, still possessed the freedom to oppose this ‘other’. This fear, while not apparent in Greenberg’s letters to Harold Lazarus, is only directly (and retrospectively) verbalised by him in his 137

response to the awarding of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry to the ‘fascist anti-Semite’ Ezra

Pound in 1949, wherein he says that: ‘I myself cannot help being offended by the matter of

Pound’s latest poetry; And since 1943 things like that make me physically afraid too.’39

If Greenberg was aware of a sense of ‘otherness’, it was not one which was self-imposed, but one which was imposed by fascist others. His ‘exacerbated sensibility to the threat of kitsch’ was, in fact, firmly based in the reality of the times – a reality spelled out for him, not only by his Partisan Review colleagues, but also by Ignazio Silone and Leon Trotsky amongst others. In this, it was not a ‘Jewish guilt-complex’ which provided the ‘fertile ground’ for his exacerbated sensibility to the threat of kitsch, but an avid interest in, and understanding of, the politics of his day.

De Duve then twists his argument around and uses T. J. Clark’s comment on the medium appearing ‘most characteristically as the site of negation and estrangement’, to suggest, some twelve pages later, that the ‘medium is the other’, embodying and materializing ‘the otherness of the addressee’.40 Then, paraphrasing Greenberg’s ‘Self-Hatred and Jewish

Chauvinism’, he makes the case that ‘every lover of avant-garde art’ could say:41

I do not think that in this respect I am projecting upon others a taste for negativity I find in myself; it is only reluctantly that I have become persuaded that hatred for one’s own social affiliation in one form or another is almost universal among lovers of avant-garde art…(de Duve’s italics)42

This case then becomes translated from the general to the particular, leaving Greenberg, in making the birth of abstract painting the ‘heir of art for art’s sake’ in ‘Avant-Garde and

Kitsch’, ‘involuntarily’ referring to ‘a phenomenon he detested and which his whole 138

doctrine of modernism holds for null and void as far as works are concerned’.43 For de

Duve, this is a move which ‘if one is not careful, corrupts his defense of purism in

“Towards a Newer Laocoon” [rendering it] vulnerable to accusations that make it verge on ethnic cleansing.’44

And so we have Greenberg, paradoxically, detesting yet secretly being attracted to kitsch and thus its aesthetic soul-mate academicism: a paradox de Duve has sought to explain in the statement that ‘the love of kitsch is a hateful relation toward the other turned around on oneself and made guiltless.’45 Which is a psychological analysis the nature of which is hard to argue against in the context of this thesis, but suffice it to say that Greenberg quite clearly did not turn around his hatred of Nazism onto himself but, in the very act of writing

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, threw this hatred directly back to its source.

Where de Duve’s argument is indisputable, however, is in its assumption that Greenberg’s defense of purism had left it ‘vulnerable to accusations that make it verge on ethnic cleansing’: a fact made obvious in Susan Noyes Platt’s analysis of Greenberg’s early work.

Platt, perceiving his ‘rigid aesthetic stance’ to be a ‘transposition of the Jewish heritage into the fabric of his thinking and writing’ (and rightly so, if the wealth of opinion to the affirmative is to be believed), determined that Greenberg, through Babbitt, Lessing and the

‘flatness’ of Courbet’s paintings, had ‘arrived at the avant-garde ghetto of purity’.46 This comment is then linked directly to the notion of ethnic cleansing in that, as Greenberg

‘wrote his theory of pure art, Paris was surrendering to the Nazis, the perpetrators of the idea of racial purity.’47 Greenberg’s purity, then, equates directly to Nazi purity; and hence 139

Greenbergian modernism with Nazism – an equation elaborated upon as Platt’s essay progresses. Greenberg had ‘castrated’ the work of his ‘little ghetto of abstract artists… for the sake of his limp aestheticism.’48 This ‘little ghetto’ apparently held small hope for culture except (possibly reflecting Nazi grandeur) a ‘delusion of abstract grandeur’.49

Further, Platt has Greenberg’s theory of abstract art reduce the wartime struggle to ‘that between artist and medium, rather than Nazi and Jew.’50

What one can say of this (beyond the observation that Greenberg, at the time of writing his seminal essays, did not yet have a stable of artists) is that whilst ‘Towards a Newer

Laocoon’ was not directly anti-Nazi in the manner of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, its thesis was in direct opposition to Nazi ideology both in terms of its international (as opposed to

Nazi nationalist) outlook, and in terms of its espousal of the type of art rejected by the

Nazis as degenerate. That Greenberg’s personal outlook remained political, despite writing this seemingly unpolitical text, is evident from the views he expressed only a month later in

‘An American View’. But, as de Duve has said, Greenberg’s purist viewpoint had left his work vulnerable to interpretations of the nature of Platt’s.

Platt, however, is not alone in the condemnation of Greenberg through his Jewishness.

When Robert Storr remarks, in ‘No Joy in Mudville’ that spiritually, Greenberg ‘imagined a frozen Halachic world remote from the contagion of the “natural” and safely insulated from a Gentile world that so often masked a brutal anti-Semitism in the “folkish” or

“popular” forms’, he is comparing Greenberg unfavourably with Philip Guston who ‘never fled [like Greenberg] from his existential discomfort into pure aestheticism.’51 In Storr’s 140

opinion, Greenberg’s ‘opposition of purity and impurity’ stood as a ‘metaphor for the perilous choices imposed by cultural assimilation into the New World’, and Greenberg himself was simultaneously ‘a refugee from his community of origin and an outsider to his adopted one’.52

Here we see shades of de Duve in that ‘existential discomfort’ sails pretty close to

‘otherness’. That Greenberg had fled and Guston hadn’t is beside the point in terms of this thesis. The fact is that each is being judged specifically for his Jewishness – and Greenberg, unlike Guston, is being portrayed as having retreated into his rigidly aesthetic burrow because, being an emancipated Jew, he ‘must still resort to some sort of Halachic safety or stability, or rather immobility.’53 This latter quote is taken by Storr from Greenberg’s

‘Kafka’s Jewishness’ yet, by insinuation, is aimed directly back at Greenberg by saying that

Greenberg had retreated ‘from course contingency into a realm of self-protective high- mindedness.’54 Greenberg, then, like Halachic law, and much like Alexandrianism, is frozen in time and place.

With ‘Kafka’s Jewishness’, however, Greenberg was presenting a general rather than a personal argument. It was an argument which sought to give a historical explanation for the

‘treadmill of routine and logic, or rather of reasonableness, in which Kafka’s heroes find their only safety…’55 What he was speaking of was the claustrophobia of Kafka’s fictional world: a claustrophobia inherent in the two main life choices open to the modern Jew – that of adherence to the old Orthodox Halacha, or that of defection to a new ‘secular Halacha’ which ‘wipes out the Jewish past.’56 We know this is not Greenberg’s world because in an 141

earlier essay (‘Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism’) he had argued for a middle path between these two worlds. That is, between the ‘negative’ Jew who flees his Jewishness and the ‘positive’ Jew who ‘asserts, seeks out, and revels in his Jewishness’.57

Hitler and Yeats

As we have seen, by the time of writing ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ Greenberg had had a thorough grounding in the propagandist machinations of the Third Reich. He would, moreover, undoubtedly have been aware of the propagandist potential of the American mass media; of conditions in America parallelling those in pre-fascist Germany, and of the existence of anti-Semitic fascist sympathisers in America. He would also have been aware of Nazi grandiosity: shows of Aryan art, emotive movies and elaborately orchestrated parades with their swastikas, eagles and banners etc. (that is, kitsch in all its worst guises).

All of which were cynical exercises designed not only to hypnotise the masses into complete submission, but also to herd the masses into a grouping together against the tangible ‘other’ of Judaism – the cultured face of which was supposedly the avant-garde in all its guises. Greenberg might not have been especially religious, but what underlay Nazi kitsch and its vilification of the avant-garde would have been cause for concern, for Hitler was intent (as Kristallnacht had demonstrated to a considerable degree) on wiping out not just a religion, but a race and its tradition.

Bearing all of this in mind, we now turn briefly to two articles, Harold Rosenberg’s ‘Myth and History’, published by Partisan Review in February 1939 (an article Greenberg had

‘liked very much’),58 and Greenberg’s ‘Bertolt Brecht’s Poetry’ of 1941. In the former, 142

Rosenberg cites Thomas Mann as saying that the concept of artists as a conservative force

(in the sense that that their ‘principle of change’ involves combining ‘the new with the old’ and ‘the original with the traditional’) had been ‘perverted by the Nazis into its opposite’ –

‘the outworn and decadent’ having been ‘preserved through terror’.59 In the latter article

Greenberg had described Brecht as having ‘become so inveterate a parodist that he could not prevent himself from parodying even the Bible in his political poetry – although there may be the influence of Stalin’s painfully simplified, catechism style of oratory.’60 In

Brecht’s hands, parody ‘became the means to something beyond itself, more profound and more important’.61 Although this was published in 1941, Greenberg does speak twice, in early 1939, of a piece ‘about Brecht’s poetry’ which had been rejected for publication, but which he planned on re-submitting. Whilst it is unclear whether these two articles were one and the same, it is at least clear that he was knowledgeable of the workings of Brecht’s poetry, and hence his use of parody, prior to writing ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’.

Let us now suppose that Greenberg, influenced as much by Rosenberg’s article and

Brecht’s use of parody as by any other source, had decided, through a particularly wicked form of parody, and on an aesthetic battle ground, to wage a propaganda exercise of his own – turning Nazi ideology on its head, as we saw he had done in response to Silone’s The

School for Dictators.62 And let us also suppose that in his awareness of the pseudo-aesthetic strategies of the Third Reich, he was also aware of the letter of Hitler’s 1937 speech inaugurating The Great Exhibition of German Art (which had been swiftly published and disseminated, in the same year, in ‘Der Führer eröffnet die Grosse Deutsche

Kunstausstellung 1937’) and had, therefore, been accessible since that time. 63 Given these 143

suppositions, it is then feasible to make direct comparison’s between Hitler’s speech and

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’.

That there was some awareness within the Partisan Review circle of the letter of Hitler’s anti-modernist views is evident from George L. K. Morris’s observation in 1938 that Hitler

‘opened the Munich Art Congress with the announcement that “there is no place in the

German Reich for the works of Neandertal Man”’.64 And, as we know, Greenberg had also, by the time of writing ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, visited Britain and Europe, where, in addition to interviewing Silone (with whom he had clearly discussed The School for

Dictators), he had met up with ‘Arp, Eluard, Hugnet, Man Ray, Virgil Thomson, etc.’ 65 So it is reasonable to assume that, amongst such company, the subject, if not the letter, of

Hitler’s anti-modernist stance would have been a conversational topic.

The Great Exhibition of German Art was the counterpart to the exhibition Degenerate Art which was opened the next day and in the same city, and Hitler used the occasion of its opening to present, through the example of art, his concept of a society which was divided upon the lines of good and bad, Aryan and Jew. This division he used specifically to ram home his anti-Semitic propaganda about ‘clever’ Jews who were ‘employing their positions in the press with the help of so-called art criticism’, taking ‘possession of those means and institutions of communication’ which formed and thus finally ‘ruled over public opinion’ – thereby ‘succeeding not only in confusing the natural concepts about the nature and scope of art as well as its goal, but above all in undermining and destroying the general 144

wholesome feeling in this domain.’66 Put simply, Jews were responsible for the badness of modern art – and modern art was bad because it was too Jewish.

By contrast, Greenberg clearly saw all that remained wholesome in culture residing in the avant-garde. His division of art’s domain into the avant-garde on one side, and academicism or kitsch on the other, emphatically denied any racist distinction between

Aryan and Jew because, as stated up front, ‘one and the same civilization’ was responsible for both the good and the bad: beyond which, both the avant-garde and kitsch were international phenomena.67 For Greenberg, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, capitalism, and the industrial revolution (as opposed to Jews) were responsible for the badness of art and culture.

To further the notion of the Jewish contamination of the arts, modern art was portrayed by

Hitler as an art of canvases dirtied with ‘color droppings… a flood of slime and ordure’, in other words, filth and dung – the sort of stuff which not so long previously had clogged up the roads.68 However, if in Germany (as in Italy and Russia) modern abstract art was now at the bottom of the dung heap, in America, for Greenberg, it had to be unambiguously and detectably on top – and anything else (on the contemporary level that is) relegated to its own dung-heap called ‘kitsch’ – a word then rarely used in English, but which, in the original German dialect from which it derives, means ‘to scrape up mud from the street’, from which is derived ‘kitschen to slap (a work of art) together’.69

145

Given the context of Greenberg’s essays, and his knowledge of German, this word, with its original form sailing so obviously close to Hitler’s description of modern art, could well have been chosen because it would have lost nothing in the translation. Supporting this theory is Greenberg’s subsequent use, during wartime, of the word ‘mud’ in praise of

Jackson Pollock’s work. This could be seen as a perverse form of taunt, especially since

Greenberg’s ‘mud’ refers not to dirt, but to Pollock’s ‘purer colors’.70 Here too, and not unrelated, we see direct inverse parallels, through Greenberg’s acknowledgment of the

German Lessing, between the types of art espoused respectively by himself and Hitler.

Regarding an eighteenth century propensity to ‘wanton boasting of mere skills, not ennobled by the intrinsic worth of their subjects’ (a statement reflecting Greenberg’s observation that it was talent which had led art astray), Lessing points back to a precedent in ancient Greece in which:71

Pyreicus, who painted barbershops, filthy workshops, asses, and kitchen herbs with all the zeal of a Dutch artist… acquired the name of Rhyparographer, or the painter of filth. Indeed, the debauched rich paid their weight in gold for his paintings, as if to offset their intrinsic worthlessness by putting a fictitious value on them.72

If the ‘debauched rich’ can be taken for such as Goebbels, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and their ilk, and the filth to represent Socialist Realism and kitsch, then Lessing’s observations, translated into modern terms, could be seen to have been utilized, indirectly, as covert criticism of art under totalitarian control. For what was kitsch if not a commodity to which a monetary value had been placed incommensurate with its intrinsic worth?

Beyond this, it was a ‘matter of fact’ for Hitler that modern ‘art and art activities’ were

‘lumped together with the handiwork of our modern tailorshops and fashion industries’.73 146

Every year it was ‘something new’, whereas for Greenberg, it was kitsch which changed

‘according to style’.74 And then, as previously noted, there was Greenberg’s juxtaposition of a poem by T.S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, etc. which rather changed the Nazi order of things.

One point of agreement between Greenberg and Hitler, however, was that modern art, by nature, was an international phenomenon. But for Hitler this was bad because it denied the ethnicity which, for him, underlay all that he was promoting as ‘good’ art. For Greenberg

(implicit in his arguments), it was this very internationality and lack of ethnicity which defined the avant-garde, allowing it to traverse the atlantic, leaving it free to continue untrammeled.

In his ‘Six Propositions on Jewish Art’, Robert Pincus-Witten notes that ‘the organic growth toward abstract self-awareness that marks European art in the twentieth-century was able to continue in New York City, a center of large Jewish population free of the immediate horrors of Nazism.’75 Greenberg, it could be said, free of the immediate horrors of Nazism, yet aware of its insidiously imminent presence, in championing the cause of abstraction, was not only championing the cause of Jewish art in the face of anti-Semitism both at home and overseas; but also, by extension, in the face of Nazi propaganda.

Given the above, one could then hesitantly offer a suggestion as to the reason the word

‘Alexandrianism’ in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ is replaced with the word ‘academicism’ in

‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’. And this suggestion is that the word ‘Alexandrianism’ has 147

been used not only to denote the simulacrous nature of kitsch, but also to signify a particular point in history. Greenberg’s description of Alexandrianism as ‘an academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy’, and his subsequent dropping of the word in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ in favour of the word ‘academicism’, might seem to imply that, in narrowing down the field, he had deliberately drawn attention not only to the sort of art Hitler was championing as good, but also to the deliberately controversial nature of the avant-garde, whose real opposite was not kitsch but the academic – the avant-garde’s controversial nature being an important element in Hitler’s anti-modernist crusade.76

Turning now to Yeats’s lines, from the poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’: ‘Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence’, we see they are first used by

Greenberg to illustrate what he means by the ‘imitation of imitating’; a concept taken directly from Lessing, who says that when an artist imitates another work of art, he is, in fact imitating an imitation.77 But Greenberg turned this around. For him, originality in art resided in the imitation of the ‘the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves’ (in other words, a superior and legitimate form of the ‘imitation of imitating’ – and one which could not have existed in Lessing’s day), and for abstract art and literature these very processes and disciplines become its subject matter.78 Greenberg’s use of

Yeats’s lines takes us from this concept to his observations that ‘Picasso, Braque,

Mondrian, Miró, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in’, and that:79

148

The attention of poets like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Eluard, Pound, Hart Crane, Stevens, even Rilke and Yeats, appears to be centred on the effort to create poetry and on the “moments” themselves of poetic conversion, rather than on experience to be converted into poetry.80

With the second observation, Greenberg clearly demonstrates his scholastic understanding of modernist poetry. An understanding which throws into relief his inclusion of Yeats’s lines, not only to exemplify Lessing’s concept, but also as a point of reference.

When next Greenberg mentions these lines, some three hundred words later, he tells us they

‘referred to Byzantium, which is very close to Alexandria’. And this to tell us that ‘the imitation of imitating is a superior sort of Alexandrianism’ with ‘one most important difference: the avant-garde moves, while Alexandrianism stands still’.81 Which was precisely what justified ‘the avant-garde’s methods and [made] them necessary.’82 Just as his reference to Lessing is inessential to his argument in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, so too, there is, in fact no need for him to refer again to the lines from Yeats – a curiosity which does not seem, so far (as with his inclusion of Lessing), to have been questioned. So why does he do this?

The theory offered here is that Greenberg is again responding directly to fascist ideology.

And this theory can be explained as follows. The realm of the Byzantine empire was noted for its grandiose embrace of gilded and bronzed pomp and ceremony; as Yeats himself had said in 1925, ‘Byzantium… substituted for formal Roman magnificence, with its glorification of physical power’;83 and as Delmore Schwartz, writing for Partisan Review in 149

1939 six months prior to the publication of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, said of ‘Sailing to

Byzantium’:

Eternity or heaven is conceived by the poet as being like Byzantium, a civilization in which artificiality and ritual dominate, where all that is natural is suppressed, where the unchanging is good, where art was the structure of existence’.84

It was precisely such unnatural, static magnificence with ‘its glorification of physical power’ which both Hitler and Mussolini were then emulating to such obviously great effect and which comprised the evil manifestation of the darker side of kitsch. If art was the

‘structure of existence’ in Byzantium, in Nazi Germany its simulacrum performed that function.

By contrast with the barbarism of totalitarian regimes, however, the Byzantine empire was noted for its humanitarianism. Poor-houses, orphanages, homes for the blind or aged; even homes for repentant prostitutes and fallen women aristocrats were funded by benevolent emperors and wealthy citizens, and Jews did not have to resort to money lending as they did in the West because interest-bearing loans were not considered sinful. Under the auspices of the ‘church fathers’ Clement, Origen, Tertullian, Justin and others, and in the major teaching centres of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, Christian philanthropy now embraced the philosophy of ‘acceptance of every person no matter from what tribe, city, or countryside’. This was an ideal religion which Jews could now appreciate for its

‘monotheism and rigorous moral standards.’85 It was, in many respects, an ideal state for

Jews.

150

Yet we are reminded, in looking back to the Byzantine empire, that it had come at the end of three centuries of struggle for Jews, beginning, for instance, with a series of skirmishes leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 a.d. and the deaths, three years later, of a thousand men, women and children at Masada, who committed suicide rather than fall into

Roman hands. The intervening period was one of darkness in which Christianity, turning from Judaism and moving towards paganism, dictated that Jewish law was dead and that the Christianized pagans were now the people of God. It was at this point that Jews were accused for having crucified Christ. Jews, then, in the dark period leading up to the birth of the Byzantine empire, had become scapegoats for Christians just as they were later to become the same for Nazis.

Inherent in Greenberg’s metaphorical allusion to ancient Byzantium: and hence, further back to the pagan period of Christianity, is perhaps a backhanded allusion to a Nazi dilemma regarding depictions of images of Christ. There is, says Neil Levi, in his essay

‘”Judge for Yourselves!” – The Degenerate Art Exhibition as Political Spectacle’,

‘something puzzling about the Nazi focus on “mocking” images of Christ.’86 What puzzles

Levi is that ‘significant political and ideological antagonism existed between Christian and

Nazi institutions’, yet the church itself was seen to comply with ‘some of the more heinous aspects of Nazi policy’, its dogma offering the National Socialists ‘anti-Semitic resources.’87 Clearly, Christian ideology still had within its dogma vestiges of its pagan past, a past which dated back beyond the Byzantine empire. The Nazi party’s lukewarm embrace of Christianity, then, was a useful ploy in its fight against Judaism.

151

Where the dilemma lay, however, was in the ambivalent fact that Christ was, himself,

Jewish and, as Levi says, Christ’s ‘racial status’ was a dilemma which was to preoccupy the

Nazis throughout the duration of their Reich. This ambivalence made itself known in the

1937 Munich exhibition Degenerate Art, in which an image of Christ (Ludwig Gies’s

Crucified Christ of 1921), presented as a ‘horror’ which had previously functioned in the cathedral as a ‘War Memorial to Heroes’, was held up to ridicule as the first thing visitors saw on entering the show.88 Conversely, says Levi, ‘when the “sullied” images of Christ are

“cleansed” in the House of German Art, they turn out to look like Hitler’.89 The imagery of

Christianity, then, became not only a means to surrepticiously mock Judaism, but also

‘another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects’ and, along the way, to portray their leaders as supernormal.90 Here was paganism at its most cynical. This cynical link between Christianity and fascism was made evident for Greenberg in The School for Dictators, in which Thomas the Cynic cites a book by the Nazi, Wilhelm Stapel, called Christentum und Nationalsozialismus, but then goes on to say that fascism

… claims to fulfil the same spiritual needs as religion, a new religion that requires the greatest sacrifices from its proselytes… in turning the Jews and money-changers out of the Temple we shall regard ourselves as the best followers of the Savior.91

It is quite possible, then, that the subject of the Nazis’ cynically ambivalent tolerance of

Christianity was a part of any discussion Greenberg might have had regarding so-called

‘degenerate’ art on his trip to Europe – as also was the possibility of how this had emanated in the various portrayals of Christianity by the Nazis.

152

In his notes on ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, Daniel Albright suggests one characteristic of that city to be the ‘abstract character’ of its art: a characteristic noted by Yeats when, in his ‘The

Tables of the Law,’ one of his characters, Owen Aherne, said that the Byzantine style moved him because

… these tall, emaciated angels and saints seem to have less relation to the world about them than to an abstract pattern of flowing lines, that suggest an imagination absorbed in the contemplation of eternity’.92

Writing in 1958 of an art form closely paralleling modernism, Greenberg also noted that the forms of Byzantine art ‘were stylized into flat patterns and used for decorative or quasi- abstract ends instead of illusionistic ones.’93 Through a blurring of the distinctions between, in the case of Byzantine art, the literal experience and the transcendental and, in the case of modernist art, the literal and everything else, both art forms arrived at ‘anti-illusionist, or rather counter-illusionist, art.’94 With reference to Pollock’s middle period, he said:

This new kind of modernist picture, like the Byzantine gold and glass mosaic, comes forward to fill the space between itself and the spectator with its radiance. And it combines in similar fashion the monumentally decorative with the pictorially emphatic, at the same time that it uses the most self-evidently corporeal means to deny its own corporeality.95

The line ‘Monuments of its own magnificence’ is said by Albright to relate to a ‘theme of self-referentiality’.96 In 1956, Greenberg asked the questions ‘might not all art, “prosaic” as well as “poetic”, begin to appear falsifying to the Jew who looked closely enough? And when did a Jew ever come to terms with art without falsifying himself somehow?’97 On a formal level, then, it could be said that Greenberg, in referring us back to Byzantium, is pointing us back to an art which, despite its figuration, had about it a quality of abstraction. 153

A quality which, in its self-referentiality, might be close to fitting the requirements of

Judaism – and an art, therefore, such as he himself was championing, which might not

‘begin to appear falsifying’ and with which, in fact, a Jew might readily come to terms without falsifying himself. An art, moreover, which snubbed its nose at Nazi anti-Semitism.

Yeats’s lines, taken out of context, leave us hanging in the air as to what comes next. In context, they continue with: ‘And therefore have I sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium’.98 These subsequent lines are left unsaid by Greenberg, for they are not essential to his argument. And yet, in quoting the preceding lines (which could also be seen as an unnecessary move) he is almost impelling us to read the rest. In the context of this reading, these unsaid lines can, therefore, in their connotations of arrival, be said to have provided a metaphorical triple meaning. Firstly, on a political level, that which suggests simultaneously a time resembling the fascist present, and a time resembling the ideal socialist state for which the Partisan Review circle, Greenberg included, were arguing.

Secondly, on an aesthetic level, a state whose art forms resembled, in some crucial respects, those of the present. Thirdly, a state whose art forms also resembled, except for the imagery, those of Jewish art. Greenberg, then, through these unsaid lines, in conjunction with those said, compels us to ‘arrive’ at three different points.

In support of this theory, given that Kristallnacht would have been fresh on the minds of

America’s Jewish community, is Martin Greenberg’s suggestion that what interested his brother about Judaism was not its religion, but its history, ‘a history that had so much made him what he was.’99 Greenberg, then, would have known that, in referring us back in time 154

to a period of relative stability for the Jewish community, he was also pointing us back to other times of persecution. In this respect, what Delmore Schwartz had to say about Yeats is particularly pertinent to how we can perceive Greenberg to have read the poem

(considering that is, that Greenberg would undoubtedly have read Schwartz), and this bears quoting at length for what it reveals:

The poem [not ‘Sailing to Byzantium”] concludes with a dramatic statement of the poet’s longing to destroy time altogether, a desire which is related… to the poet’s awareness that it is history, the movement of his age, which has greatly altered the bases and assumptions with which he began to practice his art… [of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’] the poet longs to be free of the birds, beasts and the young in one another’s arms, and to become what? A work of art!100

Given that the movement of Greenberg’s age, also, had ‘greatly altered the bases and assumptions’ with which he began to practice his art (which up to this point had been poetry), could he, then, have been emulating Yeats through his allusions to history and through his call for an art which imitated, not nature, but ‘the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves’?101 In other words an art of impersonal alienation – free from the clutches of totalitarian control. Perhaps, but if so, what might have compelled him in this mission? And what was his ultimate purpose?

The answer to these questions is not hard to ascertain, for Silone’s account of American fifth-columnists waiting in the wings to pounce, whilst fictitious, was undoubtedly based on more than an element of fact. We know that there were Nazis in America openly professing their faith, we know also that anti-Semitism and fascism were quite wide (if thinly) spread in America at that time, and that fascists, such as Henry Ford had a direct line to the Fuhrer.

It seems unlikely that such as Henry Ford would be likely to read Partisan Review: yet by 155

the same token, it was not at all unlikely, in these turbulent times, that Partisan Review was being read by anyone with a vested interest in keeping tabs on the political movements of the opposition. It was, indeed, being observed by Partisan Review’s Communist opponents, and in the early 1940s the editors became reluctant to discuss the war on account of the possibility that the magazine might be shut down by the government.102 So in all likelihood the magazine, watched from all other sides, was also being watched by the reactionary, anti-Semitic, right. Lending credence to the theory that Partisan Review knew itself to be surveyed is a cheeky poem by James Laughlin, clearly referring to the Nazi book burnings, which was published in the Summer of 1939, entitled ‘A Letter to Hitler’:

Last winter we were / short of firewood and / it was good and cold / so we used a lot of / old books that were / in the attic just old / novels nobody would / ever want to read but / we found they made / plenty of heat and / twice they set the chimney afire when / a burning page went / up with the draft and / we found they would / smolder a long time / after you thought the / fire was all out and / then suddenly burst / into flame & another / thing they made ashes / that wouldn’t stay in / the grate but floated / out all over the room!103

Given all of this it seems not at all unreasonable to assume that Greenberg, in his inclusion of Yeats’s lines and referring us, jarringly, from Byzantium in the general to Alexandria in the specific is, in point of fact, sending a subliminal message between the lines, not only to an unsolicited readership of fascist sympathisers, but also to a readership which, by its nature, comprised a large Jewish proportion. And then, the same could be said for the metaphorical linkage between ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ and ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ through the title of the latter essay (that is, the metaphorical line of thought which flows from Silone to ancient Greece and forward to Babbitt and the present) – as also it could be said for Greenberg’s inversion of Hitler’s conception of modern art. 156

The precedent for this concept of a hidden language has its origins in Jewish history: a history in which Jews were bilingual, speaking both the tongue of their adopted country and their mother tongue, Hebrew (which, according to Sandler L. Gilman, was perceived by outsiders as ‘hidden, dark, magical, dangerous’ and ‘private’).104 Yiddish was ‘a form of pidgin’, being seen as ‘German in which were embedded shards of the original magical

Hebrew.’105 That Greenberg not only spoke but was well-versed in Yiddish is evidenced by his review of Röyte Pomerantzen, where he says that of importance to understanding that text was a ‘familiarity with the cadences of Yiddish speech’ without which ‘much of the humor is lost’.106

In drawing attention to himself with his controversial essays in the face of the likelihood of their being read by the reactionary right, yet steering clear of outright reference to Judaism, he can be seen to have been fighting back, in his own way, against the barbaric forces of anti-Semitism. An action which itself has its own history within the Jewish tradition: as in, for instance, a series of Jewish insurrections circa 165 b.c. under Antiochus IV, in which

Jews were, for the most part, victorious.107 Greenberg was later to refer directly to the times of the Old Testament in his review of the work of the Palestinian painter Mordecai Ardon-

Bronstein, more of which below.

The ‘physical’ fear he had felt in 1943 due to fascism had not diminished by 1949 and was to give rise to an article published in Commentary in late 1950, ‘Self-Hatred and Jewish

Chauvinism: Some Reflections on “Positive Jewishness”’ wherein he called for modern 157

anti-Semitism (which gathered momentum ‘instead of expending itself’ when going

‘unresisted beyond a certain point’) to be directly resisted by ‘personal action on the part of individual Jews.’108 That is, he was saying that Jews had to ‘show the world’ and themselves that ‘Jews can fight’ – and fight their enemy on their own terms without having to call in the gentile ‘policeman’.109 For Greenberg, Jews had been ‘punished by history’ and accepted ‘the recognition that history usually punishes people only for being helpless’.110 That historically Jews could, indeed, fight, that they were not inherently helpless, is itself inherent in the Jewish history to which it has been suggested Greenberg refers us in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ through making us look back historically in his reference to ancient Byzantium.

Greenberg, then, can now be seen to have been battling on three fronts, the political, the aesthetic and the religious. The Jewish struggle was clearly of at least equal concern to him as the aesthetic ‘struggle’ of the avant-garde against the hostile forces of barbarism. Writing in 1955, he observed that Kafka, ‘the emancipated Jew’:111

… feels the inveterate Jewish yearning for history with a consciousness and an impatience that no Orthodox Jew could permit himself; and feels it all the more because it is he himself… who must deny himself history as long as he continues to fear it.112

By Greenberg’s reckoning, Kafka did not deny himself history, but rather, embedded its

‘menace’ to the Jew in his writings. This menace was ‘figured’, amongst other things, in the

‘scratched “entries” of “barbaric mountain dwellers”’ and in ‘the nomad barbarians who devour living animals under the windows of a passive, hidden Emperor.’113 If we take these

‘scratched entries’ to represent the Nazi propaganda machine, and the ‘passive, hidden 158

Emperor’ to represent the silently acquiescing masses, then it becomes possible to take

Greenberg’s reading of Kafka to be in some way a metaphor; particularly since immediately preceding these observations, he tells us that Kafka’s ‘sense of the world around him was the sense of a trap… as the Jews of Europe had reason to know twenty years after his death’.114

This feeling of entrapment, latent in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, but evident in Greenberg’s recounting of the fate of Gottfried Benn (which, while not directly relating to anti-

Semitism, can be seen to have had its further implications), has now revealed itself in full force. And the threat of such an entrapment could never be entirely absent all the while anti-Semitism remained a visible and tangible entity. Not unrelated to this is the possibility that Greenberg, in his call for socialism to preserve the last vestiges of living culture, in echoing Babbit’s plea for a saving remnant of culture, was arguing not only for the saving of Western culture, but also, between the lines through his espousal of abstract art, for the saving of a remnant of Jewish culture.

To summarize, what we have seen is that Greenberg, influenced by an eclectic range of sources, was responding directly to the threat of Nazism and hence, in all likelihood, to anti-Semitism also. And, through first determining the difference between the avant-garde and all that was not avant-garde, he formulated a theory of art which placed the avant-garde arts (at least on paper) not only safely within their own boundaries, but also safely removed from all that could be utilized for totalitarian ends.

159

That ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ was written in direct response to fascist and Stalinist ideology (particularly that of Nazism) there is no doubt. Additionally, there are too many parodic similarities for the writing of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ as having been a direct response to Hitler’s 1937 not to be taken into serious consideration – particularly since there is clear evidence of Partisan Review’s awareness of the letter of Hitler’s views, and particularly since Greenberg had noted the fact that Brecht had parodied Stalin. Beyond this, Greenberg had saved his harshest criticisms for the Nazis because they were the first to adopt the practice of acceding to the wishes of the masses – Italian fascists only having done so latterly and with some hesitation.

That Greenberg had, through the use of metaphor, taken us on a geographical and historical journey from modern America to ancient Byzantium we know. Further to which his knowledge of poetry might have told him that Yeats himself, in the series of poems called

‘The Tower’ (of which ‘Sailing to Byzantium was the first), leads us, through a host of metaphorical allusions, not only from Ireland to Byzantium, but also from Yeats’s

‘comfortable home to the brink of war’ (which provides for yet another reason why

Greenberg quotes Yeats’s lines).115

This journey from comfortable home to the brink of war might well describe Greenberg’s own journey, as also this argument, up to this point. The following chapter continues the journey from 1941 to the point in 1953 where Greenberg expressed extreme concern for anti-Semitism. 160

Notes

1 Greenberg, ‘Autobiographical Statement’, 194 2 Clement Greenberg, ‘Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 177 (first published in Contemporary Jewish Record, February 1944), O’Brian’s note to this essay runs as follows:

The editors of Contemporary Jewish Record asked contributors to the symposium to respond to the following questions: ‘Has the writer formed a conscious attitude toward his (Jewish) heritage or does he merely ‘reflect’ it in a passive, haphazard, and largely unconscious fashion? Is there any valid sense in which one can speak of differences between the work of Jews and non-Jews – differences possibly relating to both the choice of literary material and to the imaginative use made of it? Are there certain themes or ideas that are characteristic of modern literature as a whole but toward which the Jew is more responsive, or responsive in a somewhat different way, that his Christian colleagues? Lastly, to what extent, and in what manner, has his awareness of his position as artists and citizen been modified or changed by the revival of anti-Semitism as a powerful force in the political history of our time? (pp. 176-177)

Greenberg, it should be noted, did not respond directly to the question regarding anti-Semitism. He did, however, say that the Jewish code of behaviour was hung on to by the Jew ‘because as the member of a minority under hostile pressure he requires it for the struggle’. Yet this code of behaviour was ‘too utterly middle-class to inform the Jewish writer’s attitude to what he writes about.’ (p. 179) 3 Idem. 4 Idem. 5 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Jewishness of Franz Kafka: Some Sources of His Particular Vision’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3, 202-203 (first published in Commentary, April 1955) 6 Letter from Martin Greenberg dated March 28, 2002 7 Idem. 8 Sidney Tillim, ‘Criticism and Culture, or Greenberg’s Doubt’, 127 The issue of the Jewishness of the New York intelligentsia is addressed by Terry A. Cooney in his chapter ‘Roots and Sources’ (The Rise of the New York Intellectuals, 10-37). Citing a history stemming from the end of the nineteenth century haskalah or “Jewish Enlightenment’, Cooney speaks of the conflict for the children of first generation immigrants between traditional and Western culture. The Jewish intellectual sprang from this tension between ‘the Jewish community and the pull of the world’. What attracted this group of intellectuals to Western culture, says Cooney, was ‘a cultural promise, a literary tradition, and a pattern of social protest…’: the ‘sense of universal significance associated with their educational commitments’ which stood in stark contrast to the narrow concerns of the Jewish community. They were, in fact, ‘locating themselves in the space between – or beyond – Jewish and gentile culture.’ It was in this location that lay the ‘problem of identity for intellectual Jews’ and in which resided the ‘alienation’ of which Tillim speaks. Beyond this, they were a highly politically motivated group and it was not by coincidence that, after World War I, a ‘large proportion’ of the American Communist Party were Jewish. Yet it was a break with the Communist Party and an alignment with the more radical politics of Trotskyism which, as discussed above, became the political underpinning of the re-vamped Partisan Review. 9 Idem. 10 Greenberg, ‘Autobiographical Statement’, 194, Greenberg’s parentheses. 11 Chaim Potok, Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews, New York, 1978, 508-509 Cooney (The Rise of the New York Intellectuals, 18) puts the rational fear of this group for rural or western American political movements down to the existence of groups like the Klan and the Coughlinites who ‘did attack urban, eastern intellectuals, decry radical thought, and foster anti-Semitism.’ 12 Potok, Wanderings, 509 For a more detailed explanation of the extent of Ford’s anti-Semitism see: Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic, New York, 1987, 101-7 13 Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, 55 161

14 Idem. According to Collier and Horowitz the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, ‘an alleged report about the secret meetings of Jewish leaders devoted to world domination’:

… came from a woman calling herself Madame Shiskmereff… Concocting a phony genealogy for “The Protocols” (the pamphlet was actually written in 1905 by a Czarist agent trying to channel the revolutionary ferment in Russia into an anti-Semitic byway), she gave [Ernest] Liebold [who worked for Ford] a copy… Claiming that the Jews had connived in everything from the discovery of the New World (Queen Isabella was a “Jewish front”) to the destruction of Europe as a result of World War I, “The Protocols” was a sort of encyclopaedia of ethnic virulence. (Collier and Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic, 103-104)

For further information on ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ see: Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, 55-57. On page 57, Rosenbaum, following on from the arguments of Munich journalist Konrad Heiden, suggests that Hitler had ‘adopted the tactics falsely attributed to Jews by Czarist forgers as his own.’ And that ‘if one examines Hitler’s behaviour after he assumed power, one realizes he didn’t merely use counterfeit documents and forged interpretations of history, he counterfeited the very stuff of history itself…’ (Rosenbaum’s emphases) 15 Ibid., xxxix 16 Collier and Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic, 105 17 Michael Zalampas, Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in American Magazines, 1923-1939, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 150 Zalampas’s source for this was ‘Oozlebarts and Cantor’, Time, 15 August 1938, 15. 18 Ibid., 163. Zalampas’s source for this was ‘Lindbergh on the Spot’, Newsweek, 17 Oct., 1938, and ‘Lindy’s Nazi Eagle’, Newsweek, 31 October, 1938). Apparently, Lindbergh had ‘glowed with embarrassed pride’ when Goering ‘hung the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle around Lindbergh’s neck and pinned on his chest the six-pointed star that goes with it.’ 19 Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, xxxix 20 Robert S. Wistrich, Weekend in Munich: Art, Propaganda and Terror in the Third Reich, London, 1996, 27. Wistrich’s source for this information is Peter Loewenberg, ‘The Kristallnacht as a Public Degradation Ritual’, Leo Baeck Yearbook, XXXII (1987), 309-323 21 For information on the reportage of Kristallnacht, see: Zalampas, Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in American Magazines, 165-166. Also around this time were numerous reports in the American press of Nazi atrocities, but most chilling of all was a report by William E. Dodd (‘Germany Shocked Me’, The Nation, 2 August 1938, 176-178; reprinted in the Reader’s Digest, September, 1938, 102-105) that Hitler had ‘confidently predicted “that by 1950 no Jew” would be living within German boundaries for they “will all have been killed or driven into exile”’. (p. 146) At the beginning of 1939 reportage was coming in (‘”Christian” Per Inch’, Time, 19 January 1939, 16) of ‘signs of growing anti-Semitism in the United States. New York employment ads. Increasingly specified “Christian”, “Gentile”, or “Anglo-Saxons only”… Many Jewish women had begun “wearing crosses to obtain work”’ 22 AGK, 11 23 Texts referring to Greenberg’s Jewishness include, for example: Collins, ‘Le Pessimisme Politique et “La Haine de Soi” Juive’; Margaret Olin, ‘C[lement] Hardesh [Greenberg] & Co.: Formal Criticism and Jewish Identity’, in: The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art, University of Nebraska Press, 2001, 159-177 (my thanks to my supervisor Assoc. Prof. Alan Krell for recommending this article), and Tillim, ‘Criticism and Culture or Greenberg’s Doubt’. Olin, for instance, makes a broader argument, placing Greenberg within the context of other Jewish critics such as Waldemar George, Bernard Berenson and Harold Rosenberg. For Olin, Greenberg’s ‘few remarks about Judaism [within the arts] represent the pathos of his enterprise, a pathos at the heart of Modernism.’ (p. 176) 162

And Collins (who, despite the title of his essay does not go into Greenberg’s Jewishness in any great depth), speaks of the early period of the Jewish New York intellectuals, but without discussing ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in relation to this, and quickly moves on to his later career. 24 De Duve, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, 40 25 Idem. 26 Greenberg quoted in: Ibid., 41, quoted from: AGK, 9 27 De Duve, Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines, 41 28 Ibid., 39 29 Ibid., 45 30 Ibid., 46 31 Ibid., 48 32 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated Jan 16, 1939 33 De Duve, Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines, 46 34 Trotsky, ‘Leon Trotsky to André Breton’, 126 35 Zalampas, Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in American Magazines, 167. Zalampas does not separate out his sources, but the sources given for the entire paragraph are: ‘Woe to the Jews!’, Time, 28 November 1938, 17; ‘Democracies Uniting to Solve the Problem of Fleeing Jews’, Newsweek, 28 November 1938, 13-14, and ‘Ad Nauseum!’, Time, 5 December 1938, 19-20 36 For instance, according to Zalampas (p.167, same sources as above endnote):

Reports from Germany stressed there was no easing in the persecution of Jews. In Berlin, 8,000 Jewish apartments were expropriated. In Breslau, all telephone service “to Jews was cut off”. In Munich, police “raided rich Jewish homes for art works.” Across Germany, rabbis were jailed. Jews were forbidden to sell their securities or to draw more than 100 marks a day from their bank accounts. Jews were no longer given receipts even when they paid their fines or taxes…

And so it goes on. By Zalampas’s account (p. 168), by December 1938, press reports revealed that Nazi anti- Semitism had proceeded to inform the politics of the Czech, Slovak and South African governments. Beyond the notorious Ford, Nazi anti-Semitism had apparently been disseminated in America by such as Father Coughlin, who, ‘broadcasting from Detroit, praised the pogrom as a German “defense mechanism” against “Jewish-sponsored Communism”’, in the process openly borrowing ‘materials from a Nazi pamphlet printed at Erfurt accusing Jews of having masterminded and financed the communist revolution.’ (The sources for this information are listed as: Czech Twilight’, Newsweek, 5 December 1938, 17; ‘We Are Wanderers’, Time, 5 December 1938, 17-18; ‘760,000 Jews’, Newsweek, 5 December 1938, 17-18; The Nation, 17 December 1938, 655-658, and ‘Cardial and Coughlin’, The New Republic, 21 December 1938, 186) 37 De Duve, Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines, 46 38 Clement Greenberg, ‘Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism: Some Reflections on “Positive Jewishness”’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3, 56 (first published in Commentary, November 1950) 39 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Question of the Pound Award’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2 (first published in Partisan Review, May 1949), 304 Greenberg was but one contributor to this article, written in response to William Barrett’s editorial ‘A Prize for Ezra Pound’, which appeared in the April issue of Partisan Review regarding that year’s award of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry to Ezra Pound. This was a discussion of whether or not Pound, on account of his anti-Semitism, should have been awarded the prize. Most contributors came down on the positive side because of the quality of his work. Greenberg, however, expressed his disgust in that the judges ‘could have taken greater trouble to explain their decision and thereby spared me, and a good many Jews like me, additional offense’; by which he did not mean ‘necessarily’ that he was personally against the award. (p. 305). For the views of other contributors, see: ‘The Question of the Pound Award’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 5, May 1949, 512-522 40 De Duve, Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines, 54, 66 41 Ibid., 67 42 Idem. 43 Ibid., 77 44 Idem. 163

45 Ibid., 45 46 Platt, ‘Clement Greenberg in the 1930s’, 49, 52 47 Idem. 48 Ibid., 57, 58 49 Ibid., 57 50 Idem. 51 Robert Storr, ‘No Joy in Mudville: Greenberg’s Modernism Then and Now’, in: Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings in High and Low, eds.Kirk Varnedoe et al, New York, 1991, 176 52 Ibid., 175 53 Greenberg, quoted in Ibid., 176: quoted from: Clement Greenberg, ‘Kafka’s Jewishness’, in: Greenberg, Art and Culture, 1961, 269 ‘Kafka’s Jewishness’ is a rewrite of ‘The Jewishness of Franz Kafka: Some Sources of His Particular Vision’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3, 202-209 (first published in Commentary, April 1955) 54 Storr, ‘No Joy in Mudville’, 176 55 Greenberg, ‘Kafka’s Jewishness’, 268 56 Ibid., 269 57 Greenberg, ‘Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism’, 46, 47 58 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated Feb. 16, 1939 59 Rosenberg, ‘Myth and History’, 20 60 Clement Greenberg, ‘Bertolt Brecht’s Poetry’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1 (first published in Partisan Review, March-April, 1941), 60 In ‘Kafka’s Jewishness’ Greenberg was to say of ‘Lob der Partei’, from the play Die Massnahme, that even here ‘Brecht cannot prevent himself from parodying the Old Testament, and Stalin in the bargain, whose own style, with its catechism-like alternation of question and answer derives from religious liturgy.’ (Greenberg, ‘Kafka’s Jewishness’, 263) 61 Ibid., 51 62 To consider the parody suggested here is to also consider the subversive humour apparent in Greenberg’s letters to Lazarus, as discussed in Chapter Two. 63 For publication details of this speech see ’Adolf Hitler, speech inaugurating the “Great Exhibition of German Art 1937”, Munich’, in: Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 474 (footnote). It might well be possible to find direct evidence of Partisan Review’s knowledge of the letter of Hitler’s speech of 1937 in either the Dwight MacDonald Papers in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale or the James T. Farrell Collection in the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania. 64 George L.K. Morris, ‘Art Chronicle: The Architectural Evolution of Brancusi’, Partisan Review, Vol. V. No. 3, Aug-Sep 1938, 34 Further to this, Hitler does refer to the neanderthal in his speech inaugurating the Great Exhibition of German Art (Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 482): ‘For our sake those prehistoric stone-age culture- vultures and art stammerers may just as well retreat to the caves of their ancestors to adorn them with their primitive international scribblings.’ Which might tend to suggest either that this speech and the one referred to Morris are one and the same, or that, at the least, the content was remarkably similar. The significance of the avant-garde being, as noted by Hitler, an international phenomenon is noted in the main text of this thesis. 65 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, postcard of Porte Saint Martin, Paris, dated 11 May, 1939 66 Hitler, speech: the Great Exhibition of German Art 1937, 475 That Hitler was using this occasion primarily to promote his personal anti-Semitic campaign is clear from the following passages:

This power (the ‘overwhelming formative influence of one outstanding racial core’), once capable of forming a people… is contained here again in the same Aryan race which we recognize not only as the carrier of our own culture, but a that of preceding cultures of antiquity as well… (p. 478)

From now on we will wage an unrelenting war of purification against the last elements of putrefaction in our culture…. From now on – I assure you – all those cliques of babblers, dilletantes and art crooks which lend support to each other and are therefore able to survive, will be eliminated and abolished. (p. 482) 164

In regard to the former passage, Greenberg’s statement, ‘Today we look to socialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now’ (AGK, 22), takes on its deepest significance – in that, for him, living culture was continued by neither race not creed. Returning briefly to Babbitt’s call for a ‘clear-cut type of person’ who would ‘incline toward a clear-cut type of art’ and ‘be guided in deciding what is sufficiently clear-cut and what is an unjustifiable hybrid’, one could argue further, that Greenberg’s resort to purism was, in part, a response to the Nazi-propagated notion of the Jew as a chimeric aberration – at once inferior as a type, yet somehow sufficiently intelligent to be able to control the direction of art. This stereotype of the Jew as a hybridised figure can be seen to be manifest in the character of Shylock, whose otherness is illustrated by Shakespeare by means of his hybridized pattern of speech. The hybrid, then, had long been a means by which Jews were perceived and it was against any form of hybridization in the arts against which Greenberg was arguing. The connection between these two points warrants consideration in the context that Greenberg was arguing specifically against kitsch and then specifically against the Nazi utilisation of kitsch: for the hybrid in Greenberg’s canon was anything but the Jew. (For an explanation of Shakespeare’s use of a hybridized form of speech to characterize Shylock’s otherness, and the stereotype of the Jew as hybrid, see: ‘Language and Social Class’, in: Cambridge School Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice, eds. Jonathan Morris and Robert Smith, Cambridge University Press, 1992, 180-181. My thanks to Dr Christopher Heathcote for drawing this aspect to my attention.) 67 AGK, 5 68 Hitler, speech: The Great Exhibition of German Art 1937, 475, 480 69 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, Volume 1, Springfield, Mass., 1965 Further to this is Greenberg’s placement of ‘ersatz culture’ synonymously with kitsch (AGK, 12). Ersatz, in both English and German, means ‘substitute’; but in German it also means ‘reparation’ – which might be seen to suggest the possibility that the art Hitler lionised was being flung back at him not only as false, but as false for revenge. 70 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Marc Chagall, Lyonel Feininger, and Jackson Pollock’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 165, (first published in The Nation, 27 November 1943) The full sentences read:

The mud abounds in Pollock’s larger works, and these, though the least consummated, are his most original and ambitious… In the large, audacious Guardians of the Secret he struggles between two slabs of inscribed mud (Pollock almost always inscribes his purer colors); and space tautens but does not burst into a picture; nor is the mud quite transmuted.

71 Lessing, Laocoön, 13 72 Idem. 73 Hitler, speech: the Great Exhibition of German Art 1937, 476 74 Idem.; AGK, 12 75 Robert Pincus-Witten, ‘Six Propositions on Jewish Art’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 50, No. 4, December 1975, 68 76 AGK, 6 77 Ibid., 9; Lessing, Laocoön, 45 78 AGK, 8, 9 79 Ibid., 9 80 Idem. 81 Ibid., 10 The word ‘Alexandrianism’ itself points us back, through the dictionary definition for ‘Alexandrian’ (O.E.D.), firstly ‘to the school of Greek literature, esp. poetry, which flourished at Alexandria under the Ptolemies, and is regarded as a “silver age”, derivative, imitative, artificial, addicted to recondite learning’, and, secondly, to those ‘belonging or akin to the schools of philosophy in Alexandria, esp. those which produced (amongst others) Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. On a formal level, then, the decadent forms of Alexandria can be seen to closely resemble in essence the forms of kitsch – be that Nazi or otherwise. Yet on 165

another level we are reminded of a time when Christianity, infused with philosophy, crept out of its pagan past. 82 Idem. 83 Yeats, A Vision, 1937 (1925), quoted in: Daniel Albright, ‘Notes: The Tower’, in: W.B. Yeats: The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright, London, 1990, 629 84 Delmore Schwartz, ‘The Poet as Poet’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 3, Spring 1939, 57 85 Potok, Wanderings, 376-377; other information about the Byzantine Empire from: Merle Severy, ‘The Byzantine Empire: Rome of the East’, National Geographic, Vol. 164, No. 6, December 1983, 709-766 86 Neil Levi, ‘”Judge for Yourselves!” – The Degenerate Art Exhibition as Political Spectacle’, October 85, Summer 1998, 52 87 Idem. 88 Idem. 89 Idem. 90 AGK, 20 91 Silone, ‘The School for Dictators’, 35 92 Yeats, quoted in: Albright, ‘Notes: The Tower’, 630, quoted from: ‘Tables of the Law’, in: W. B. Yeats, The Secret Rose and Other Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Varorium Edition, ed. Philip L. Marcus, et.al., Cornell University Press, 1981 93 Clement Greenberg, ‘Byzantine Parallels’, in: Greenberg, Art and Culture, 168 94 Idem. 95 Ibid., 169 96 Albright, ‘Notes: The Tower’, 631 97 Greenberg, ‘’Kafka’s Jewishness’, 273 n.b. As previously noted, this is a rewrite of ‘The Jewishness of Franz Kafka: Some Sources of His Particular Vision’ of 1955. In this earlier version (p209) he says of Kafka that ‘Poetry in meter would have been too high falutin, too Gentile, would have involved a mortal falsification. And might not fiction, too, and literature in general be falsification?’ 98 W. B. Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in: W.B. Yeats: The Poems, 239 99 Martin Greenberg, correspondence dated March 28, 2002 100 Schwartz, ‘The Poet as Poet’, 57 101 AGK, 8 102 According to Gilbert, a ‘campaign to discourage pro-Communist authors from printing in the Partisan had been mounted by the Communists even before the magazine first appeared.’ Gilbert then goes on to cite the case of William Carlos Williams, who had refused to let an article appear in Partisan Review because he found the New Masses so violently opposed to the magazine that they had refused to print him if he remained a contributor (Gilbert, Writers and Partisans, 193). Obviously the New Masses was reading Partisan Review in order to use stand-over tactics against prospective contributors. That the editors became reluctant to discuss the war (Ibid., 248) because of the possibility that the magazine might be shut down by the government suggests that were possibly aware that they were, indeed, being surveyed from this quarter too. Also in this regard, the word ‘kitsch’ might well have been chosen because it would have lost nothing in the translation. That Greenberg was aware of the possibility of such a loss of meaning is evident from his review of Brecht’s A Penny for the Poor, wherein:

In its original German, at least, the novel is to some extent redeemed by Brecht’s virtuosity as a matter of language. Scattered throughout the book are splendidly executed passages of irony in a prose which for its firmness and sensitivity might serve as a model for any writer of German. The English translation, much too literal, has caught almost nothing of this, and very little more of Brecht’s “collage” compositions in cliché and cant phrase, for which he has an extraordinary ear. Isherwood’s version of Brecht’s own poems (are) inadequate since they coarsen Brecht’s colloquialisms to the point of banality, something which is entirely absent from the German. (Greenberg, ‘The Beggars Opera’, 5)

103 James Laughlin, ‘A Letter to Hitler’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 4, Summer 1939, 68 This poem provides proof that Hitler’s anti-Semitic zeal was known at least three months prior to the publication of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. Held on the 10 May 1933, the works destroyed at these burnings included, along with those of Sigmund Freud etc., those of Mann and Brecht. Additionally, on 11 April 1933, 166

the Bauhaus was shut down. Following from a prolonged campaign of the confiscation of ‘culturally Bolshevik, degenerate or subversive’ artworks, in 1937 about 17,000 artworks were removed ‘in weeks’ from public collections – some 600 of which were to comprise the exhibition of Degenerate Art (for this information see: Sandro Bocola, The Art of Modernism: Art, Culture, and Society from Goya to the Present Day, Munich, London, New York, 1999, 381) Again, given Greenberg’s milieu and his trip to Europe in early 1939, it is unlikely that he would not have had some awareness of these actions – particularly since some of those artists and writers affected by Nazism had already moved to America. 104 Sandler L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, 16 105 Ibid., 18 106 Greenberg, ‘The Jewish Joke: Review of Röyte Pomerantzen’, 186-187 107 For these insurrections, see: Potok, Wanderings, 247-248 108 Greenberg, ‘Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism’, 53 109 Ibid., 52 110 Idem. 111 Greenberg, ‘The Jewishness of Franz Kafka: Some Sources of His Particular Vision’, 206 112 Idem. 113 Idem. 114 Idem. 115 Albright, ‘Notes: The Tower’, 628-629 167

CHAPTER SIX: A CULTURE IN PLIGHT

A wartime perspective

In its July-August issue of 1941, almost a year after ‘An American View’ was published by

Horizon, Partisan Review published ‘10 Propositions on the War’, co-authored by

Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald. As in the former article, the choice was between conventional war fought on behalf of the Roosevelt-Churchill war regimes (representing a cultural elite), or revolutionary war fought on behalf of the proleteriat. At stake was the future of democracy itself, for, as Greenberg had said in ‘An American View’, the only future which offered ‘any hope and credibility to the masses’ was ‘that of socialism.’1 And now, owing to the incompetence of the Roosevelt-Churchill social system in planning

‘long-scale production whether for war or peace’, it seemed that only the working class was capable of waging effective war against Nazism because it alone could ‘overmatch the

Nazis’ in ‘military methods’, ‘war production’, and ‘war aims’.2 On the slim chance that the Roosevelt-Churchill regimes ‘and their class’ might win the war, ‘the masses everywhere [could] hope for little for themselves from Hitler’s defeat.’3

What Greenberg and Macdonald were after was the formation of an effective socialist movement able to fight both Nazi fascism and capitalism (which was both ‘intolerable in a functional as well as a moral sense’ and ‘archaic’).4 Without such a ‘socialist revolution’, they felt, fascism would ‘triumph in one form or another’.5 The war then was between socialism and differing shades of fascism. This alignment of capitalism with fascism, that is, the awareness of certain similar potentials, might be seen as being of importance in 168

understanding Greenberg’s continuing opposition over the years to the commercializing effects of capitalism.

That he and Macdonald were equating capitalism with fascism is evident throughout this article. The alternative outcomes of a non-Socialist war were ‘military defeat owing to the superiority of fascism in total warfare’, or ‘victory under a fascist system of our own’ – for they saw that to support the ultra-right wing Roosevelt and Churchill regimes (which had turned against the ‘labor movement’) was to clear the road for fascism.6

Strange as these views might seem today, these were desperate times; and in looking to socialism as the great redeemer, as Greenberg had done previously in ‘Avant-Garde and

Kitsch’ and ‘An American View’, he and Macdonald were not alone. In England, for instance, George Orwell, as far back as 1937, had determined that the only way of ‘saving

England from Fascism’ was through the bringing into existence of ‘an effective Socialist party.’7

But there were, at the time, counter-arguments to this position. Challenging Greenberg and

Macdonald for their ‘Utopian ideas’, Philip Rahv saw not only that Hitler, ‘by his swift conquests’, had ‘removed one country after another from the area of possible revolutionary action’, but also that the war had ‘evolved in such a way as to exclude more and more the prospect of a socialist way out of the catastrophe.’8 In his view it was ‘wholly gratuitous to dismiss a bourgeois-democratic victory as meaningless’, for, while ‘in itself it would not bring socialism’ it would at least give the labor movement ‘an opportunity to take stock of 169

itself, to re-group its forces, and, if so minded, to resume the struggle for a fundamental reconstruction of society.’9 Despite which, Rahv still thought it was ‘sheer romanticism’ to believe in a revolution in America given the ‘economic conditions [and] the relations between the social classes’.10 Yet, rational though this seems today, nobody in 1941 had all the right answers. And, despite history proving Greenberg and company wrong, the fact is that their vision of a politically engaged proletariat demonstrates a certain faith in the resources of the lower classes, and (for the reasons they would be fighting) a concern for their condition. This concern, most apparent in Orwell’s writing, was also evident, as we have seen, in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’.

Such a faith in the working class, however, was matched by a lack of faith in the communist leadership and its camp followers. Just two months after ’10 Propositions’, in his review of Paul Frölich’s Rosa Luxemburg, Her Life and Work, Greenberg openly criticized the legacy of both Trotsky and Lenin. Because of their lack of attention to, or appreciation of, ‘the unique and personal’ in those with whom they dealt, and because of their editing out of the personal in their public personas, their followers, in their zeal, were blindly aping ‘the externals’ of those they followed.11 Thereby, they were cultivating in themselves a ‘narrowness’ which passed ‘for self-oblivious devotion’, and a ‘harshness in personal relations’ and ‘desolating incapacity for experience’ which had become ‘the hallmarks and standard traits of the Communist “professional revolutionary”.’12 Despite having shown ‘admirable energy, devotion and capacity for self-sacrifice’ these ‘organizers and agitators’ had estranged the very classes they wished to engage.13 The ‘liability’ that this ‘Bolshevism’ had ‘brought the socialist movement’ was, in Greenberg’s view, as 170

responsible as ‘the stultifying smugness and pettiness of the social democrats for the present plight of the working class.’14

That the communist remoteness from reality had resulted in the failure to engage the interest of the masses is borne out by another observation of Orwell’s regarding a communist speaker’s address to a British working class audience (and we can judge from

Greenberg’s criticisms that this was precisely the sort of thing he was referring to). ‘His speech’, said Orwell, ‘was the usual bookish stuff, full of long sentences and parentheses… besides the usual jargon of “ideology” and “class-consciousness” and “proletarian solidarity”’.15 By contrast, a ‘Lancashire working man… spoke to the crowd in their own broad lingo’, leaving no doubt as to ‘which of the two was nearer to his audience.’16 Like the Lancashire man, and unlike Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg did not present herself as impersonal, and she had learned from ‘her close association with the German socialist movement’ that:17

… the workers of the West would go into action effectively only under organisational forms which, by allowing the maximum democracy to the rank and file, insured the instantaneous sensitivity of the revolutionary leadership to the moods of the masses.18

For these reasons, Greenberg saw that the only realistic way of engaging the masses in the fight for democracy would be through paying ‘as much attention to what Luxemburg said as to what Lenin said’.19 Yet clearly, by this stage, he was having doubts about communism as a whole, rather than simply Stalinism: his remarks on Lenin’s and Trotsky’s legacy demonstrating this point. And perhaps these doubts had crept in some time previously, for in his and Macdonald’s reply to Rahv it had been revealed that the ten propositions traced 171

their ‘paternity’ to Luxemburg, rather than to Lenin or Trotsky.20 This is significant because Greenberg’s anti-communism would later be presented by revisionists as a Cold

War strategy. Yet World War Two had hardly begun when this initial distancing from

Trotsky occurred, and as the war drew towards a close, in a 1944 letter to the editor of

Politics, Greenberg distanced himself entirely.

That this distancing was related to a growing realization that true communism had little hope of existing in the real world is evident, for, after asking the rhetorical questions as to whether the industrialization of Eastern Europe would eventually raise its standard of living, and whether an increase in production and productivity, coupled with the slackening of foreign danger, might release the socialist tendencies which Trotsky said lay locked in

Soviet economy, Greenberg answered in the negative. ‘Stalin’, he said, ‘will muzzle, imprison, or execute all bona fide working-class leaders and liberals in any country he gets control of. Such would be the immediate cost of Stalinism to Eastern Europe, as it has been and still is in Russia itself.’21 There was a small hope that Stalin might have eventually been ‘powerless to control for his own ends’ the ‘historical forces’ which he himself might

‘set in motion’, but even this hope would inevitably be dashed when it came to the Cold

War – and so, Greenberg’s opposition to Stalinism was carried over into that period. 22

This, though, was his last reference to Trotsky until the publication of ‘The Late Thirties in

New York’ in Art and Culture of 1961.

Immediately after the Rosa Luxemburg review Partisan Review published ‘Venusberg to

Nuremberg: Review of Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler by Peter Viereck.’ 172

While this was fundamentally a criticism of Viereck’s ‘exasperatingly superficial and misleading’ book, there are some enlightening points relating to Greenberg’s own position at this time.23 Rejecting ‘some of the more threadbare notions of Harvard Humanism’, and along with them ‘Professor Babbitt’s fatuities’, he also took a swipe at Thomas Mann and a further swipe at the Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn (who, it will be remembered, was admired by him during the early thirties, then introduced into ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ for falling foul of Nazi ideology despite being welcomed at first with ‘great fanfare’).24 Benn was criticized for being ‘the most important German poet after Hauptmann to come to terms with the Nazis’, and Mann for not breaking ‘publicly with Hitler until two or three years after the Nazis took power’.25 Although this year saw a drift away from Trotskyism, then, it saw an equal drift away from right-wing humanism. Yet what remained the same, naturally, was his antagonism towards Nazism and all associated with it – an antagonism which was to remain evident for some years after the war.

Where Greenberg agreed with Viereck was in the ‘indisputable’ fact that Romanticism was

‘the most important single source of Nazi doctrine’.26 Though, unlike Viereck, he didn’t see certain Nazi leaders (lovers of Romanticism – ‘intellectuals and artists manqués’) as

‘Greenwich Village politicians’.27 Seeing them for the thugs that they were, he said that

‘the bohemia of putsches and freebootery in which the Nazis learn their politics was no artist’s quarter, in spite of the fact that its plots were hatched in cafés.’28

Of Romanticism, it is of some interest that in the space of two years Greenberg had gone from portraying it simply as being responsible for confusing the arts, to discussing its 173

darker undertones – its use-value to the Nazis being clearly similar to that of kitsch.

Perhaps he had recognized this connection all along for, back in 1939, he had demonstrated some awareness of precisely the type of art favoured by Hitler over Goebbels and

Mussolini (who had each courted the avant-garde before they caved in to mass taste). Or perhaps he even saw the direct relationship between kitsch and Romanticism, such as outlined by Hermann Broch, in which the former was a product of the latter, each responding to a similar nostalgic need for a ‘better and safer world’.29 Certainly, by 1944, in a review of the Whitney Annual and Romantic Painting in America, Greenberg had perceived something of this nature in the ‘neo-Romanticism’ of Salvador Dali, Georgio de

Chirico and various Americans, who looked ‘to the past for qualities of sentiment and formal schemes’ – for, in this ‘new’ Romanticism, a ‘nostalgia’ was ‘felt for a harmony’ which could be ‘found only in the past.’ 30 As kitsch had once been portrayed as responding to a certain need in society brought about by the loss of traditional culture, so too, going by

Greenberg’s interpretation, neo-Romanticism and Surrealism could now be seen as responding to the same loss. And the similarities between these and kitsch do not end here.

Like kitsch, these new phenomena were seen to be market-driven. Apparently taking ‘their cue’ from Salvador Dali (who, according to Greenberg, wanted the attention of society and its money) the neo-Romantics and Surrealists were now producing the ‘the first “modern” art to have become a social success on the spot’.31 Beyond the obvious analogies with Pop

Art (analogies which cannot be ignored in seeking reasons for Greenberg’s intransigence), it is worth considering that this account of Surrealism was written during war-time when any popularly successful art form stood to be commandered by the Nazi propaganda 174

machine. And in this regard, the analogies might seem to go further. For, in their nostalgic looking to the past for qualities of sentiment and formal schemes, neo-Romanticism and

Surrealism were seen by Greenberg to be returning to the academic. And academicism, as

Greenberg had made plain in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ was synonymous with kitsch. Like kitsch, the academic was easily digestible. So too were neo-Romanticism and Surrealism, as opposed to Cubism and abstraction which required a certain patience with ‘the thought and feeling involved in the transposition of the aesthetic to and from the rest of experience.’32

Put another way, neo-Romanticism and Surrealism, as described by Greenberg, could be seen, like kitsch, as peddling in the ersatz. And what was Nazi kitsch, after all, but an ersatz reminder of that better and safer world of yore: pageantry, banners, even fairy tales with, for instance, Hitler as the knight who ‘fought with hell’ to free ‘the glorious German soul’ (the sleeping beauty) from the ‘cave of thorns’.33 For which good deed ‘all of the people cried out: “Heil!”’.34 The type of things, in fact, which the Nazis had used to mesmerize the nostalgia-hungry masses into submission. As Broch had observed, kitsch was ‘the simplest and most direct way of soothing this nostalgia’, and ‘the Romantic need was at one time satisfied by chivalrous novels or novels of adventure (in which the immediate terms of historical reality were replaced by prefabricated clichés)’.35

Like Broch’s ‘prefabricated cliché’, in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ Greenberg had presented kitsch as using for its raw material ‘the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture.’36 Again like Broch, he had made links between kitsch and Romanticism, and this 175

because academicism, which had been a subset of kitsch in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, was presented in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ as being a child of Romanticism. Now, in 1944, he was making similar analogies in that the ‘latest “romantic” revival in paintings’, like

Broch’s kitsch, was responding to a society which had ‘been “romantic” for quite a while in its hunger for immediate emotion and familiar forms.’37 And this statement reflects his perception in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ that kitsch, in filling the gap left by the loss of traditional culture, was ‘destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture

[were] hungry… for the diversion which only culture of some sort can provide.’38 Further still, like kitsch, which borrowed from genuine culture its ‘devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb [and] themes’, converting them into a ‘system’ while discarding the rest, neo-

Romanticism had stood the original Romanticism ‘on its head’ by failing to ‘revolt against authority and constraints’ and by giving up ‘experiment and the assimilation of new experience’.39 In the process of this it was borrowing ‘certain innovations of pre-cubist modern art – free brushwork, high color keys – only to subordinate them to the methods and moods of mannerist, baroque, German and French romantic painting.’40 The result of this was ‘art of a decadent flavor.’41

Looking across to another essay of 1944, ‘Surrealist Painting’, we find Greenberg accusing

Dali of a similar retrogression. Dali, he said, had ‘turned on post-cubist painting, praised

Meissonier and commercial illustrations, and asserted his contempt for “formal” values by the deliberate but just as often unconscious negligences of his own painting.’42 In this, Dali was ‘no more revolutionary than fascism’ and, like kitsch, was a fake, being ‘the Ossian of our day.’ 43 Significantly, despite being ‘puerile’ and ‘no more revolutionary than fascism’, 176

Dali was ‘widely welcome.’44 And here it is possible to see that Greenberg would have been aware of the propagandist potential of neo-Romanticism and Surrealism, for, as he had made clear in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, totalitarian regimes were especially interested in any popularly acceptable imagery. Remembering the lesson Greenberg would have learned from Silone’s School for Dictators, it could be said that he was more attuned to this possibility than most.

Bearing in mind the darker import of propaganda during these years, it is worth considering that for Greenberg, as for all Jews, events had recently taken a terrifying turn for the worse.

The review of the Whitney Annual had been published on 1 January 1944, and was therefore written at the end of 1943. Casting back to Greenberg’s response to the awarding of the 1949 Bollingen Prize for Poetry to the anti-Semitic Ezra Pound, he had said, remember, that as a Jew he could not ‘help being offended by the matter of Pound’s latest poetry’ and that since 1943 ‘things like that’ had made him ‘feel physically afraid too’.45

Prior to 1943, at the time of writing his first essays, Greenberg’s fears had been in the abstract. For, although there was anti-Semitism in America, the pogroms were occurring across the Atlantic, and America had not yet joined the war. Yet something had happened during 1943 to cause a physical fear that had not abated six years later.

Looking back to this period we find a likely cause in news reports of the time. In May news arrived of the liquidation of 70,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Of the 56,065 who survived, 7,000 were shot immediately and the remainder sent to concentration camps.46 In

August a report of the American and World Jewish Congress stated that 3,030,050 Jews 177

had died from Hitler’s persecution policies.47 This, then, would have marked the point where the world became fully aware of Hitler’s genocidal intent. The salient point here, of course, is that at this time the fate of the world was still undecided. The war could have gone either way, hence the sheer depth of fear felt by Greenberg. His response to

Surrealism and neo-Romanticism, then, must be seen not only in this light, but also in the light of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch.’ Where since 1939 he had championed the avant-garde in opposition to Stalinism, Nazism and an inherent anti-Semitism, he was now championing it in opposition to the full terror of anti-Semitism.

After the Pound incident, Greenberg’s next tirade against anti-Semitism was to occur in

‘The Plight of Our Culture’ of 1953. Looking to the lead-up to this point should demonstrate that underlying his continued opposition to Stalinism was the lingering spectre of Nazism. It should also demonstrate that over these years the middlebrow, by gradual degrees, was replacing the lowbrow as the prime aesthetic enemy of the avant-garde – with the genuine avant-garde becoming less easily definable as its traditional ground became increasingly usurped by its simulacra.

One point shining though Greenberg’s wartime writings is that he was not, even within his brief espousal of Trotskyism, an extremist. Even the somewhat extreme hope for a revolution, however utopian the belief, was intended to avert the graver extremes of a Nazi- fascist or capitalist-fascist victory. In terms of Cold War revisionism (to be addressed in the next chapter), this is significant because he would here be cast as aligning himself with

Arthur Schlesinger’s ‘new liberalism’ (which, according to Serge Guilbaut, was 178

‘powerfully situated midway between fascism and communism’).48 Yet, in the area of politics, and long before The Vital Center, Greenberg’s tendency toward the middle gound was informed during 1939, as we have seen, by Ignazio Silone’s conception of a ‘third front’, which was then mediating between the extremes of capitalist conservatism and fascism. Later, with fascism out of the way, he would mediate between Stalinism and the commercializing effects of capitalism (his antipathy to which spilled over into his stringent criticism of middlebrow culture).

A post-war world-view.

Back in 1939, Greenberg had shown only a passing interest in middlebrow kitsch, such as the New Yorker and its dangers to the ‘naïve seeker of true light’; after the war, however, he was to demonstrate a growing unease at the rise of the middlebrow and its ersatz culture.49

Despite his criticism of Viereck’s Metapolitics, he had learned from it, with ‘surprise’, that

‘the ideas of the Nazis, in more or less their present form, were current among German petty bourgeois intellectuals long before 1914, much less 1933.’50 Perhaps, in this light, if the newly burgeoning American middle-class can be taken as a de facto petty bourgeoisie, then it might be reasonably supposed that underlying Greenberg’s vigilant interest in it was the fear of anti-Semitism. For behind the entire kitsch market, as Greenberg well knew, lay what Broch descibes as ‘kitsch man’, without whom kitsch could neither ‘emerge nor prosper’.51 And this ‘kitsch man’, as ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ had demonstrated, might equally be the Russian peasant, the consumer of luxury kitsch, or, given the circumstances, the complicit supporter of totalitarianism and anti-Semitism.

179

And such insidiously complicit support was, indeed, a concern of Commentary (of which

Greenberg was associate editor) when it commenced publication in November 1945, just three months after the war ended. Sponsored by The American Jewish Committee,

Commentary began with Eliot Cohen’s inaugural ‘Act of Affirmation’ which included the following chilling passage:

As Jews, we are of an ancient tradition that, in a very special sense, keeps a vigil with history. We are particularly sensitive to the march of events, perhaps because… they have so often marched over us… As Jews we live with this fact: 4,750,000 of 6,000,000 Jews of Europe have been murdered. Not killed in battle, not massacred in hot blood, but slaughtered like cattle, subjected to every physical indignity – processed… there were men and women in other lands who raised their voices in protest, who lent helping hands. But we must also record this fact: the voices were not many, the hands were not many…

And we must face this fact, too: that is the thinking and feeling that set loose this nightmare phenomenon still burns high in many countries, and lies latent in all.52

The concept that anti-Semitism lay ‘latent in all’ would, in all probability, have been a perception of Greenberg’s when he had noted similarities between capitalism and fascism back in 1941. It would be difficult therefore to overlook this and the Holocaust as significant factors in understanding Greenberg’s postwar world-view.

Returning briefly to his statement that there was ‘a quality of Jewishness’ present in every word he wrote (from ‘Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger

Generation of American Jews’ of 1944), this had been prefaced with the statement that he had ‘no more a conscious position toward his Jewish heritage than the average American

Jew’, which was to say ‘hardly any’.53 This single admission, though, has to be seen as relative, for it has to be measured against his belonging to Jewish intellectual circles, one of 180

which, The Contemporary Jewish Record (of which Greenberg was managing editor until it merged with the later Commentary), was solely Jewish. And it also has to be measured against numerous other factors, including his heckling at the Madison Square Garden Nazi rally; his obvious disappointment that his son had all the appearance of his Anglo-Saxon heritage and none of his Jewish heritage; and the capacity of the events of 1943 to instill such abject and personal fear. Perhaps, then, what he meant by ‘Jewish heritage’ was something more narrowly defined than the norm, and perhaps too he was measuring himself against his more orthodox counterparts. Certainly, in the various articles already quoted there is strong evidence of a more than passing knowledge of the Jewish past, and his 1946 review of Peggy Guggenheim’s Out of This Century (in which he was demonstrably concerned that she had abandoned her Jewish heritage) bear this out.

Seeing Guggenheim’s flight from ‘moneyed, bourgeois stuffiness’ and her reckless abandonment to bohemia as revealing ‘the unconscious conviction’ that she would be

‘returned’ somehow to the bourgeoisie (because Jews were ‘forced to remain bourgeois in spite of themselves’), Greenberg then said that he was ‘disturbed in a particular way by this account of the life of another Jew.’54 ‘Is this’, he asked, ‘how naked and helpless we Jews become once we abandon our “system” completely and surrender ourselves to a world so utterly Gentile in its lack of prescriptions and prohibitions as bohemia really is?’55 By this, it is reasonable to assume that Greenberg himself had not completely abandoned the system nor surrendered himself entirely to an ‘utterly Gentile’ world. That this was the case is apparent in ‘Under Forty’ where he had said that the Jew ‘has at least a way of life, a code of behaviour, a felt if not conscious standard to which he conforms and which protects him 181

from the ravages of Bohemianism.’56 And the maintenance of standards could be seen as the essence of what Greenberg’s modernist mission was about, for this was the ostensible reason for his promotion of the avant-garde.

In February 1946, just six months after the war ended, standards in general were still cause for concern. And, in a review of the water-color, drawing, and sculpture sections of the

Whitney Annual, Greenberg was still seeking out the middle path along which true culture might thrive. Against this, and insidiously usurping this middle path was a middle-class now ‘swelled by war prosperity with millions of new recruits’.57 Being less easily defineable than the lower ground, it was therefore less easy to guard against. Most disturbingly, this newly-swollen middle class was ‘now surging toward culture under the pressure of anxiety, high taxes, and a shrinking industrial frontier’ – an anxiety which expressed itself ‘in a market demand for cultural goods’ that were ‘up to date and yet not too hard to consume.’58 In response to this market, what was now occurring in the realm of serious art was a (mostly unconscious) temptation on the part of the artist to ‘meet’ the demand ‘by softening, sweetening, and simplifying his product.’59

Outright vulgarization was out of the question, for the public still wanted ‘something’ that had ‘the smell of high art’. This situation constituted ‘a much greater threat to high art than

Kitsch itself’: which had ‘usually’ kept ‘the distinctions clear’.60 Unfortunately, artists themselves had now ‘become reluctant to insist on preserving the distinctions, because the contemporary cultural elite’, the patrons of art, could no longer ‘furnish’ them with either 182

‘intellectual and moral support nor markets.’61 1946, then, might be seen as marking the point where he had come to fully appreciate the corrupting effect of middle-class values.

Reaffirming his anti-middlebrow stance, Greenberg wrote ‘Pessimism for Mass

Consumption: Review of An Essay on Morals by Philip Wylie’, published in October 1947 by Commentary. Here, he commenced by saying that it was ‘to the credit of the American way of life’ that it intended ‘everything and everybody for mass consumption’.62 However,

‘as long as consumers’ taste [remained] on its [then] level this otherwise laudable intention’ was causing ‘serious damage in the realm of culture.’63 What he had seen was that the trimming, rationalization and pre-digestion ‘for mass consumption’ of fine arts, poetry and philosophy would only have misled where the purpose was ‘to enlighten’.64 And here, he was as critical of consumer society as ever, perceiving that the ‘social mechanisms for maintaining interest in life and the expectation of satisfactory rewards’ had been breaking down in America since before 1939.65

Continuing this argument the following month for Horizon’s British audience in ‘The

Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’, he again bemoaned the effects of the middlebrow on American culture, saying:

It might be thought that in a country like ours, where pictorial communication, as in the movies, comics and tabloids, has encroached so much on the printed word, even for very literate people, and where industrialism insists more and more on the graphic… that in such a country painting even at its remotest from mass taste would receive some stimulus from the sheer overflow of pictorial consumption.66

183

But instead of receiving this stimulus, high culture itself had simply been usurped by the lower end, giving nothing in return. The results of this were that ‘vulgarized modern art’ was now deriving from ‘impressionism and its immediate aftermath’, penetrating ‘Life magazine, the calendars and advertisements.’67And this had had ‘the same effect as the invasion of the New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar by ex-avant-garde literature.’68 Art, then, had become ‘another way of educating the new middle class’ that sprang up in industrial

America ‘in the wake of every important war’, and whose ‘cash demands’ enforced a

‘general levelling out of culture’.69 This levelling out, in ‘raising the lowest standards of consumption’, had meant pandering to the lowest common denominator.70

Greenberg’s appraisal of post-war culture could here be taken as being an extension of his arguments in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, wherein kitsch, to repeat, used for its ‘raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture.’71 Now, in late 1947, mass culture was still seen to be regurgitating a bastardized version of the genuine. In this, the

‘ex-avant-garde literature’ of the New Yorker and Harper’s can be seen as relating closely to the ‘vicarious experience’ which had marked the essence of kitsch eight years previously.72 Each were phenomena dealing in the second-hand. Mass culture may not have been the immediate political threat it had been during the war period, yet still it was a threat to high culture - ‘the danger’ now, though, being presented by the ‘very improvement of general middlebrow taste.’73 This improvement had been brought about by mass education which, although being ‘an unparalleled venture, one not to be sneered at’, went hand in hand in a ‘completely capitalized and industrialized’ society with a relentless search ‘to organize every field of activity and consumption in the direction of profit, regardless of 184

whatever immunity from commercialization any particular activity may once have enjoyed’.74 This, in turn, had brought about more boredom and tastelessness. More fuel, therefore, for the mass culture machine.

Although, in material terms, most Americans now had ‘culture in the Soviet Russian sense’, that is, ‘nine out of ten Americans’ now knew ‘how to use water closets and automobiles’, with these new-found standards had come aspirations to ‘self-cultivation’ – the problem here being that ‘high culture’, which had traditionally ‘functioned on the basis of sharp class distinction’ was now ‘endangered’ by the very processes which were bringing about egalitarianism.75 In this, Greenberg, as a socialist, was clearly not against the new reforms; but, as a self-professed defender of genuine culture, he was perturbed by the fact that the ‘sweeping process… wiping out the social distinctions between the more and the less cultivated’ was now rendering ‘standards of art and thought provisional’.76 It was as if all the worst predictions he had made in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (excluding the fascist element) had now come to fruition.

In ‘his effort to keep a step ahead of a pedagogic vulgarization’ that was infecting everything, and in ‘his endeavour to locate the constantly shifting true centre of seriousness’, there was now a seeming compulsion for ‘the ambitious American writer and artist… from moment to moment [to] improvise both career and art.’77 In this new, almost ad. lib. environment brought about by the loss of past certainties and distinctions, it was becoming ‘increasingly difficult to tell’ who was ‘serious’ and who was not.78 In

Greenberg’s view things had generally worsened over time, with the entry of a new ‘kind of 185

rationalization’ which was ‘flattening out and emptying all those vessels which are supposed to nourish us daily’.79 Winning the war then, as Greenberg had predicted, had not improved matters – at least in cultural terms.

In terms of high culture, the literary avant-garde was becoming increasingly difficult to locate (at least by previous standards) because of other simulacra beyond mere kitsch: that is, the simulacra of the genuine avant-garde itself (a problem Greenberg was later to give voice to in ‘Counter-Avant-Garde’ of 1971 in which avant-gardism, as has been demonstrated, was seen to be usurping the artistic avant-garde’s traditional territory). But there was still a clear link between culture in its broadest sense and the place and purpose of the avant-garde. That is, art was not divorced from other concerns of society. Yet, disconcertingly, the avant-garde was now perceived to be becoming infected by the ills of modern society.

Articles expressing similar concerns appeared on the pages of Partisan Review around this time. Irving Howe, for instance, saw in 1950 that because industrialism was now granting

‘large quantities of leisure time without any creative sense of how to employ it’, there was springing up a ‘vast new industry that must be staffed by intellectuals and quasi- intellectuals’; in other words, the mass culture industry. 80 And Milton Klonsky had noted in 1949 that ‘the base forms of popular culture have an autonomous system of values indifferent to the standards of art criticism, and a career separate from that of Western art.’81 In a note of pessimism, he said in conclusion that:

186

… works of art of a high order, equal to the best of the past, can still be produced, though increasingly rarified, professional and aloof. For the tradition begun with the Renaissance is ending. As the advanced arts have surpassed themselves in the refinement of sensibility even to the point of nullity – the blank page of Mallarmé and the empty canvas of Mondrian – so the mass arts have become more violently sensational and garish.82

Although Greenberg himself would later confront the problem of the ‘empty canvas’, at this time he was less pessimistic than Klonsky for the fate of art, for he was aware of the pre- eminence of a solid core of American avant-garde artists able to match, or even surpass, the

School of Paris.

Reflecting his earlier vision of a world class American art, in 1946 he began placing his all-

American pantheon on the international scale, when he distinguished ‘four or five’ of

Gorky’s paintings as adding ‘something no one else could have done to that which Picasso and Miró have already said’.83 In April 1947, he was calling David Smith ‘one of the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century anywhere, deserving to stand next to Brancusi,

Lipchitz, Giacometti, Gonzales… Laurens and Moore.’84 In this, Smith was ‘making an absolute contribution to the development of world as well as American art.’85 By June, in a review of Joan Miró, he was hailing Jackson Pollock as ‘the most important new painter since Miró himself’.86 By October, in ‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and

Sculpture’, in the face of Greenberg’s generally gloomy outlook on the state of American culture, Smith and Pollock were hailed as the only two American artists producing ‘an art capable of withstanding the test of international scrutiny.’87 By December, in a review of exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb, he was praising the ‘rising general level of advanced or “radical” art’ in America, which was now ‘a substantial fact’.88 Seemingly 187

as proof of this improvement Gottlieb was described as ‘perhaps the leading exponent of a new indigenous school of symbolism’ which included (amongst others) Mark Rothko,

Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman.89 And here, suddenly, the ‘issues’ were becoming

‘plainer’, and ‘the areas in which serious and ambitious modern art [could] still be produced, easier to define’.90 By the time of writing ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ in 1953, however, the ‘issues’ were again to become clouded.

That what was on show in the galleries was the tip of the iceberg becomes evident in a

January 1948 article ‘The Situation at the Moment’, in which Greenberg, who had clearly been visiting artists’ studios, said that the best painting being done in America at that moment did ‘not reach the public eye’ but remained ‘stacked against the wall.’91 What became clear to him at this point was that, though easel painting was ‘on the way out’, in its place was emerging the ten foot by ten foot abstract picture.92 In terms of easel art what was appearing in Greenwich Village was a larger scale canvas expanding on ‘Matisse’s hot colour’ and ‘Picasso’s calligraphy.’93 Having worked its way through the problems set up by the School of Paris, by March 1948, in ‘The Decline of Cubism’, the quality of work of artists including Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, David Smith and John Marin had forced the conclusion that the ‘main premises of Western art’ had ‘at last migrated to the United

States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power’.94 But not quite all premises ‘not by a long shot’, just enough to permit Americans to abandon their ‘chronic, and hitherto justified, pessimism about the prospects of American art.’95

Greenberg’s 1931 vision of a world-class American art, when he had placed Orozco and

Rivera ahead of Braque on the world scale, with Marin a close contender was now coming 188

to fruition. In print, this vision, which had re-emerged in 1946 with his review of Gorky, had, in ‘The Decline of Cubism’, found full voice. And Marin was still up there with the best.96

Of the literary avant-garde, however, Greenberg was less optimistic, as is apparent from his contribution to the 1948 symposium ‘The State of American Writing’. By now the avant- garde writer was obtaining jobs in university publishing and magazines, and was becoming something of a celebrity, even being ‘asked to lecture’ and ‘participate in round tables’ and to write ‘introductions to the classics’.97 While Greenberg saw nothing wrong with this per se, it was problematic in that there was now ‘a certain regimentation of the avant-garde, a standardization of its attitudes.’98 And this standardization was threatening to ‘impose a new academicism… Academic because predictable.’ Unlike the avant-garde of old, there were now:99

… the literary quarterly critic with his “method”… the full-time poet… the all-round “creative man” or aesthete (interested in the movies, painting, poetry, old almanacs, architecture, etc.)… the ex- or disabused Marxist [in which category Greenberg put himself]… the “orgast”… the neo-saint (socialist, anarchist, or otherwise) with his moral exhibitionism… the Hemingway or Western “intellectual”… the Kafkan pseudo-philosopher and pseudo-poet… the survivor of the Left Bank… the man who listens for the latest word from Paris – and so on.100

Each ‘classification’ having ‘its sages, managers, and impresarios.’101 And there was even a blurring of these categories. In 1939, the avant-garde’s ‘specialization of itself’ (its ‘best artists’ being ‘artist’s artists’ etc.) had estranged it somewhat from those who had formerly been ‘capable… of enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature’.102 Now, in

1948, it had fallen victim to a new form of ambitiousness in which what mattered more 189

than what one burned to say was where one wished to place oneself ‘in the struggle for reputation.’103 In short, the American literary avant-garde had become ‘professionalized… organized into a field for careers.’104 It was ‘no longer the adventure beyond ratified norms, the refusal in the name of truth and excellence to abide by the categories of worldly success and failure.’105

Back in 1939, sensing the danger of ‘superficial phenomena and local success’, the avant- garde had been ‘becoming more and more timid’ with every passing day.106 Now, in 1948, the literary avant-garde was prone to timidity for quite opposite reasons. In the process of embracing the very success from which it had previously shied away, it was now freezing itself into ‘a standardized repertory of attitudes because of the absence of new challenges to itself within the field of experience.’107 The literary avant-garde now seemed holed up between ‘political crisis’ and ‘the increasing aggressiveness and the expansion of middlebrow culture’– each working together:108

… to stop the progress of bourgeois culture as a whole toward new experience – the one [presumably the middlebrow] by making its vanguard timid, the other [presumably politics] by forcing it to wait upon backwardness and cultural demagoguery.109

And here, middlebrow culture came in for another beating, for, being ‘a more serious threat to the genuine article than the old-time pulp, dime-novel, Tin Pan Alley, Schund variety ever has or will’, it alone was responsible for ‘devaluating the precious, infecting the healthy, corrupting the honest, and stultifying the wise.’ 110 Insidiousness, then, was ‘of its essence’, its ‘avenues of penetration’ having become ‘infinitely more difficult to detect and block.’111 As for the avant-garde, Greenberg ended this essay with the afterthought that the 190

situation was ‘no better in painting and music’.112 Aside from his solid core of avant-garde artists, Greenberg’s obvious disappointment with the avant-garde in general was again expressed, as we will see, in ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, as was his continued consternation at the expansion of the middlebrow.

Providing further insight into Greenberg’s general train of thought around this time, five months prior to ‘The State of American Writing’, in March 1948 he had written ‘Review of an exhibition of Mordecai Ardon-Bronstein and a Discussion of the Reaction in America to

Abstract Art’, which, again, bears marked similarities to aspects of ‘Avant-Garde and

Kitsch’. Saying that ‘the most significant art [was] tending to become more and more exclusively abstract’, he then proceeded to state (through a criticism of the art establishment’s ‘counter-reaction’ to this trend) that ‘no genuine partisan of “modern” or

“radical”… art would in his right mind ask for a blanket acceptance of advanced art.’113

And this, again, recalls the statement in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ wherein the avant- garde’s artists were artists’ artists. Against this cultural elite Greenberg again pitted the masses, that is, the ‘millions’ who found modern art ‘something unintelligible and even meaningless’.114 Eight years after his seminal essays were written, Greenberg still saw these millions as preferring Norman Rockwell to genuine culture. That is, what Broch had described as ‘kitsch man’ still comprised the largest part of western society. As in ‘Avant-

Garde and Kitsch’, however, the real enemy of the avant-garde was not the masses but those who were in a position of control over public taste – personified in this review by the magazine Art Digest (a magazine Greenberg recommended merely as ‘an unconscious 191

cultural document’), the person of the critic Aline Louchheim, and Boston’s Institute of

Modern Art.115

Given the similarities between these two essays, it is interesting that here we find what is arguably an explicit example of what has been suggested was latent in Greenberg’s early essays. That is, that he was arguing between the lines for a saving remnant of Jewish culture within the broader framework of modernism. Although Bronstein’s landscape paintings were essentially figurative, through his handling of paint the imagery was often broken down into the almost unrecognizable. Reviewing these landscapes on show at the

Jewish Museum, Greenberg noted that they had been brought ‘to the verge of the abstract by their texture.’116 For comparison these paintings were juxtaposed with those of Arnold

Friedman, who, like Bronstein, was Jewish and ‘approached the abstract by a similar path’.117 That Greenberg was suggesting a similarity of intent because these artists were both Jewish, is borne out by his observation that, as was ‘the case with most contemporary

Jewish painters, Bronstein’s chief direction [was] expressionist.’ 118 And, certainly, he saw in Bronstein’s painting something specifically Jewish, for he said:

Far be it from me to see an eternal Jewish soul any more than an eternal Anglo-Saxon one, but there does seem to be a relation between Bronstein’s Palestinian pictures and the Old Testament: there is the same hallucinatory monotony, the same intensity applied to broad effects, the same accumulation of parallel or equivalent details around a single obsessively extended theme.119

Here, Greenberg was comparing Bronstein, through the word ‘equivalent’, with Mondrian, whose work offered:

192

… perhaps the clearest anticipation toward which several of the most important threads in contemporary painting now converge: the even, all over, ‘polyphonic’ picture in which every square inch is rendered with equal emphasis… Texture and surface carry everything, and the picture becomes reversible…with beginning, middle, and end made interchangeable.120

Mondrian’s paintings were then linked to American art through the ‘spreading recognition of the fact that [America’s] most significant art [was] tending to become more and more exclusively abstract.’121 Greenberg, through a verbal sleight of hand, had led us directly from Jewish art to modernist abstraction – thereby situating Jewish art within the purview of modernism. The obvious irony here is that under Nazism modernist art had been criticized for being too Jewish; yet now, specifically Jewish art was being flaunted as part of the modernist tradition.

Greenberg’s equation of Jewish art and modernist painting was made again in ‘ “American-

Type” Painting’ of 1955. He justified the term Abstract Expressionism by saying that ‘most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian or Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art’.122 Of interest here is that he specifically distinguished Jewish expressionism, as opposed to Israeli or Palestinian.

Yet these equations were only possible because modernist painting of this era fitted, to a certain extent, the requirements of the Second Commandment – on which subject Robert

Pincus-Witten made the observation that ‘artists struggling with the structures of thought embodied in Abstract Expressionism glimpsed an earlier primordial consciousness of abstraction embodied in Judaism’.123 This observation might be seen to strike at the core of

Greenberg’s enterprise, for hadn’t he said that the chief direction of most contemporary 193

Jewish painters was expressionist? It was not that all Abstract Expressionists were Jewish, but that the art they produced, in essence, was. And if, in essence, it was Jewish, then so too, in essence, it glimpsed an ‘earlier primordial consciousness’. This feeling of primordial consciousness – of a sense of all that had gone before, evident in Greenberg’s writings, not least through the influence of T. S. Eliot, was again put voice to in a letter to Harold

Lazarus in 1940, a month prior to the publication of ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’. There he had noted that he ‘couldn’t conceive the basis on which Hitler will unify Europe’ and (as previously quoted) that his past ‘did not flow into Hitler’s future’.124 Which might perhaps be seen as a reference both to his Jewishness and to his consciousness of the history of

Judaism.

Despite Greenberg’s numerous writings on Jewish themes, his references to Jewish art were few. This is a curiosity noted by Margaret Olin, who said that though he ‘never devoted an essay to Jewish art [he] did touch on the subject occasionally, and uneasily’.125 Citing the

Bronstein review as an example, Olin perceived Greenberg to have been ‘at a loss for words [in his] attempt to explain the affinity to the Old Testament that he sensed’ in

Bronstein’s landscapes – failing to provide an ‘insightful explanation’ for his reference to

‘the eternal soul’.126 Olin puts Greenberg’s reluctance to refer to Judaism in the visual arts down to the fact that he could only account for Jewish art within a formalist art historical framework. This is probably true to a substantial extent. Yet the fact that he singled out the art of Bronstein and Friedman, and made direct analogies with the biblical, meant that he had found a formalist means to discuss art that was specifically Jewish. The question is, why didn’t he explore this further? Perhaps the answer to this might lie in another 194

observation of Olin’s that to ‘attribute to Jews their own culture marginalizes them,

[isolating them from] a “mainstream” culture’.127 If Greenberg had also seen this possibility he might have felt that singling out Jewish artists would expose them to the threat of anti-

Semitism. This might explain the unease Olin detected in his occasional references to specifically Jewish art. Certainly, beyond Friedman and Bronstein, he didn’t name any contemporary Jewish expressionist painters in this article. And Friedman, it might be said, being deceased, was safe from anti-Semitic backlash, as, presumably, was Bronstein, living, as he did, in the part of Palestine which would soon become Israel.

Two months after the Bronstein review, and still as angered by Soviet philistinism in 1948 as he had been in 1939, Greenberg wrote ‘Irrelevance versus Irresponsiblity’. Like ‘Avant-

Garde and Kitsch’, this brought together art and politics, and concluded with a virulent attack on Stalinism. The first half of this article was a criticism of Western art writing, wherein the views promoted by Geoffrey Grigson and André Gide were subjected to question. What they apparently promoted was the notion that ‘by devoting himself to means instead of ends the contemporary advanced artist [had] reduced himself to a technician, performer, virtuoso… whose work must lack real “human” import’.128 For this, and other reasons, Greenberg accused Grigson and Gide of ‘irrelevance’, for what they had failed to appreciate was that, with changing times, art had ‘now drifted into one of the most precarious of positions: that of a familiar phenomenon whose familiarity [had] not made it any the less baffling, a phenomenon… that [continued] to resist the literary approach.’129

195

Despite this resistance to the literary, Greenberg saw that there was human content in advanced (or abstract) art, and that it resided in the fact that human activity was now embodied in its own ends. The ‘message of modern art’ which Greenberg now felt compelled to argue ‘over again’ was that whether ‘abstract or not’, or whether ‘Matisse’s,

Picasso’s, or Mondrian’s’, the means of modern art was ‘content’, that is: ‘Pigment and its related combinations on canvas are as important as delineated forms’.130 The extension of this being that ‘matter – colors and the surfaces on which they are placed – is as important as ideas’.131 For Greenberg, abstract art was ‘effective on the same basis as all previous art’ and was no different ‘in principle’.132 In these statements can be seen a continuity of thought going back through ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ (where the ‘history of avant-garde painting’ was ‘that of a progressive surrender to the resistance of the medium’);133 to

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (and the fact that Picasso, Braque, Mondrian etc. derived ‘their chief inspiration from the medium they [worked] in’);134 to Henry James’s ‘peeling off of layers of ignorance to get at the novel’ in 1931, and to the observation, also in 1931, that the basis for criticism of dance was the same as for criticism of modern art.

As in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ the object of Greenberg’s attack on Stalinism in this essay was the utilization of subject matter for totalitarian ends. In his line of fire was an article called “Aspects of Two Cultures” which appeared in the VOKS Bulletin, ‘a cultural magazine published in Moscow in English – among other languages – by the USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries’.135 The pen and mind of its author, Vladimir

Kemenov (also the magazine’s editor), were said by Greenberg to have functioned ‘in a subcellar of consciousness a Neanderthal man should have shrunk from entering.’136 This 196

reference to the Neanderthal might be seen as a play on Hitler’s 1937 statement in relation to modern art that there was ‘no place in the German Reich for the works of Neanderthal man’, which, in turn, as we know, was directed specifically against Jews.

Certainly Greenberg had seen Stalinism and Nazism as synonymous back in 1939, particularly in respect to the way they each utilized kitsch for propagandist purposes. And now, in 1948, he was arguing against much the same thing: for Kemenov’s article had lambasted modern art and promoted, in its place, the art of the Stalinist regime. Here, modern art was presented by Kemenov as ‘pathological, insane, mystical, irrational, escapist, etc.’: its ‘decadence and deterioration [rendering it] unable to produce good war propaganda.’137 That Greenberg was, indeed, equating Kemenov’s tirade with Hitler’s is evidenced by the following passage:

… it is to be noted that throughout the article he, or at least his translator, avoids using the term, “degenerate art”, perhaps because the Nazis used to apply it so regularly to modern art. This does not, however, prevent him from adding that the latter is a “fantastic mixture of unwholesome fantasy and fraud”, “worthless nonsense”, “a mixture of pathology and chicanery” tracing its origins to “daubs painted by the donkey’s tail.”138

By Greenberg’s account, Kemenov had said that ‘only imported Soviet music, movies, and posters could “spiritually” mobilize people in this country [presumably America] and

Britain against Hitler during the war’, and now ‘young Soviet art’ was creating ‘works of world-wide significance… advancing along the true path indicated by the genius of

Stalin.’139 Greenberg responded to this Stalinist defence of what amounted to kitsch, or at best academicism, by calling Kemenov, too, irrelevant, saying that: ‘The truly new horror of our times is not, perhaps, totalitarianism as such, but the vulgarity it is able to instill in 197

places of power – the official vulgarity, the certified vulgarity’.140 This remark he qualified with two lines of verse: ‘From low to high doth dissolution climb, / and sink from high to low…’141

This, then, reflected closely the opinion of Stalinist culture both Greenberg and Macdonald had expressed during the late thirties. Yet it might also be taken as reflecting his concerns for modern American culture (concerns made apparent in 1947, and even more apparent later in ‘The Plight of Our Culture’), in which, though for different reasons, there was a counter-flow from low to high and back again, all the while diluting the pure and lowering standards. For, while the middlebrow aspired to genuine high culture, what it actually demanded for its consumption was a watered-down version of the genuine, thereby bringing the high down to its own level. Perhaps Greenberg had seen the connection, for why else would he have spoken of Grigson and Gide in the same breath as Kemenov?

Without acknowledging the obvious correspondence between Greenberg’s stance in the forties with that of the thirties, Benjamin Buchloh, in his essay ‘Cold War Constructivism’, portrayed Greenberg’s attack on Kemenov as exemplifying ‘a typical strategy’ of the Cold

War period ‘when any association with the Soviet Union had become increasingly suspect, and definitely a liability, given the American climate of vindictive anti-Stalinism and aggressive anti-Communism.’142 And this strategy was ‘to decry the threat of Communism by pointing to the cultural aberration in Soviet art and architecture, exemplified by Socialist

Realism.’143

198

Buchloh’s comments seem to imply that Greenberg’s opposition to Stalinism and Socialist

Realism was somehow consciously aligned with the U.S. government’s right wing agenda

(and therefore motivated by a similar vindictiveness), or that it was motivated by fear of being seen to support communism. The obvious rebuttal to this is that Greenberg’s opposition to Socialist Realism was not a Cold War ‘strategy’, but a voicing of long-held beliefs which might be seen to go back beyond even ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ to the early thirties when he was beginning to sift out the fake from the genuine in literature.

Underlying his obvious anger at Kemenov might be seen the memory of all that Nazism had stood for, including anti-Semitism and, worse, genocide. Beyond which, what Buchloh overlooks is that Greenberg had opposed Stalinism all along and had long since become disenchanted with communism in general.

It is significant that Buchloh’s comments, in the midst of an otherwise reasonable argument, were presented in the anthology Reconstructing Modernism of 1986, edited by

Serge Guilbaut – for it was Guilbaut, along with John O’Brian, who took the discussion to extremes only outmatched by Francis Frascina. And, as we will see, Guilbaut himself used

‘Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility’ to implicitly suggest that Greenberg was engaging in official Cold War propaganda.

The fact is that in the post-war period there were still parallels to be drawn with 1939.

Parallels which were most succinctly illustrated in 1950, on the pages of Partisan Review, in an article by William Barrett aptly called ‘World War III: The Ideological Conflict’.

‘The people know’, said Barrett, ‘even if their political commentators do not, that Russia 199

and the United States are now locked in a struggle for the world.’144 Russian communism,

‘through the momentum of its own dictatorship’, was compelled to ‘conquer what remained of liberal civilization’, exploiting ‘disorders all over the world’.145 And America, in turn, was ‘compelled to embark upon international action to halt the tide.’146 Americans were being drafted to fight in the Korean War, and nobody could ‘predict exactly’ what was

‘going to happen next, nor where.’147 So confident was Barrett that this conflagration would mushroom that he said: ‘When the world conflict becomes the world war, our fates will rest pretty largely in the hands of the military.’148 The threat, then, which had lain latent for some time had now become a tangible possibility.

Here again, as in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, the world was seemingly on the brink of war, this time with the awareness of what modern warfare now represented. For, besides the

Holocaust there was also, as Cohen had pointed out in his ‘Act of Affirmation’,

… the fearsome knowledge that through our inventiveness we have unleashed a power that has proved that it can end a world war by striking a single blow, and that only waits to prove that it can… build new, undreamed civilizations, or end the human race.149

And here again, the subject of propaganda was rearing its head. Presenting similar evidence to Kemenov, yet arguing from a different side of the fence, Barrett saw that the Russians had the edge on the U.S.A. in winning a foothold in Asia because the Americans just could not compete with communist propaganda, which offered ‘powerful incitements to human passions… apocalyptic visions of redemption and revenge.’150 And, as if to prove that the more things had changed, the more they had stayed the same, on the cultural front, all seemed much as it was when Macdonald wrote his condemnation of Soviet cinema in 1938. 200

According to Nicolas Nabokov, writing for Partisan Review in 1949 (and echoing Dwight

Macdonald’s observations from eleven years previously), Russian composers were being coerced into adhering to ‘the classical tradition of Russian music’ and incorporating ‘in their art the principles of socialist realism.’151 If, then, Greenberg was entirely anti- communist by this stage, it is not difficult to understand why – because, under communism,

Soviet culture had failed to advance from the depths to which it had already descended by

1938. Small wonder then that from calling on Marx’s authority in ‘Avant-Garde and

Kitsch’ he was, by 1948, calling himself an ‘ex- or disabused Marxist’ – distancing himself still further from communism, which, corrupted as it inevitably would be by human nature, could no longer be seen as a viable alternative to capitalism.152 Yet, despite his feelings at this time, he was not to give up entirely on Marxist philosophy, as will become apparent.

This tends to suggest that he did not, as revisionist history would imply, entirely abandon socialism.

By March 1949, Greenberg’s pantheon had grown. As we have seen, in ‘A Symposium:

The State of American Art’ he listed the key players (significantly numbering amongst them those he had supported all along) as being, to repeat: Arshille Gorky, Jackson Pollock,

Willem de Kooning, David Smith, Theodore Roszak, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell,

Robert de Niro, and Seymour Lipton. Unfortunately, despite some of these being on a par with world art, the majority of them were seen to be wasting ‘valuable energy in the effort to survive as working artists in the face of a public whose indifference consigns them to neglect and poverty’ – a situation which hadn’t improved by June, when, in ‘The New York

Market for American Art’, Greenberg again bemoaned the fact that American society was 201

doing ‘very little overtly to encourage American art in its new advance and a great deal to discourage it’.153 Although adverse criticism (because of the attention) was a ‘promising sign’, the lack of patronage was a concern; for society was ‘more effectively’ discouraging art ‘by simply withholding its money and refusing to buy it or give it honorific publicity.’154

The persistent spectre of anti-Semitism

In 1950, clearly reflecting on his Jewish heritage, Greenberg wrote ‘Self-Hatred and Jewish

Chauvinism: Some Reflections on “Positive Jewishness”’. Beginning with the ‘realization’ that the Jewish self-hatred in himself explained many things that used to puzzle him in the behaviour of his fellow Jews, he then went on to explain that the term ‘self-hatred’ was first applied by Theodor Lessing to what what was ‘better defined as the Jewish inferiority complex’, which was ‘more self-doubt and self-contempt that actual self-hatred.’155 In turn, this self-hatred was acted out in two very different ways, the negative and the positive.

With the first, the Jew either saw no difference, except religion, between himself and

Gentiles, or resorted to disassociating entirely from things Jewish. With the second the Jew asserted, sought out, and revelled in ‘his Jewishness’.156 This ‘positive Judaism’ was, for

Greenberg, a euphemism for a sort of chauvinism or ‘rabid nationalism’ which was, ironically, becoming ‘more like other nationalisms’.157 For Greenberg neither was the answer to the problem. So, again seeking out the middle path, he came to the conclusion that:

… we shall persist as Jews, no matter how assimilated we become in our customs and manners, as long as Jewishness remains essential to our sense of our individual selves, as long as it is the truth about our individual selves. And we shall have a better 202

chance of surviving “Jewishly” if the truth that is our Jewishness becomes one that we prefer rather than one that is felt as due only to an unfortunate “accident” of birth. Which the “positive” self-hating Jew feels to be just as much an accident as does the “negative” one.158

And this, by any standards, has to be seen as a declaration of a conscious position toward his Jewish heritage. As previously mentioned, Greenberg was militant in his Jewishness to the extent that he believed Jews had to show the world and themselves that they could fight.

But he also made it clear that, while he wanted to be able to accept his Jewishness ‘more implicitly’, and that he was ‘both Jew and American naturally’, he did not want to make any more issue of being a Jew ‘unless he was forced to by such things as anti-Semitism.’159

Interestingly, in ‘Self-Hatred’ he alludes to just such an instance in the person of Joe

McWilliams. Such ‘matters’ as McWilliams, Greenberg felt, should be left to the hands of

Jews alone instead, to repeat, of ‘calling in the policeman’.160

McWilliams had previously been discussed in the very first issue of Commentary in an article by James Rorty called ‘American Fuehrer in Dress Rehearsal’, which was based on

‘the scientific analysis of anti-Semitic demagogues’ in New York and the West Coast.161

‘Just as Hitler borrowed some of his propaganda methods from American advertising practice’, said Rorty, ‘so, in the formula used by the Reverend X, [George Allison] Phelps, and Joe McWilliams, there is evidence of considerable conscious or unconscious borrowing from Hitler...’162 The first two, unlike McWilliams, were Christian fundamentalists, but what all three had in common was their self-presentation as ‘persecuted’ victims.163

McWilliams, for instance, supposedly once shouted: ‘They can threaten me all they want to. I am not a damn bit afraid to walk the streets of New York all by myself. I don’t have to. 203

I have the toughest men in New York with me.’164 A terrifying prospect, yet things seemed to have improved by 1948 when Robert Pick, looking at the natural fears of Jewish refugees who had previously been victims of anti-Semitism, concluded that American anti-Semitism was ‘an unthoughtful and casual phenomenon – neither intense, politically organized, nor respectable’.165 And in 1951, David Riesman, in criticizing the militant stance of some Jews against American anti-Semitism, and favouring a more tolerant attitude, concluded that there were ‘in the life of a society, times so desperate that repression of a totalitarian movement on its way to power might be required. That is not… the situation now...’.166

By 1953, however, overseas anti-Semitism was still cause for serious concern. In an article entitled ‘Stalin Follows in Hitler’s Footsteps’ (published just six months prior the ‘The

Plight of Our Culture’), Peter Meyer discussed the trial, during November 1952, of fourteen leading Czechoslovakian communists – a trial which had led to the execution of eleven, and the life imprisonment of three. Of the fourteen, eleven were ‘of Jewish origin’.167 In 1955,

Commentary published an article called ‘…Only the Very Best Christian Clientele’, in which Charles Abrams spoke of a widespread insidious form of anti-Semitism in America.

‘Despite statutes, custom, and common law,’ Abrams said, ‘discrimination in hotels and resorts of all kinds is common today. Negroes are discriminated against in most hotels and resorts. Jews are likely to be barred from many resorts.’168 In addition to signs saying blatantly ‘No Jews allowed’ were others saying, for instance, ‘Christians only’ and ‘Our clientele is 100% Christian’.169 Despite this article having appeared two years after ‘The

Plight of Our Culture’, the situation had, apparently, been of some duration, a point made evident in a 1949 article by Greenberg’s Partisan Review colleague, Sidney Hook, in which 204

he noted that there was no ‘noticeable decrease in antisemitism’.170 Going further, Hook suggested that it had ‘now reached an intensity in some Western countries almost equal to that observed in Germany a few years before the Nazis came to power’, and that there was

‘ample evidence to show that antisemitism is present in every class in Western society from top to bottom.’171 As he emphasised, the ‘persistence of antisemitism in a world that recognizes the difference between Jew and non-Jew… is not past history but present history.’172 So it seems reasonable to infer that, given his milieu, Greenberg would have been aware of this pernicious presence as he came to write ‘The Plight of Our Culture’.

And behind this awareness would have been the memory of recent history; not only in terms of the Holocaust but also, prior to this, of his own experience of anti-Semitism in

America. And this, we know, dates back at least to his attending the German-American

Nazi bund rally in Madison Square Garden in early 1939.

That the awarding of a coveted poetry prize in 1949 to the known anti-Semite Ezra Pound was capable of rekindling Greenberg’s wartime fear, serves to emphasize the fear attached to Cohen’s warning that anti-Semitism was still ‘latent in all’. Four years later, these fears were still fresh as Greenberg wrote ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, casting T. S. Eliot in the same mould as Charles Maurras, a collaborator with the Germans under the occupation. As we know, Eliot, when first introduced into Greenberg’s published work in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, was held up alongside Braque as a representative of high culture. By 1950, in

‘T. S. Eliot: The Criticism, The Poetry’, in a glowing appraisal of his work, he was hailed as ‘the greatest of all literary critics’, a ‘man of superior sensibility’ and a ‘prophet’.173 By

1953, however, we find Greenberg saying that: 205

Whether or not he got his first political notions from the late Charles Maurras, Eliot has been chronically susceptible… to the kind of thing Maurras expressed most consistently: that type of reaction, trimmed out with Catholicism, “tradition”, “classicism”, “hierarchism”, “authority”, ultra-nationalism, and anti-Semitism…174

Until now, Greenberg’s severest criticism of Eliot’s attitude had come in ‘Mr. Eliot and

Notions of Culture’ of 1944, a critique of Eliot’s Partisan Review article ‘Notes Towards a

Definition of Culture’, which was a precursor to the similarly named book of 1948, Notes towards the Definition of Culture. Greenberg’s main objections here had revolved around three points: firstly, that Eliot’s article decried ‘the assumption that “clerical labour is more dignified than manual labor” [while at the same time identifying] the elite with culture’; secondly, that one of its ‘underlying premises’ seemed to be that ‘the generic form, Culture, qua form and qua entelechy’ was ‘immutable’; and thirdly, that it maintained that culture was ‘something to which a few can be raised’.175 Indeed, there seems here to have been nothing more objectionable to Greenberg than plain old-fashioned snobbishness. And snobbish it was, one of Eliot’s primary premises being that an elite class should be formed largely under the proper conditions of heredity and that its selection should not be based on

‘achievement alone’.176 For Eliot, this was essential to the ‘development of a superior culture.’177 Yet, for all its snobbishness, there is no hint of anti-Semitism. In a footnote to

‘The Plight of Our Culture’ Greenberg would say that this essay said ‘more in fewer, apter, and carefuller [sic] words than does any chapter’ in Notes towards the Definition of

Culture.178

On the face it, it seems that Greenberg had only recently become aware of Eliot’s anti-

Semitism, or he would surely not have been so effusive in his praise in 1950. Perhaps it was 206

a footnote in Notes which led him to read After Strange Gods of 1934 and The Idea of a

Christian Society of 1939, books which apparently repeated ‘a number’ of Maurras’s ideas

‘to an English-speaking public’.179 Or perhaps it was the reactionary overtones of Notes which prompted him to read further, only to discover these earlier works to be equally reactionary, not only speaking of class and elites (in the worst possible manner), but also promoting anti-Semitism and, in a veiled way, supporting fascism.180 And all within Eliot’s discussions of a Christian society. What is particularly interesting here is that Greenberg included Catholicism amongst Eliot’s reactionary tendencies, for, as noted in Chapter Five, in a letter of 1939 he had quipped that if he were a gentile, Harold Rosenberg and Lionel

Abel would make him ‘a Catholic anti-Semite’. Further to which, being an editor of

Commentary at its inception, he would undoubtedly have read ‘American Fuehrer in Dress

Rehearsal’ which made clear the links between ‘Christianity’ and anti-Semitism. And he would almost certainly have been aware of the exclusion of Jews from holiday resorts on the cynical excuse of Christian exclusivity. Remembering Reverend X and George Allison

Phelps, it is not difficult to see why Greenberg would have been so perturbed by his discovery of the depth of Eliot’s reactionism, and that it was linked to Christianity.

It is significant here that in his 1941 review of Metapolitics Greenberg had seen Viereck’s assumptions about Romanticism as being not only wrong, but wrong in line with ‘an assumed Christian orthodoxy’.181 Not that he was against Christianity per se, for in 1950 he was to say that among religions, Christianity ‘with its beautiful paradoxes of the Trinity and

Transubstantiation’ lent itself ‘particularly well’ as an ‘all-embracing, extra-artistic authority’ which would make poets ‘feel safe’ in the practice of an art which lacked ‘logical 207

consistency.’182 Yet, as we have seen in a previous chapter, the cynical link between

Christianity and Nazism had been made evident for him in Ignazio Silone’s School for

Dictators. This, coupled with the known American links between Christianity and anti-

Semitism, would undoubtedly have exacerbated the degree of his response to Eliot.

Indeed, his criticism of Eliot matches in virulence his attack on Kemenov, and, as with that attack, he was calling Eliot’s position, too, ‘irrelevant’ – a term which seemingly served both as a blanket dismissal and, possibly, a desire that justice be served. Maurras, for instance, for his ‘extremes’ of irrelevance had ‘sat in jail for six years.’183 Greenberg’s obvious interest in Maurras here might seem to denote a more profound concern for anti-

Semitism than might be gathered simply from his criticism of Eliot; a concern seemingly just as profound as it had been back in 1948 when he responded to the Pound issue (and the very profundity of this concern may well have contributed to his strict adherence to formalism). As to how this might read in terms of Greenberg’s vehement anti-Stalinism, we find him linking these factors some paragraphs later, when he said that the reasons for modern society’s despair were, amongst other things, ‘the war’, ‘the exterminations’, and

‘the oppression’. And here, by ‘oppression’ he clearly meant Stalinism.184

In seeing Nazism and Stalinism side by side Greenberg was not alone. Hannah Arendt, for instance, in 1948 wrote an article for Partisan Review drawing parallels between Nazism and Stalinism, called ‘The Concentration Camps.’ Here, while making the point that there were ‘no parallels to the life of the concentration camps’ (for ‘forced labor in prisons and penal colonies’ was finite, and the convict still ‘retained his rights over his body’), Arendt, 208

in the direct comparisons she could make, said that it was in the nature of totalitarianism ‘to demand unlimited power’.185 Going further, she said that what ‘makes conviction and opinion of any sort so ridiculous and dangerous under totalitarian conditions is that totalitarian regimes take the greatest pride in having no need of them.’186 In this scenario, humans, ‘insofar as they are more than animal reaction and fulfillment of function are entirely superfluous to totalitarian regimes.’187

And there were other articles which, like ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ and ‘The Plight of Our

Culture’, used the opportunity of a discussion of culture to introduce the subject of Nazism.

For instance, in its second issue, Commentary initiated a line of discussion called ‘The

Crisis of the Individual’, which revolved around the proposition that, though the inviolability of the individual had been so much a part of civilization, it had been debased, not so much by war, but by the unleashing of atomic energy. Taking the line that the debasement of the individual had blunted his/her mental and emotional reaction to that very debasement, Commentary asked the questions:

Why is this happening to us? Where did we go wrong? Is it a lost cause or is this the transition to a new society with better values? Is it that men have always had the will to treat each other solely as means; is renascence of religious belief the answer, and is it that the economic exigencies of our time compel men to treat one another in this way?188

The frontrunner in this discussion was Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Will Civilization Survive

Technics?’ of December 1945, in which the crisis of modern society was presented as being due to an inability to ‘develop political and social instruments which are adequate for the kind of society which a technical civilization makes possible and necessary.’189 This 209

situation predated the atomic bomb, which was ‘only the most recent and the most dramatic symbol of this deep inner contradiction which cleaves our whole society.’190 It went back, in fact, to the introduction of technics in the fields of production and communications, and had exacerbated to the extent that humankind was now confronted with a form of globalization. With the onset of this ‘potential world community’ what was lacking was the ability to ‘actualize’ it ‘morally and politically.’191 It was from the soil of this ‘international anarchy’ that Nazism had emerged, seeking to ‘overcome that anarchy by the coerced unification of the world’.192 This view of Niebuhr’s could be seen to reflect Greenberg’s position in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in which the Industrial Revolution was responsible for just such a global effect. For Greenberg, writing in 1939, the rise of Nazism had emerged from the soil of the international phenomenon which had brought about a general loss of native tradition. A tradition which was cynically replaced with an ersatz culture – one which, as we have seen, had not only lent itself readily to Nazi propaganda, but was still, in the form of socialist realism, providing the means to perpetuate the totalitarian

Stalinist regime. Like Greenberg before him, Niebuhr saw the roots of the modern evil as stemming from the eighteenth century.

Whilst we can reasonably assume Greenberg to have had read this article, we can know for certain that he had read Franz Borkenau’s 1951 article ‘Will Technology Destroy

Civilization’, for he credits this twice in ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ for its appraisal of culture. Although Borkenau did not refer to Niebuhr, his article undoubtedly owed much to the line of discussion he commenced. Unlike Niebuhr, though, Borkenau saw Nazism as descending, not from anarchy born of the Industrial Revolution, but from the ‘old Lutheran 210

belief in the devil’s domain over the world.’193 This belief, which united Lutheranism with

Gnostic demonology was ‘ultimately the root of all German evil.’194 Here, Christianity was linked, not simply with anti-Semitism, but with the worst forms of oppression. And we know that Greenberg had read these words prior to his linking of Eliot’s anti-Semitism with

Catholicism and Charles Maurras, and his linking of ‘the exterminations’ with ‘the oppression’. There is, then, yet another layer of connectedness between Greenberg’s lines, for perhaps the Stalinist singling out of Jews for persecution was seen as related to the fact that Russia had been, historically, a fundamentally Christian society – as had Germany.

Clearly Nazism was a shaping element of the world-view not only of Greenberg but also his peers, and it hardly needs saying that Jewishness, and hence anti-Semitism, were the underlying concerns of this milieu. Greenberg’s continuing support for American abstraction, then, must be seen in relation to this. Yet revisionist history avoids all discussion of such matters in its attempt to portray Greenberg as having promoted this art concomitant with the cynical right-wing politics of the time. In order to do this it had to present him as having shifted to the right and as having become optimistic for middlebrow culture. In short, it has misrepresented Greenberg, both personally and professionally. This round of revisionism holds a singularly authoritative place in the field of Greenbergian scholarship, having been disseminated not only in various respectable journals,

Reconstructing Modernism, and Serge Guilbaut’s well-known book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art of 1983, but also, for posterity, in John O’Brian’s 1993 introduction to the third and fourth volumes of The Collected Essays and Criticism. And the legacy of

Guilbaut and O’Brian lingers on, most recently in the work of Francis Frascina, whose 211

‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”: the Making of Greenberg’s

“Modernist Painting”’ extends the revisionist argument into a full-blown analysis of the politics behind the writing of ‘Modernist Painting’ in 1960.

Indeed, so authoritative has such scholarship been that, according to one of its critics,

Michael Kimmelman (in ‘Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold

War’ of 1994), Guilbaut’s version of events had become ‘the standard view, recapitulated often’.195 So standard, in fact, that, it was repeated in exhibition catalogues, and even T. J.

Clark, in his essay ‘In Defense of Abstract Expressionism’, had said that the Cold War revisionists had ‘proved their point’ (although this was said with some caution).196

Kimmelman, however, thought otherwise, and here he was not alone. In 1993, in defense of

Greenberg, Hilton Kramer (in ‘Clement Greenberg and the Cold War’) had taken O’Brian’s account to task. And in 1997, Robert Burstow (in ‘The Limits of Modernist Art as a

“Weapon of the Cold War”’), like Kimmelman before him, questioned the basis of the revisionist argument in the general without specific reference to how Greenberg was portrayed.

With these criticisms in mind, we now turn to Cold War revisionism as a precursor to addressing the element of ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ relating to Greenberg’s views on

American culture. And here, as should become apparent, he was at his most critical – far too critical, in fact, to have been considered a complicit party to American imperialism. 212

Notes

1 Greenberg, ‘An American View’, 41 2 Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald, ‘’10 Propositions on the War’, Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No.4, July-August 1941, 272, 273 3 Ibid., 275 4 Ibid., 273 5 Ibid., 275 6 Ibid. 273 Undoubtedly fuelling Greenberg’s concerns would have been reports of anti-Semitism coming in to Partisan Review around this time. For instance, George Orwell observed that the British pacifist movement had been interpenetrated by ‘Fascist ideas, especially anti-Semitism’. Thereby further demonstrating both the reality of fascism and the reality of the warnings in Silone’s School for Dictators. (George Orwell, ‘London Letter’, dated January 3 1941, Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, March-April 1941, 109) The previous September Stephen Spender, recalling one of his visits to Germany during 1929-32, recounted a conversation with some young Nazis. When he asked them ‘what do you think when you meet a Jew?’, they replied ‘we want to crush him and knock him down.’ (Stephen Spender, ‘September Journal’, Partisan Review, Vol. VII, No. 2, 1940, 97). 7 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Harmondsworth, England, 1962 (1937), 202 Orwell, however, criticizing ‘An American View’, did not share Greenberg’s opinion that the working class was ‘the only class in England that seriously [meant] to defeat Hitler’. Noting that Greenberg was looking ‘from the outside’ he said that the patriotism of the English middle classes might be made use of, and that they ‘would readily transfer their loyalty to a Socialist regime, if they were handled with the minimum of tact.’ (Orwell, ‘London Letter’, dated January 3 1941, 108) 8 Philip Rahv, ’10 Propositions and 8 Errors’, Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 6, November-December 1941, 499 9 Ibid., 502 10 Ibid., 500 11 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Rosa Luxemburg, Her Life and Work by Paul Frölich’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 78 (first published in Partisan Review, September-October 1941) 12 Idem. 13 Idem. 14 Idem. 15 Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 154 16 Idem. Confirming that this remained a common opinion between Orwell and Greenberg is Orwell’s ‘London Letter’, dated August 17 1941 (published in Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 6, November-December 1941), wherein Orwell noted that ‘the middle-class Communists’ included:

…most of the official and unofficial leaders of the party, and with them must be lumped the greater part of the younger literary intelligentsia, especially in the universities… the “Communism” of these people amounts simply to nationalism and leader-worship in their most vulgar forms, transferred to the USSR. (pp. 492-493)

17 Greenberg, ‘Review of Rosa Luxemburg’, 78 18 Ibid., 79 19 Idem. 20 Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald, ‘Reply by Greenberg and Macdonald’, Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 6, November-December 1941, 506 21 Clement Greenberg, ‘Letter to the Editor of Politics’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 187 (first published in Politics, March 1944) 22 Idem. 213

23 Clement Greenberg, ‘Venusberg to Nuremberg: Review of Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler by Peter Viereck’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 79 (first published in Partisan Review, November-December 1941) 24 Ibid., 79, 81 25 Ibid., 83 26 Ibid., 82 27 Ibid., 82, 83 28 Ibid., 83 29 Broch, ‘Notes on the Problem of Kitsch’, 73 30 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of the Whitney Annual and the Exhibition Romantic Painting in America’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 173 (first published in The Nation, 1 January 1944) 31 Ibid., 172 32 Idem. 33 Adolf Holst, ‘Der Drachentöter’ (‘The Dragonslayer’), trans. Jack Zipes, www.gwu.edu/~folktale/GERM232/sleepingb/Dragonslayer.html ‘The Dragonslayer’:

The old tales ring forth about a sleeping beauty. They sing about a satanic power and bring reports about witches and spindles. They tell how a king came one hundred years later. He climbed the walls and took the power away from the curse by kissing the Sleeping Beauty awake! A knight came a-riding through sleeping Germany. He fought with hell and ran through the dragon’s heart in the middle of the flaming mountain! The knight of a special errand was endowed with wondrous power, and he lifted the glorious German soul out of the cave of thorns. And all the people cried out: “Heil!”

According to Zipes, the dragon represented ‘the alien races’. There were, at the time, rejoinders to the fascist appropriation of fairy tales; for instance, Erich Kästner’s response to’The Dragonslayer’, ‘The Apparently Dead Princess’, which included the lines:

You don’t want to free yourselves Lackeys are lackeys. You sleep with the past! And all are silent. And no one cried: ‘You have been sleeping for years and shouldn’t sleep any more. And it should never become what it once was, Because otherwise it would be like it once was!’ You are lackeys. You’ll remain lackeys. You are it. And you want to be it. It is not your business to shout: ‘Germany, awake!’ If you shout, it will go to sleep! (Trans. Prof. Mary Beth Stein) www.gwu.edu/~folktale/GERM232/sleepingb/Apparently_Dead_Princess.html

This parody might be seen as reminiscent of James Laughlin’s 1939 poem about the Nazi book burnings, ‘A Letter to Hitler’, quoted previously. 34 Idem. 35 Broch, ‘Notes on the Problem of Kitsch’, 73 36 AGK, 12 37 Greenberg, ‘Review of the Whitney Annual’, 173 38 AGK, 12 39 Idem, Greenberg, ‘Review of the Whitney Annual’, 173 40 Idem. 214

41 Idem. 42 Greenberg, ‘Surrealist Painting’, 229 The Ossian, as is common knowledge, has associations with an eighteenth-century fake, fabricated and presented as original by James Macpherson, a scholar of the original pre-medieval Gaelic Ossian saga. Feeling that the original was not up to scratch, he composed his own. Beginning as a minor practical joke, it ended as a successful forgery, compelling Macpherson to continue to reinvent further Ossian tales. The final irony being that he could not claim credit for his inventions. Interestingly, the language of the original Ossian is said to have been copied from David and Isaiah, and its parallel phrasing to resemble Hebrew poetry. Which might be a point of significance given Greenberg’s knowledge of both English and Hebrew literature. To elaborate, it might be that in drawing our attention to this particular fake, and likening it to Surrealism which stemmed from Romanticism (with its associations with Nazism), Greenberg was also drawing our attention to the verities of Judaism which had been corrupted by the Nazis. Which is certainly a point worth considering. For information on the Ossian, see: ‘The Literary Influence of the Middle Ages’, § 10 ‘Ossian and Macpherson’, and §11 ’Literary Career of Macpherson’, in: The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907-1921), Vol. X, The Age of Johnson: to be found at http://www.bartleby.com/220/1011.html 43 Idem. 44 Idem. 45 Greenberg, ‘The Question of the Pound Award’, 304 46 Thomas M. Leonard, Day by Day: The Forties, New York, 1977, 300 47 Ibid., 326 Of possible further significance was reportage on 26 July 1943 that eight American ex-patriots who had broadcast propaganda for Axis governments were indicted on treason charges by a federal grand jury in Washington. Among their number was Ezra Pound. 48 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 190 49 AGK, 13 50 Greenberg, ‘Venusberg to Nuremberg’, 79 51 Broch, ‘Notes on the Problem of Kitsch’, 49 52 Eliot Cohen, ‘An Act of Affirmation: Editorial Statement’, Commentary, Vol. I, No. I, November 1945, 1-2 53 Greenberg, ‘Under Forty: A Symposium’, 176-177 54 Clement Greenberg, ‘A Martyr to Bohemia: Review of Out of this Century by Peggy Guggenheim, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 98 (first published in Commentary, September 1946) It seems significant that this article was written under the pseudonym ‘K. Hardesh’. According to John O’Brian’s editorial note (Ibid., 99) Hardesh is Hebrew for Greenberg. 55 Ibid., 99-99 56 Greenberg, ‘Under Forty’, 179 57 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of the Water-Color, Drawing, and Sculpture Sections of the Whitney Annual’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 57 (first published in The Nation, 23 February 1946) 58 Idem. 59 Ibid., 58 60 Idem. 61 Idem. 62 Clement Greenberg, ‘Pessimism for Mass Consumption: Review of An Essay on Morals by Philip Wylie’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2 (first published in Commentary, October 1947), 158 63 Idem. 64 Idem. 65 Ibid., 159-160 66 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 162 (first published in Horizon, October 1947) 67 Idem. 68 Idem. 69 Idem. 215

70 Idem. 71 AGK, 12 72 Greenberg, ‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’, 162 73 Idem. 74 Ibid., 163 75 Idem. 76 Idem. 77 Idem. 78 Idem. 79 Idem. 80 Irving Howe, ‘This Age of Conformity’, Partisan Review, Vol. XXI, No.1, 1950, 9 81 Milton Klonsky, ‘Along the Midway of Mass Culture’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No.4, April 1949, 362 82 Ibid., 365 83 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Paul Gauguin and Arshile Gorky’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 79 (first published in The Nation, 4 May 1946) 84 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of David Smith, David Hare, and Mirko’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 140 (first published in The Nation, 19 April 1947) 85 Idem. 86 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of an Exhibition of Joan Miró’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 154 (first published in The Nation, 7 June 1947) 87 Greenberg, ‘The Present Prospects’, 167 88 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 187 (first published in The Nation, 6 December 1947) 89 Ibid., 188 90 Ibid., 187 91 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Situation at the Moment’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 194 (first published in Partisan Review, January 1948) 92 Idem. 93 Idem. 94 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Decline of Cubism’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 215 (first published in Partisan Review, March 1948) 95 Idem. 96 Idem. 97 Clement Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing, 1948: A Symposium’, in O’Brian, Vol. 2, 254 (first published in Partisan Review, August 1948) 98 Ibid., 255 99 Idem. 100 Idem. 101 Idem. 102 AGK, 10 103 Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing’, 255 Greenberg’s opinion on the state of the literary avant-garde is reflected in Milton Klonsky’s observation that large numbers of ‘previously independent’ intellectuals were now being absorbed ‘into the world of government bureaucracy and public committees; into the constantly growing industries of pseudo-culture [and] into the adult education business, which subsists on regulated culture-anxiety.’ (Klonsky, ‘This Age of Conformity’, 12) 104 Ibid., 154 105 Idem. 106 AGK, 11 107 Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing’, 255 108 Idem. 109 Idem 110 Ibid., 257 111 Ibid., 257-258 216

112 Ibid., 258 113 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of an Exhibition of Mordecai Ardon-Bronstein and a Discussion of the Reaction in America to Abstract Art’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 217, 218 (first published in The Nation, 6 March 1948) 114 Ibid., 218 115 Ibid., 217 116 Ibid., 216 Bronstein was Ardon-Bronstein’s family name. The name Ardon was chosen by him because it had a ‘connection with the family of the biblical figure Bezalel, chief architect of the tabernacle and designer of the sacred vessels.’ In the early fifties, he dropped Bronstein entirely, becoming simply Moredecai Ardon. For this see: Michele Vishny, Mordecai Ardon, New York, 1974, 25 117 Idem. 118 Ibid., 216 119 Ibid., 216-217 120 Ibid., 217 121 Idem. 122 Clement Greenberg, ‘ “American-Type” Painting’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3, 219 (first published in Partisan Review, Spring 1955) 123 Pincus-Witten, ‘Six Propositions on Jewish Art’, 68 Further to the above, Pincus-Witten says that these artists (in glimpsing this earlier primordial consciousness of abstraction embodied in Judaism):

…were able to cleanse away three decades and more of compromises made between abstraction and the prevailing progressive modes - Cubism, Fauvism, etc. Abstract Expressionism definitively exposed the most pernicious compromise of all for the vulgarisation it is, the bargain struck between abstraction and representationalism, “semi-abstraction.” (Idem.)

This is significant in that, for Greenberg, the semi-abstract quality of much abstract expressionism allowed for a compromise at least equal to that it allowed its artists. This compromise being in the ability of the work to be assessed formally whilst remaining (like the expressionist work of Ardon-Bronstein and like the work of de Kooning etc.) in many respects figurative. 124 Greenberg, The Harold Letters, letter dated June 24, 1940 125 Olin, ‘C[lement] Hardesh (Greenberg)’,162 126 Idem. 127 Margaret Olin, ‘Graven Images on Video? The Second Commandment and Contemporary Jewish Identity’, in: Olin, The Nation Without Art, 201 128 Clement Greenberg, ‘Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 230 (first published in Partisan Review, May 1948) 129 Ibid., 231 130 Ibid., 232 131 Idem. 132 Ibid., 233 133 TNL, 34 134 AGK, 9 135 Greenberg, ‘Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility’, 233; Hitler quoted in: Morris, ‘Art Chronicle: The Architectural Evolution of Brancusi’, 34, and (in relation to the similar phrase ‘prehistoric stone-age culture vultures’) in: Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 482 For substantial excerpts from Vladimir Kememov’s ‘Aspects of Two Cultures’, first published in VOKS Bulletin (Moscow), USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, 1947, 20-36, see: ‘Vladimir Kemenov, “Aspects of Two Cultures,” 1947’, in: Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 490-496. This is worth reading to see precisely what Greenberg was arguing against. 136 Idem. 137 Ibid., 234 138 Idem. 217

139 Idem. 140 Ibid., 235 141 Idem. 142 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Cold War Constructivism’, in: Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut, The MIT Press, 1986, 86 143 Idem. 144 William Barrett, ‘World War III: The Ideological Conflict’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVII, No. 7, 1950, 651 145 Ibid., 655 146 Idem. 147 Ibid., 651 148 Ibid., 652 149 Cohen, ‘An Act of Affirmation’, 1 150 Barrett, ‘World War III: The Ideological Conflict’, 655 151 Nicolas Nabokov, ‘Russian Music After the Purge’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 8, Aug 1949, 843 152 Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing’, 255 153 Greenberg, ‘A Symposium: The State of American Art’, 287; Clement Greenberg, ‘The New York Market for American Art’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 320 (first published in The Nation, 11 June 1949) 154 Idem. 155 Greenberg, ‘Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism’, 45 156 Ibid., 47 157 Ibid., 48 158 Ibid., 57 159 Ibid., 56 160 Ibid., 53 161 James Rorty, ‘American Fuehrer in Dress Rehearsal’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1945, 13, editorial introduction. 162 Ibid., 15 163 Idem. 164 Idem. 165 Robert Pick, ‘A Refugee Looks at Anti-Semitism Here’, Commentary, Vol. 6, No. 3, September 1948, 213 166 David Riesman, ‘The “Militant” Fight Against Anti-Semitism: Education and Democratic Discussion is the Better Way’, Commentary, Vol. II, No. 1, January 1951, 17 167 Peter Meyer, ‘Stalin Follows in Hitler’s Footsteps’, Commentary, Vol. 15, No. 1, January 1953, 1 168 Charles Abrams, ‘…Only the Very Best Christian Clientele’, Commentary, Vol. 19, January 1955, 10 169 Ibid., 13 170 Sidney Hook, ‘Reflections on the Jewish Question’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 5, May 1949, 465 The title of Hook’s article reflects that it is a discussion of the problem in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti- Semite and Jew (c. 1948), as it is a direct translation of Sartre’s original title Reflections sur la question juive. 171 Ibid., 466, 471 172 Ibid., 472 173 Clement Greenberg, ‘T.S. Eliot: The Criticism, The Poetry’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3, 66, 68 (first published in The Nation, 9 December 1950) 174 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 124-125 175 Clement Greenberg, ‘Mr Eliot and Notions of Culture: A Discussion’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 1, 217, 218 (first published in Partisan Review, Summer 1944) Entelechy: ‘the supposed vital principle that guides the development and functioning of an organism or other system or organization’ (O. E. D.) 176 T. S. Eliot, ‘Notes Towards a Definition of Culture’, Partisan Review, Vol. XI, No. 2, Spring 1944, 151 (first published in The New English Weekly, Jan-Feb 1943) 177 Ibid., 152 178 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 126 (n. 2) 179 Ibid., 125 218

180 T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, London, 1948. Eliot referred to The Idea of A Christian Society on page 84 (n 2). On page 70, he made the comment that ‘In certain historical conditions, a fierce exclusiveness may be a necessary condition for the preservation of a culture.’ This comment was accompanied by the following footnote:

Since the diaspora, and the scattering of Jews amongst peoples holding the Christian Faith, it may have been unfortunate both for these peoples and for the Jews themselves, that the culture-contact between them has had to be within those neutral zones of culture in which religion could be ignored: and the effect may have been to strengthen the illusion that there can be culture without religion.

T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods, London, 1934. On page 20, speaking of the importance of ‘unity of religious background’, Eliot said that ‘reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable… a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.’ T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, London, 1939. This was published almost a year after the world had learned of the pogroms of Kristallnacht; yet on page 94 Eliot said that, while both fascism and communism had ‘fundamental ideas’ which were ‘incompatible’ with Christianity, ‘in practice, a Fascist or Communist State might… be more or less tolerable.’ As a note of irony, all three books were published by Faber and Faber, which also published, in the same year as The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. 181 Greenberg, ‘Venusberg to Nuremberg’, 81 As a point of interest, back in 1941, in his ‘London Letter’ of August 17 (pp. 493-494), Orwell, noting the ‘pro-Fascist activities in the past’ of the ‘ “born” Catholics of the old Catholic families’, said that while they had not dared be ‘openly pro-Hitler’, they had ‘done their propaganda indirectly by fulsome praises of Petain and Franco.’ Further to which, he stated that:

No one who has studied Catholic literature during the past ten years can doubt that the bulk of the hierarchy and the intelligentsia would side with Germany as against Russia if they had a quarter of a chance… If anything pertaining to a Petain government were established here, it would have to lean largely on the Catholics. They are the only really conscious, logical enemies that democracy has got in England…

By these old Catholics, Orwell did not mean the bulk of the two million Catholics in England, most of them poor Irish labourers ‘not sufficiently under the thumb of their priests to be Fascist in sympathy’, but the ‘middle- and upper-class’ Catholics who were ‘extremely numerous in the Foreign Office and the Consular Service, and [had] a good deal of influence in the press…’ 182 Clement Greenberg, ‘Religion and the Intellectuals: A Symposium’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3, 41 (first published in Partisan Review, May-June 1950) 183 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 125 184 Ibid., 128 185 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps’, Partisan Review, Vol. XV, No. 7, 1948, 748 186 Ibid., 761 187 Idem. 188 ‘The Crisis of the Individual: A Series’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1945, 1 189 Rienhold Niebuhr, ‘Will Civilization Survive Technics?’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1945, 2 190 Ibid., 2-3 191 Ibid., 3 192 Idem. 193 Franz Borkenau, ‘Will Technology Destroy Civilization? Why the Prophets of Doom Are Wrong’, Commentary, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1951, 26 194 Idem. 195 Michael Kimmelman, ‘Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War’, in: The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, 42 196 T. J. Clark, ‘In Defense of Abstract Expressionism’, October 69, Summer 1994, 26. 219

Taking issue with Clark’s ‘certitude of the revisionist argument’, Kimmelman, in his final endnote (p. 55, n. 75), quotes the following passage from Clark’s ‘In Defense of Abstract Expressionism’:

There has been a feeling in the air for some time now that art writing on Abstract Expressionism has reached an impasse. The various research programs that only yesterday seemed on the verge of delivering new and strong accounts of it, and speaking to its place (maybe even its function) in the world fiction called America, have run into the sand. Those who believed the answer to the latter kind of question would emerge from a history of Abstract Expressionism’s belonging to a certain Cold War policy, with patrons of art world institutions to match, have proved their point and offended all the right people. But the story, though good and necessary, turned out not to have the sort of upshot for interpretation that the storytellers had been hoping for. (p 26)

Significantly, Clark did then go on to say:

It was one thing to answer the question, ‘What are the circumstances in which a certain national bourgeoisie, in the pride of its victory, comes to want something as odd and exotic as an avant-garde of its own?’ It is another to speak for the implications of that encounter for the avant-garde itself, and answer the question, ‘To what extent was the meeting of class and art practice in the later 1940s more than just contingent? To what extent does Abstract Expressionism really belong, at the deepest level – the level of language, of procedure, of presuppositions about world-making – to the bourgeoisie who paid for it and took it on their travels?’ (Idem.)

Therefore, Clark, while appearing to accept much of the revisionist argument, was in fact questioning some of the assumptions inherent in that argument. 220

CHAPTER SEVEN: COLD WAR REVISIONISM

Serge Guilbaut

To understand the untenability of Guilbaut’s portrayal of Greenberg as a Cold War propagandist is to first understand the questionable nature of the ground on which it was based. And here briefly we must turn to Eva Cockcroft’s seminal text ‘Abstract

Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’, published by Artforum in 1974, wherein

Abstract Expressionism was implied to have been used by the CIA, through the auspices of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), to further an imperialist agenda.

To support Cockcroft’s claims that Abstract Expressionism had been consciously and specifically promoted overseas, we are told that ‘Abstract Expressionist painting was exported abroad almost from the beginning’ with Willem de Kooning’s work being included in the Venice Biennale from ‘as early as 1948’; that in 1950 he was joined by

Arshile Gorky and Pollock, and that MoMA ‘took sole responsibility’ for these exhibitions

‘from 1954 to 1962.’1 Cockcroft then proceeded to list other overseas MoMA-initiated exhibitions in which Abstract Expressionists were featured, including the 1955-56 exhibition ‘Modern Art in the U.S.’, which toured ‘eight European cities’, and showed works by twelve abstract expressionists.2

Questioning both the facts and the slant of Cockcroft’s account, Michael Kimmelman said, firstly, that de Kooning ‘was not included in the 1948 Venice Biennale’, secondly, that in

1950 he ‘was represented by four works in a show of six artists that was ancillary to a John

Marin retrospective comprising eighty-one works’, and, thirdly, that MoMA ceded the task 221

of responsibility for the Venice Biennale twice: in 1956 to The Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1960 to The Baltimore Museum of Art.3 Indeed, according to Kimmelman, a point

‘minimalised’ by historians and critics alike is that MoMA’s exhibitions of Abstract

Expressionism ‘came on the whole during the later fifties, by which time the movement’s first generation had already been followed by a second’ (e.g. Jasper Johns who was, according to Kimmelman, in the 1958 Venice Biennale).4 To support his claim that

Abstract Expressionism was not yet the success it would have needed to be to suit

Cockcroft’s argument, Kimmelman cited the example of a 1956 travelling exhibition to

London and Paris. In London apparently, although Abstract Expressionism was ‘the most frequently discussed and controversial section of the exhibition’, the ‘overwhelming preference’ was ‘for the more realistic canvases.’5 And in Paris the ‘spirit of the coverage was altogether against Abstract Expressionism.’6

Following on from Kimmelman, Robert Burstow’s critique spotlighted not just Cockcroft’s argument, but also its influence. In support of her claims that the CIA’s undercover aid organizations and MoMA’s international programs had ‘similar’ functions, Cockcroft had referred to a 1967 Saturday Evening Post article by Thomas W. Braden (formerly executive secretary of MoMA and, from 1951-54, supervisor of the CIA’s cultural activities).7 In this article Braden had apparently revealed the CIA to have funded a Paris tour of the Boston

Symphony Orchestra in 1952. Although Burstow acknowledged that Cockcroft did not state outright that MoMA’s supposedly propagandist overseas promotion of Abstract

Expressionism was similarly funded by the CIA (although there is a strong implication), he pointed out that David and Cecile Schapiro later stated it as a matter of fact. And this led 222

him to observe that in revisionist accounts ‘as firm historical evidence has been in short supply, the art historical literature has subsequently tended to be repetitive and speculative.’8

Having interviewed Braden in 1992, Burstow was able to say conclusively that although the CIA had funded various international organizations for the purpose of turning the non- communist left against the communist left, Braden’s division ‘did not fund American painting, at least not during his two years in charge between 1952 and 1954’, and that ‘it would have been overestimating the cultural sophistication of government officials to assume that they would have then associated avant-garde art with liberal democracy’.9 He may, said Burstow, ‘have been only slightly exaggerating when he claimed that no-one in the CIA knew “the difference between Socialist Realism and finger painting”’.10

In 1994 Burstow interviewed Greenberg, who apparently said that he ‘did not believe that government officials would regard Abstract Expressionism as emblematic of liberal democracy’, and that ‘it was insufficiently accepted by an international cultural élite to have promoted a positive image of the US abroad until the mid-1950s.’11 Indeed,

Greenberg’s published contemporary account of the reception of the 1950 Venice Biennale seems to bear out this last observation – for he had taken the critics Alfred Frankfurter and

David Sylvester to task for their adverse appraisal of America’s contribution to the show in, respectively, that September’s Art News and The Nation of September 9.12 This, in turn, provoked Sylvester’s response that Pollock, Gorky and de Kooning did not represent ‘an exclusively American conception’, for ‘something akin’ to what they were doing was 223

‘being done very much better by Hartung and Kermadec.’13 And this comment by a critic of

Sylvester’s standing raises further questions as to how effective Abstract Expressionism would have been had it been used during this period as a singular emblem of ‘liberal democracy’.

Interestingly, Guilbaut, in ‘Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick’ of 1986, saw this exchange as being related in some nebulous way to the fact that America was

‘involved in an all-fronts counter-offensive against Communist cultural efforts’ – on the verge of launching a ‘psychological offensive’ emphasizing ‘the importance of cultural affairs in the propaganda war’.14 Significantly, instead of admitting that Abstract

Expressionism was not a resounding success during this period, Guilbaut suggested an

‘inability’ on the part of ‘some Europeans to grasp what was then at stake.’15 What his argument could not consider was that both Greenberg and Sylvester, each right in his own way, were arguing on purely aesthetic and art historical terms. And nor did it consider that

Greenberg’s opposition to Soviet Communism was long-standing and personal, and thus not generated by the official politics of the Cold War period.

Guilbaut’s portrayal of Greenberg as Cold Warrior had begun in 1980 in ‘The New

Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America’. Here, supposedly reflecting the views of

Arthur Schlesinger, the avant-garde artist was now censuring himself through warping ‘the trace of what he wanted to express’, consciously attempting ‘to erase, to void the readable.’16 By these means the ‘progressively disillusioned avant-garde [while] theoretically in opposition to the Truman administration, [had] aligned itself, often 224

unconsciously, with the majority’, which after 1948 had ‘moved dangerously toward the right.’17 For the artists, such politics had resulted in ‘the bitter defeat of being powerless to prevent their art from being assimilated into the political struggle’.18 And this particular

‘political struggle’ required that art be apolitical, that is non-communist and non-critical of

American society, if it were to be emblematic of American freedom in the Cold War push for cultural supremacy. (Or, as Guilbaut put it in ‘Postwar Painting Games’, ‘modern art… for strategic reasons, had to lose its…traditionally oppositional edge.. so as to be able to enter into the international arena as a positive alternative in Europe to Communist culture’.)19

The prime mover and shaker is this development (the ‘catalyst’) was supposedly

Greenberg, who had somehow been responsible for forcing the avant-garde to

… suppress what many first generation artists had defended against the sterility of American abstract art: emotional content, social commentary, the discourse that avant-garde artists had intended in their work.20

Because Greenberg had ‘theoretically achieved’ the elevation of the avant-garde ‘to a position of international importance’, he had, ‘in so doing integrated it into the imperialist machine of the Museum of Modern Art.’21

By ‘first generation artists’ Guilbaut seems to mean those who had arisen from the political hotbed (and the W.P.A. arts project) of the late thirties including Gorky, de Kooning and

Pollock. That is, those with whom Greenberg had been long acquainted, and whose relative worth he had seen for some time, as concomitant with his earlier vision of a world-class 225

American avant-garde. If, then, Greenberg had managed, as Guilbaut says, to have elevated the avant-garde ‘to a position of international importance’ (which by 1950 he clearly hadn’t) it would have had little to do with Cold War politics. By the same token, if he was failing to present the ‘emotional content’ and ‘social commentary’ which Guilbaut sees these artists to have ‘intended in their work’, it was not because he was forcing these artists to suppress such factors, but because, from the outset, his method of formalist criticism

(grounded, as it was, in Kantian philosophy and science) had, all along consciously sought out, first and foremost, formal concerns. In 1983, at the Vancouver Conference on

Modernism and Modernity, he made this point clear by saying: ‘I look at pictures first and how they look, and what they have to tell me comes next.’22 Which was not to entirely negate the place of literature in pictorial art (it existed, he noted, in Courbet and Goya), but it was to say that ‘in the showdown’ aesthetic experience was for him.23

Kimmelman, noting that since the late 1960s revisionist historians had ‘worked to shift the discussion of postwar American art away from the formalism of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.,

Michael Fried, Clement Greenberg, William Rubin, and others’, said that in directing attention to ‘the political, economic, and social circumstances’ in which postwar art was produced, these revisionists had 24

… linked the critical reception and promotion of postwar American art to political ideology, relating the promotion of American art abroad to the Marshall Plan… or Greenberg’s writings on Abstract Expressionism to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s manifesto of anti-Communist and antifascist liberalism, The Vital Center (1949).25

The nature of this statement suggests that it referred primarily to Guilbaut’s How New York

Stole the Idea of Modern Art (which, by Guilbaut’s admission, owed a conceptual debt to 226

Cockcroft). Here, Kimmelman spotted a contradiction in Guilbaut’s ‘descriptions of precisely what role the artists played’ in making ‘connections between Cold War rhetoric and the rhetoric surrounding Abstract Expressionism in the years leading up to 1952’.26 On the one hand, Guilbaut had said that the Abstract Expressionist group ‘forged an

“American” image for itself’, yet on the other had implied ‘that the artists were passive and that the sheer ambiguity of Abstract Expressionist art allowed it to be easily appropriated by powerful forces.’27 These contradictions, then, might be added to other questionable points, such as the actual level of promotion of Abstract Expressionism overseas. Yet what

Kimmelman had seen here was the tip of the iceberg, which is not to argue with Guilbaut’s cultural history, but merely how it related to Greenberg.

The crux of Guilbaut’s argument was that New York (i.e. Greenberg) stole the notion of modernism from the Parisians during the first months of 1948 in direct response to political events of January that year. For this, it was necessary to prove that Greenberg had not only suddenly promoted Abstract Expressionism above the School of Paris, but also, and just as suddenly, had shifted towards the political right and become optimistic about middlebrow culture. In this, Greenberg was linked by implication to the new anti-communist, anti- fascist views of Schlesinger which were, according to Guilbaut, decidedly right of centre

(unlike the liberalism of the early forties which had been ‘tinged with left-wing philosophy’).28 Most troubling here is the suggestion of theft, for behind such a suggestion is the implication that neither Greenberg nor Abstract Expressionism deserved the international success they had supposedly achieved at this point. But this implication was 227

essential in order to promote the idea that this ‘success’ had been somehow surreptitiously achieved by means of compliance with the government’s imperialist agenda.

Guilbaut’s argument for this theft effectively ended with the observation that, reflecting

Schlesinger’s vision of an ‘activist liberalism’, the U.S. Government was bent on developing ‘a cultural program that was geared to Europe and that emphasized the intellectual potential of America.’29 Put simply, the argument leading to this point was that, in this push for international status, American abstract art was a prime commodity. What had once ‘been characteristically American’ was to become ‘representative of “Western culture” as a whole’.30 In the case of art this was, according to Guilbaut, not simply a push for internationalism, nor even universalism, but universalism by American standards with

American art as the dominating force. Any art which did not speak of this new American universalism was simply cast aside, especially any ‘too closely related to the Paris school’.31 Greenberg’s place in this, through his support for Abstract Expressionism, was in the rendering of ‘assistance’ to the ‘authoritarian strain’ which had begun ‘to emerge in the avant-garde at this time.’32

Since Greenberg alone had ‘maintained that the American avant-garde had taken the lead’, and because ‘what everybody wanted was a commanding personality to lead the troops’

(which turned out to be Jackson Pollock, who, as we know, Greenberg had long supported) he was somehow implicated on the one hand as a compliant party to the official U.S. plot to conquer the world on the cultural level, and on the other as the authoritarian voice behind the push for the cultural supremacy of Abstract Expressionism.33 And it is worth noting 228

here that Kay Larson, in her 1987 essay ‘The Dictatorship of Clement Greenberg’, pointed out that to ‘Greenberg’s other attributes must be added the perverse magnetism of the authoritarian personality’ to which she added ‘the charm of contemptuousness’.34 And, as previously noted, in 1989 Susan Noyes Platt was to cast Greenberg in the role of petty dictator. Such, it seems, is the propensity of clichés to do the rounds.

That in mid-1949 Pollock had been transformed from an ‘alienated avant-garde artist into a culture hero’ by Life magazine, and not by Greenberg seemed beside the point. Greenberg

(along with Harold Rosenberg, Marc Rothko and Barnett Newman) was now portrayed as a

Cold War frontiersman whose ‘avant-garde ideology’ was linked to ‘the ideology of postwar liberalism’ – that is, ‘the advanced liberal ideology set forth by Schlesinger in The

Vital Center’.35 As to how Greenberg might have felt about Pollock’s appearance in Life magazine, we have only to look at his remark in 1949 that:

Today the art public asks expressly not to be made conscious of its own inadequacy. The new social areas that have been opened up for art consumption are able to make their wishes felt through such vessels of expression as Life, Art News, Art Digest, Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly. The philistinism that feels itself confirmed by this sort of journalism is, I am afraid, more dangerous to culture than is generally realized.36

However, this obvious antipathy to the commercialization of ‘high’ art, evident since 1946, was overlooked in Guilbaut’s account.

As we know, Greenberg had been working for some time towards the gathering together of a significant core of avant-garde American artists when he came to write ‘The Decline of

Cubism’ in March 1948, yet according to Guilbaut, he had chosen the month of March to 229

drop the ‘bombshell’ that ‘American art had broken with Paris once and for all’ in this essay – and this because of ‘political events and the the climate that had prevailed in New

York since January’.37 By this Guilbaut meant the presidential campaign which had

‘revolved around the issue of the European Recovery Program’ (thereby bringing world problems, particularly communism, to the fore), and Truman’s push for an immediate temporary draft.38 This was a continuation of his earlier argument in 1980, where he had attributed Greenberg’s ‘attack’ on the School of Paris to the fact of the ‘prewar atmosphere that had existed in New York since January of that year’ when the ‘threat of a Third World

War’ raised the question as to what would become of Western civilization.39 While it is true that Greenberg, given his milieu, would have been more attuned than most to this threat, and that it would undoubtedly have shaped his vision, it does not ipso facto mean that he was in any way consciously aligned with official policy in his promotion of American art.

And, as we have seen, the question of the fate of Western civilization had been an issue on the pages of Commentary since its inception in 1945.

For Guilbaut, ‘The Decline of Cubism’ represented ‘the first time in the history of

American art [that] an important art critic’ had shown ‘himself to be sufficiently aggressive, confident, and devoted to American art to openly challenge the supremacy of Parisian art.’40 Yet, as we know, this was not the first time that Greenberg had openly challenged the supremacy of Parisian art. And nor did ‘The Decline of Cubism’ represent the ‘once and for all’ break with the past Guilbaut suggested, for Greenbergian modernism, by its nature, proscribed such a break.

230

As we have seen, alhough the ‘main premises’ of Western art had migrated to America, this was qualified by the statement that only ‘enough of them’ had arrived to permit the abandonment of a ‘chronic, and hitherto justified, pessimism about the prospects of

American art’.41 There was, then, however tenuous, that essential remnant of connection.

As if to reinforce this point, in a review of Willem de Kooning’s first exhibition in April

1948, just a month after ‘The Decline of Cubism’, Greenberg noted that:

Just as the cubists and their more important contemporaries renounced a good part of the spectrum in order to push farther the radical renovation of painting that the fauves had begun… so de Kooning, along with Gorky, Gottlieb, Pollock, and several other contemporaries, has refined himself down to black in an effort to change the composition and design of post-cubist painting and introduce more open forms, now that the closed form canon… as established by Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, and Miró seems less and less able to incorporate contemporary feeling.42

Significantly, however, this canon had ‘not been broken with altogether’ even though it seemed at the time that ‘the possibility of originality and greatness for the generation of artists [then] under fifty’ depended on such a break.43 That the break was not forthcoming and that the thread of continuity remained necessary becomes evident in ‘A Symposium:

The State of American Art’ of 1949, in which Greenberg noted that the ‘definitely

American trend in contemporary art’ could be defined as:44

… the continuation in abstract painting and sculpture of the line laid down by cubism and broadened subsequently by Klee, Arp, Miró, Giacometti and the example of the early Kandinsky, all of whose influences have acted to modulate and loosen forms dictated by Matisse, Picasso and Léger.45

And in 1961, as noted in the first chapter, Pollock’s art was still said by Greenberg to have owed its lineage largely to the School of Paris. It might have suited Guilbaut’s picture of cultural imperialism to suggest that there was a clean break, but in Greenbergian 231

modernism there was no such thing, for the avant-garde had for its credence to be grounded in established tradition, and for Greenberg there was no Cold War shame in admitting this fact. These might seem small points, but they serve to illustrate that Greenberg was not concerned with cultural imperialism but with preserving the avant-garde tradition, something he had been adamant about in his seminal essays, with the preservation of standards set by past example being a paramount concern.

Shoring up his contention that the political situation of January 1948 was the cause of the avant-garde’s break with Paris, Guilbaut offered the additional explanation that the ‘roots’ of Greenberg’s pronouncement in ‘The Decline of Cubism’ also went back to January.46

And here he quoted from ‘The Situation at the Moment’ of 1948 to the effect that ‘the immediate future of Western art’ now depended on what was done in America - American abstract painting having, for ‘several years’, shown ‘a capacity for fresh content’ that was not being matched ‘either in France or Great Britain’.47 Yet this article, appearing in the

January 1948 edition of Partisan Review, would have been written sometime prior to

January, thereby indicating that these views were unrelated to the politics Guilbaut deemed of utmost significance.

In fact the pronouncements of ‘The Decline of Cubism’, as we have seen, are owed to a line of thought gestating over a considerable time – gathering force intermittently since the early thirties: a fact of which Guilbaut, in all fairness, would have been unaware since

Greenberg’s early letters had not then been publicly available. However, that the position

Greenberg (by 1948) had maintained on and off for a period of sixteen years had been 232

publicly evident for a couple of years (since, in fact, the 1946 review of Hedda Stern and

Adolph Gottlieb), indicates that ‘The Decline of Cubism’ was not quite the ‘bombshell’ that Guilbaut suggests. Perhaps it had simply taken this long to discover a sufficient number of North American artists capable of beating the School of Paris at its own game, but certainly there is little to suggest that this article was motivated by recent political events. In terms of Greenberg’s intransigence, it is a significant factor that he maintained a fairly constant approach not just to formalism, but to American modernism. Revisionist history, however, has a tendency to cover up continuity in order to present the cataclysmic

– that is, in this case, that Greenberg’s was simply a knee-jerk response to immediate and powerful events.

Further bolstering the suggestion that Greenberg was complying with official politics,

Guilbaut remarked that just two months after dropping his ‘bombshell’, Greenberg was writing under political ‘pressures’ when, in the article ‘Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility’, and ‘remembering his Trotskyist years’, he ‘lashed out violently at communism and

Stalinism on behalf of modern art’.48 Certainly, as we have seen, Greenberg was scathing of

Stalinist culture, and he was clearly as vehemently opposed to Stalinism as ever, but under what specific ‘pressures’ did Greenberg now feel compelled to write?

To answer this is to backtrack slightly in Guilbaut’s argument, for, after seeing ‘The

Decline of Cubism’ as having provided America with the last of ‘the trumps’ in ‘the war against communism’ – that is ‘artistic supremacy’ and ‘cultural superiority’ (the rest being the atom bomb, a strong economy and a powerful army) – he then went on to suggest that, 233

with ‘Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility’, Greenberg had actively ‘entered the dispute’ because ‘the battle against communism promised to be a long and a difficult one.’49 And

Greenberg’s role in this battle (a battle in which ‘art, too, was called on to play its part’) was as a contributor to ‘the full arsenal’ of cultural propaganda. Greenberg then, who had long since opposed propaganda, was cast as a propagandist.50

In this light, the suggestion that he was writing under ‘pressure’ might seem to imply that

Greenberg was being leant on from above and thus, in his attack on Kemenov, that he had been coerced into compliance with with the right wing agenda of the government of the day

– an implication which had also been inherent in Buchloh’s account. However, as we have seen, ‘Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility’ was also quite scathing of certain Western art writers of the time, describing them, along with Kemenov, as being ‘irrelevant’ due to their misrepresentations. And, as we have also seen, Greenberg’s vehement opposition to

Stalinism had its roots in the late thirties. It had, then, little to do with either the Cold War per se, or official American imperialism.

Some pages later, Guilbaut compounded his portrayal of Greenberg as a quasi-official propagandist by saying that ‘it was clear to Greenberg… that in order to save “high culture” artists must be fiercely anti-Communist’.51 This, however, was not only a gross misrepresentation of Greenberg, but also a distortion of the meaning of the example used to support the claim, which came (although Guilbaut fell shy of making this clear) from ‘The

State of American Writing’ of August 1948. Contrary to Guilbaut’s assertion, it was not artists who had to be ‘fiercely anti-Communist’, but writers, and then writers as people, not 234

writers as writers. Indeed, Greenberg had made a point of this distinction when he said, as

Guilbaut himself quoted, that:

As a person the writer ought indeed to involve himself in the struggle against Stalinism to the “point of commitment”. Why should we ask less of him than of any other adult interested in the survival of the common decencies and authentic culture?52

But, as a writer the same person was ‘under no moral – or aesthetic – obligation whatsoever to involve himself in this struggle.’53 And, for Greenberg, this meant that the writer’s

‘whole personality may not be invested in his interest in the struggle against Stalinism, or, for that matter, in any sort of politics.’54 In true formalist fashion, then, Greenberg was denying the necessity of extraneous subject matter. In terms of avant-garde art, as we know,

Greenberg saw its use-value in saving high culture as residing in its apolitical, non- representational nature. That is, being abstract, it could neither be popularised nor appropriated for propagandist ends, whether Stalinist or American imperialist. But this was the art, not the artist, whose personal politics seemed of no specific interest to Greenberg.

Yet Guilbaut had created the opposite impression to further the implication that Greenberg was coming onside with the government of the day.

To compound this implication we are told that in the August 1948 issue of Partisan Review

(i.e. ‘The State of American Writing’) Greenberg, along with Leslie Fiedler, had ‘described the literary avant-garde, which in many ways resembled the painting avant-garde, as a bearer of hope and an important cultural asset for the atomic age and its dangers’.55 Beyond the fact that Greenberg now saw marked differences between the painting and literary avant-gardes, and although Fiedler’s contribution did point to the fact that, as the ‘creative 235

act’ of writing challenged many political systems, ‘most spectacularly… the Soviet

Communist world-view’, and therefore ‘hypothetically’ attacked Stalinism, there is no evidence in Greenberg’s contribution to this symposium that he had said anything of the kind.56 And, as we have seen, far from being a ‘bearer of hope’, the literary avant-garde was, in his view, in a singularly sorry state – and this because of its becoming

‘professionalized’.57 That this had resulted, in part, in its popularization underscores the fact that Greenberg was still maintaining a vigil against the commercialisation of various forms of true culture. And this, which might be an important factor in understanding his later aversion to Pop Art and other forms of ‘novelty’, is masked by Guilbaut’s distortions.

After having said erroneously that, for Greenberg, the literary avant-garde was a hope- bearing ‘important cultural asset’, in another apparent contradiction, Guilbaut then suggested that ‘the literary avant-garde was too well accepted’ and that Greenberg

‘therefore had more faith in the painting avant-garde, which, owing to its long tradition of isolation, was capable of arousing greater hostility’, yet which was now in danger,

‘constantly under attack from two sides.’58 Yet this was again to misdirect. For, and to repeat (and Guilbaut did quote this), what Greenberg had said, and only in relation to the literary avant-garde, was that ‘on the one side’ it was ‘faced with political crisis’ and on the other ‘with the increasing aggressiveness and expansion of middlebrow culture.’59 Even the literary avant-garde, then, was only ‘under attack’ from one side – the middlebrow. The very side which was also encroaching on the artistic avant-garde’s traditional territory.

236

To support his conjecture, then, that modern art was stolen from Paris at a precise moment in 1948 which conveniently coincided with specific recent political events (as also his suggestion that Greenberg was the perpetrator of the ‘myth’ that the avant-garde’s precarious balancing ‘on a razor’s edge’ was ‘what gave it its vitality, creative tension, and quality’), Guilbaut had been forced to present a pessimistic essay relating to the literary avant-garde as an optimistic appraisal of the artistic avant-garde.60 To further the suggestion that Greenberg was generally optimistic for the middle class, after having cropped his excerpt from ‘The State of American Writing’ just short of one of the most significant passages (where Greenberg portrayed the middlebrow as ‘devaluating the precious, infecting the healthy, corrupting the honest, and stultifying the wise.’), Guilbaut had not only to water down Greenberg’s harsh criticism of the middlebrow, but also to concoct a story demonstrating Greenberg’s optimism. And this story runs as follows, that:

In the second part of his article, Greenberg explained why ‘high culture was imperiled by the “increase of the middle class”’ and its impact on all areas of social life. The middle class threatened art and yet it was its only hope, for “high culture” exists, Greenberg argued, only when the middle class is powerful. The avant-garde was “culture with a difference”: the growth of the middle class tended to diminish differences while making their perpetuation crucial for the survival of “culture”.61

So many quotes, and yet no references. Since there was only one part to ‘The State of

American Writing’, and since nothing precisely of this kind was said therein, it seems most likely that this is a corruption of what Greenberg said in the second part of ‘The Plight of

Our Culture’, which, being written in 1953, was therefore irrelevant to an argument positioned tightly in the first months of 1948. And, as we have seen, nothing from this period suggested the slightest hint of optimism for middlebrow culture. Yet it was essential to present Greenberg as being optimistic in order to equate this optimism with that of a talk 237

given by René Harnancourt to ‘the annual meeting of the American Federation of Arts in

May 1948’ – a talk in which ‘the same concern and the same hope’ as is supposedly evident in Greenberg’s article shone through.62 And they shone through in the following ways: that

‘freed from the restriction of collective style, the artist discovered he could create a style in the image of his own personality’; that the problem of artistic alienation could be ‘solved… by an order which reconciles the freedom of the individual with the welfare of society’, and that ‘the perfecting of this new order’ would result in ‘a society enriched beyond belief by the full development of the individual for the sake of the whole.’63 In this new society, a

‘good name’ for which was ‘democracy’, Harnancout apparently believed that modern art

(‘in its infinite variety and ceaseless exploration’) was ‘its foremost symbol’.64

And so, according to Guilbaut, Harnancourt had presented ‘perhaps the first reconciliation of avant-garde ideology with the ideology of postwar liberalism’.65 This comment, in turn, was used to link Greenberg with ‘the advanced liberal ideology’ in Schlesinger’s The Vital

Center, which, as previously quoted, Guilbaut described as being ‘powerfully situated midway between fascism and Communism.’66 However, given Guilbaut’s tight time-frame of 1948, The Vital Center did not appear until 1949, a point Guilbaut notes on page 184.

Beyond which, as is apparent from Greenberg’s writings, his own ideology, unlike

Schlesinger’s, was situated between rampant capitalism and Stalinism. And there is certainly a case for suggesting that the fear and memory of fascism underlay his continuing opposition to both, since he had seen the possibilities for fascism within a capitalist society back in 1941.

238

As we also know from Greenberg’s writings, his only optimism for culture during these years resided in his faith in a small section of the artistic avant-garde, which he had long supported. Yet, by June 1949, its work was clearly not yet achieving the recognition and acceptance one might imagine was essential to its promotion as an emblem of American freedom. If Greenberg was supportive of the international exposure of this core avant-garde group the reason has to be considered that it was simply because he knew their relative worth, and that, since the early thirties, he had seen the possibilites for an internationally acceptable American art. And it could be seen as reflective of that early vision, and his appreciation of the worth of American art, rather than an allegiance to Cold War politics, that in 1949 he perceived ‘three or four’ of this group (as previously quoted) as being ‘able to match anything being done by artists of the same generation elsewhere in the world.’67

This is not a possibility Guilbaut considers.

The fact that Greenberg championed what, at that time, would have been the radical edge of modern art (coupled with the fact that he was scathing of capitalist society) suggests that he had not drifted as far to the right as revisionists suggest. Rather than being in line with right wing politics, his opinions on the state of American culture were in line with other intellectuals of the time. For instance, reflecting Greenberg’s opinion on the commercialisation of the American literary avant-garde, and echoing the arguments in

‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in 1949 Milton Klonsky wrote that ‘comic strips, pulp fiction, movies, radio serials [and] commercial jazz’, all directly resulting from ‘modern technology and public education’, were usurping ‘the functions of traditional art in setting 239

the styles, the manners, the images, the standards and the goals of life for millions, almost as if they were the organs of an un-official state religion.’68

John O’Brian

As Guilbaut had relied on Cockcroft’s version of events, so too O’Brian seems to have relied on Guilbaut’s, whose works are listed in the bibliography to The Collected Essays and Criticism. Yet, unlike Guilbaut, the crucial timing for O’Brian is the period between

1951 and 1953, for his contention was that Greenberg’s supposed passage from Eliotic

Trotskyism to what he called ‘Kantian anti-Communism’ had taken ‘no more than a couple of years’.69 For this it was necessary to establish the defining limits of this period of change, and so a 1951 letter to the Editor of The Nation (dated 7 February and finally published, not in The Nation, but in The New Leader on 19 March 1951) and ‘The Plight of

Our Culture’ of 1953 were called upon to serve this purpose. 70 The letter, which criticized

J. Alvarez del Vayo’s column for parallelling Soviet propaganda in its expression of the interests of the Soviet Union, was taken by O’Brian, in its ‘implied claim to objectivity’, to represent the appearance of a new Kantianism and anti-communism in Greenberg’s writings.71

In view of the fact that Greenberg had, even by O’Brian’s estimation, been quoting Kant in print since 1943 (although it was, in fact, two years earlier) this might seem a curious thing to say. And certainly anti-communism had been a mark of Greenberg’s anti-totalitarian outburst in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ – a fact of which O’Brian himself would have been undoubtedly aware. However, to prove his argument he was compelled to conflate Soviet 240

communism with Trotskyism in order to portray Greenberg as having dropped his earlier allegiances. As we know, Greenberg had opposed Stalinism all along, and his allegiance to

Trotskyism had waned long before the war was over. However, for O’Brian, as

Greenberg’s transition had to have occurred between 1951 and 1953, ‘The Plight of Our

Culture’ was presented as the final stage of Greenberg’s ‘about face’, his ‘unsticking of the

Trotskyist label’, in which, in the space of a couple of years, ‘pessimism about the culture of modernity had given way to optimism.’72

To support his suggestion that Greenberg had shifted to the right, O’Brian dredged up his association with the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), and then presented his 1951 letter criticising J. Alvarez del Vayo as being a ‘proof of faith’ to this committee, which was supposedly ‘looking for firm evidence of anti-Communist commitment in its members.’73 According to O’Brian, the ACCF was ‘a subsidiary of the

Congress for Cultural Freedom established in 1950’, both organisations being ‘engaged in combatting Communism.’74 As if to reinforce the point that Greenberg’s ‘new’ attitude was of use to the reactionary right, we are then told that his ‘charges’ (against del Vayo) were

‘read into The Congressional Record by no less a figure than than Congressman George

Dondero’, who, in a twist of Cold War irony, ‘had been leading a crusade against what he saw as Communist-infected modern art.’75

Then, through a series of associations ranging from Greenberg’s involvement ‘in executive policy-making at the ACCF’ to an 1969 interview with Lily Leino for the Voice of

America, O’Brian maintained that Greenberg ‘remained committed to the Cold War agenda 241

of the U.S. Government’ until the late sixties.76 Even after MaCarthyism had subsided, he said, Greenberg was writing for ‘a number of periodicals [such as Encounter] sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, seeing ‘no reason to change his practices after it was revealed… in 1966 that the ACCF, Encounter, and other organizations and periodicals… had been supported by the CIA through a series of dummy foundations.’77 Rationally, it might be supposed that since the CIA’s tentacles were so far-reaching, there would have been little point in withdrawing one’s services from anything. A point, however, which

O’Brian fails to reveal is that Greenberg’s association with the ACCF was quite short-lived.

According to Florence Rubenfeld’s account, he joined in the Fall of 1951, and according to

O’Brian’s chronology he attended the first official meeting in December 1950, was nominated to the executive committee in October 1952, and resigned in April 1953.78

Despite being on the executive committee, and therefore, as O’Brian suggests, probably

‘involved in executive policy-making’, the reason he resigned was that ‘the organization no longer reflected his views’.79 As he apparently said to Rubenfeld: ‘They didn’t listen to me.

They didn’t care what I thought’.80

In his portrayal of the ACCF and Greenberg’s membership, it seems that O’Brian had followed on directly from Guilbaut, who, in ‘Postwar Painting Games’, had described this committee as being ‘an organization that one can characterize, at least until 1953, as pursuing right-wing liberalism in its active fight against Russia and Communism in the field of ideas’.81 By Guilbaut’s account this committee had been founded by James

Burnham, James T. Farrell, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (vice chairman), and Sidney Hook. What he didn’t say was that Hook was both the chairman of this and a contributing editor to 242

Commentary, and that both he and Farrell were Partisan Review stalwarts from the old days. That he chose to mention Schlesinger’s position, not Hook’s, may well be because

Schlesinger’s Vital Center had been central to his argument in How New York Stole the

Idea of Modern Art.

Among the ACCF’s membership were Alexander Calder, Robert Motherwell, Jackson

Pollock, William Baziotes and Greenberg. It is questionable, then, that to be associated with this committee meant a commitment to right-wing liberalism, as seems to be

Guilbaut’s implication. Yet it seems typical of revisionist history that, in order to present the case for a united push for cultural supremacy, specific individuals were cast as right- wing. But this is to conflate communism with socialism, and, as Greenberg had said to Saul

Ostrow, by 1989, though he no longer believed in ‘Socialism’, he still voted socialist whenever he could. And he was still considering socialist issues. 82 For instance, the fact that socialism had not yet been tried in advanced countries, and that in Russia it had had ‘to do the dirty work of industrialization.’83

Both Guilbaut’s and O’Brian’s understanding of the ACCF came from Christopher Lasch’s

The Agony of the American Left of 1966.84 Yet Lasch casts a different light on the matter.

Despite later revelations of CIA infiltration and funding (which would not, after all, have been apparent to the committee), and despite its having been founded, in part, to ‘counter the influence of mendacious Communist propaganda’ (which, as we know, Greenberg had long criticized), this committee was set up in apparent good faith to ‘defend academic freedom’ and ‘resist the lengthening shadow of thought-control.’ 85 Not surprisingly, this 243

version of events does not enter revisionist arguments; yet, given Greenberg’s observations in ‘The State of American Writing’ regarding the avant-garde writers’ move into academia, it is reasonable to suggest that he joined the ACCF with the best interests of the avant-garde in mind.

Apparently paraphrased by O’Brian was Lasch’s opinion that the ACCF:

… represented a coalition of liberals and reactionaries who shared a conspiratorial view of communism and… agreed that the communist conspiracy had spread through practically every level of American society’.86

The O’Brian version of this reads: ‘like many intellectuals within his circle at Commentary and Partisan Review during the McCarthy era, Greenberg became a militant anti-

Communist at the same time that he abandoned his earlier hopes for a socialist order’, and that chief among the themes of this ‘disaffected American left’ was ‘the conspiratorial view that Bolshevism could be found at every level of society.’87

O’Brian, then, had particularized Lasch’s broad generalization in order to cast Greenberg in the appropriate light for his argument. Indeed, his argument seems quite coloured by

Lasch’s, in whose opinion:

The prototype of the anticommunist intellectual in the fifties was the disillusioned ex- communist, obsessed by the corruption of Western politics and culture by the pervasive influence of Stalinism and driven by a need to exercise [sic] the evil and expiate his own past.88

Greenberg may well have been an ‘anticommunist intellectual’, but he was not, in the

Stalinist sense, ‘a disillusioned ex-communist’, and he was certainly not seeking to ‘expiate 244

his own past’ – for that past had long since included anti-Stalinism. Underlying O’Brian’s account, however, is just such an implication. But he was selective in what he took from

Lasch, and Lasch’s opinion, unlike O’Brian’s, was qualified by the observation that:

… the particular brand of anticommunism that flourished in the fifties grew out of the postwar power struggles in Europe and out of traumas of twentieth-century history – fascism, Stalinism [and] the crisis of liberal democracy.89

What Lasch has addressed here tallies with what we have already seen, and what O’Brian avoids: that is, that the world-view of a generation of intellectuals was shaped by the spectre of Nazism. To be sure, Greenberg fitted Lasch’s generalization in that he was concerned with the ‘pervasive influence of Stalinism’, but this has to be seen in relation to other concerns of both he and his peers: for instance, anti-Semitism. Yet this is lost in an argument which sees Greenberg as having acquiesced to an imperialist agenda.

This suggestion of acquiescence entered O’Brian’s argument in relation to ‘The Plight of

Our Culture’, which supposedly marked the point at which Greenberg’s ‘earlier criticism of mass-circulation magazines and their blurring of distinctions between high and low culture’ was revoked, and his ‘pessimism about the culture of modernity had given way to optimism’.90 By dint of this newfound optimism, his ‘initial hostility’ to the promotion of art for commercial profit (its reproduction in calendars and magazines, and its entry into big business collections, for example) was now, supposedly, succumbed to – and hence

Greenberg’s complete ‘acquiescence to the pax Americana and its policies’.91 The

‘turnaround in Greenberg’s thinking’ exemplified by this ‘acquiescence’ had resulted in his promotion of ‘a serene and optimistic art of abstraction’; of, that is, a form of 245

correspondence ‘to the brightest cultural prospects in the American imperium’.92

Interestingly, the terms ‘acquiescence’ and ‘American imperium’ (with identical italics) appear together in The Agony of the American Left in relation to Dwight Macdonald’s 1958 article ‘America! America!’, in which, said Lasch, Macdonald ‘wondered whether the intellectuals’ rush to rediscover their native land… had not produced a somewhat uncritical acquiescence in the American imperium.’93As previously discussed, Greenberg was anything but uncritical of American culture. And, as we shall see, this criticism was to reach full force in ‘The Plight of Our Culture’.

To further support his argument, O’Brian called on Hilton Kramer’s statements from 1962 that to ‘understand Art and Culture is to understand a great deal about the artistic values that came out of the war and the Cold War years’, and that ‘to question it is to question some of the salient achievements and aesthetic beliefs of those years’. 94 Feeling that he had been quoted out of context, Kramer felt compelled to respond immediately in 1993 with the rejoinder, which bears quoting at length, that:

There is no way to understand what in 1962 I spoke of as “the salient achievements and aesthetic beliefs” of the war and the Cold War period without some acknowledgement of the lethal effects that Stalinist influence had on American art and culture in the 1930s. The Stalinist-inspired Popular Front culture of the Thirties was, in all its essentials, an irredeemably philistine and middlebrow culture, and it laid upon all the arts in this country a curse of mediocrity and sentimentality from which it did not begin to recover until the 1940s.95

In Kramer’s view, O’Brian’s interpretation of ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ was a distortion of its meaning to support the charge that Greenberg’s ‘acquiescence to the Pax Americana and it policies was accompanied by a corresponding shift in his stance as a cultural critic’. 246

A distortion which Kramer saw as an attempt ‘to bring his reading of Greenberg’s later criticism into line with the political views of his friend and colleague Serge Guilbaut’.96

Being so concerned with this, said Kramer, ‘he scarcely noticed the degree of misrepresentation that such an effort required.’97 Interestingly, Annette Leddy, curator of the Getty Research Institute’s holdings of Greenberg’s estate, notes a letter from O’Brian

‘expressing dismay that CG agrees with Kramer’s attack on the Intro to the Collected

Essays’ – thereby suggesting that Kramer, in Greenberg’s opinion, was right in his accusations.98

Unlike O’Brian, Kramer frankly rejoiced ‘that someone in the USIA bureaucracy had the brains to ask a writer of Greenberg’s distinction to speak on the Voice of America broadcasts’.99 But, he said, ‘for O’Brian it remains a mark of the writer’s contract with the

Devil.’100 Speaking rhetorically, he asked: ‘And what sort of thing was Greenberg broadcasting for the Voice of America in 1969?’101 In answer to which, amongst the passages he quoted from the interview with Lily Leino, was Greenberg’s view of Soviet art, which ran:

I’ve seen some contemporary Soviet art, and as far as I can tell, art in the Soviet Union is controlled by Philistines. The same appears to be true in China and in every place where Bolsheviks are in power. I call them Bolsheviks instead of Communists because I feel that’s more accurate, more specific. “Socialism” in backward countries means Bolshevism – Stalinism, if you want – and that means something barbaric, because “socialism” in a backward environment becomes, among other things, an aggressive expression of backwardness.102

247

Significantly, this statement demonstrates that Greenberg was still, in 1969, maintaining a position he had held since 1939 (with barbarism still a concern). Fully agreeing with

Greenberg’s opinion, Kramer said:

Some of us knew that this was all perfectly true when Greenberg made his broadcast in 1969, and now all the world knows it was true. Yet, because he spoke the truth under U.S. government auspices, Mr. O’Brian apparently finds it tainted. That is indeed the triumph of ideology over veracity.103

Further supporting Kramer’s case is that in the Leino interview Greenberg was again quoting Marx.104 Not only, in this, was he exercising his freedom to speak, a freedom denied his Russian counterpart, but also was demonstrating, quite openly, that he was not complying with a right-wing agenda.

The Cold War period might have proved Greenberg right regarding his early views on

Stalinism, but, since this was a position he had held all along, he cannot be seen to have changed his stance concomitant with Cold War politics, and nor, by the same token, can he be seen as having been subservient to official Cold War policy. If anything, he was possibly influential, for Kramer observed that there was:

… no question but that the Cold War played a significant role in shaping American cultural life in the decade and a half that followed the end of World War II, and that ex-radical intellectuals of Greenberg’s generation made an important contribution to the formulation of that role…105

And, as we have seen, aspects of his arguments in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ were now being quite generally discussed in the intellectual ranks. In Kramer’s opinion, O’Brian’s 248

through his distorted ‘characterization of Greenberg’s role in this intellectual history’, had revealed:106

… his loyalty to the radical politics of the Sixties, with its anti-American paranoia, its sentimentalization of Marxist ideology, and its adamant refusal to acknowledge the moral superiority of American democracy over Soviet tyranny.107

Whether or not this was a ‘moral’ superiority, certainly there was a degree of freedom and security in America, cast in legislation, unheard of in communist Russia at this time. What

O’Brian failed to appreciate was that, for Greenberg’s milieu, the days of revolutionary utopias were over, Stalinism had put paid to that. As Cohen had pointed out in his ‘Act of

Affirmation’: ‘we share with the rest of humanity the deep unease of breathing air almost visibly clotted with fantastic utopias or unimaginable cataclysms.’108 Greenberg had clearly felt this unease since the war years, and ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, beyond all else, reflects this. And here, an article by Norbert Muhlen, published by Commentary in January

1951, might be seen to best illustrate what the battle of the intellectuals, rather than that of the politicians, was about. Called ‘The New Nazis of Germany: The Totalitarians of the

Eastern Zone’, the editorial introduction stated that:

In their quite proper concern over every sign of continuing or resurgent Nazism, leaders of American public opinion have sounded the alarm at the return of individual Nazis to government office or positions in industry and at individual acts and expressions of bigotry in the zones of occupation of the American and other Western powers. But meanwhile, almost unnoted, across the border in Eastern Germany, totalitarianism has re-risen, fully organized and strongly armed physically and ideologically, ripe for new internal terror and possible external aggression.109

Here, there is a concern for the fate of a subjugated people, rather than for American imperialism – a concern evident in Greenberg’s reference to the ‘oppression’ as a cause for 249

modern society’s despair. And here again we see analogies being drawn between Nazism and Stalinism, for, commencing with an overview of the Nazi dictatorship, including the camps and exterminations and the lesser crimes of state control of media and industry,

Muhlen went on to describe the East German dictatorship as bearing many resemblances to its fascist predecessor; operating, as it did, by means of bribery, corruption and terror. Even

‘objectivism’, which basically meant questioning the propaganda by ‘reading a Western newspaper or listening to a Western broadcast’, was a crime ‘punishable by re-education in a labor camp and expulsion from the party’.110

From what has been presented so far, it seems there is much of significance overlooked by the revisionists which might have made for a quite different argument. Certainly open to question are the claims that 1953 (or possibly 1948) marked the final phase of Greenberg’s transition from pessimism to optimism coincidental with a sudden change of politics. These claims will be further challenged in the following chapter, which addresses Greenberg’s view of culture in 1953, and changes he made to the political content of ‘The Plight of Our

Culture’ for the volume Art and Culture of 1961. 250

Notes

1 Eva Cockcroft, ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’, Artforum, Vol. 12, No. 10, June 1974, 40 2 Idem. 3 Kimmelman, ‘Revisiting the Revisionists’, 45 Kimmelman (p. 54 [n. 49] ) suggests consulting the following sources for the correct information regarding the 1948 Venice Biennale: Philip Rylands and Enzo di Martino, Flying the Flag for Art: The United States and the Venice Biennale, 1895-1991, Richmond, Va., 1993, 277-279, and Paolo Rizzi and Enzo di Martino, Storia della Biennale: 1895-1982, Milan, 1982, 97 A tendency to subsume one ideology into another seems common to revisionist histories. For instance, Max Kozloff contended that any similarity between ‘American cold war rhetoric’ and the language of Abstract Expressionist artists was simply coincidental. Yet Cockcroft, disagreeing with Kozloff, in a curious twist of logic suggested that Cold War rhetoric was informed by Abstract Expressionist language – or at least that is how it seems, for she had said their similarities were not coincidental. (Cockcroft, ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’, 39) 4 Ibid., 51 5 Ibid., 48 6 Idem. 7 Cockcroft, ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’, 40 8 Robert Burstow, ‘The Limits of Modernist Art as a “Weapon of the Cold War”: reassessing the unknown patron of the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner’, The Oxford Art Journal, 20:1, 1997, 68. The article to which Burstow was referring here was David and Cecile Shapiro, ‘Abstract Expressionism: the Politics of Apolitical Painting’, Prospects, No. 3, 1977, 175-214 9 Burstow, ‘The Limits of Modernist Art’, 69. Burstow had interviewed Braden on 16 October 1992. 10 Idem. Braden’s reference to the CIA and finger painting was apparently quoted in J. S. Friedman, ‘The Art that came in from the Cold’, In These Times, 9-15 January 1985, 13 (for this see Burstow, 78 [n. 23] ) 11 Greenberg quoted in: Burstow, ‘The Limits of Modernist Art’, 69, quoted from: Robert Burstow, ‘On Art and Politics: A Recent Interview with Clement Greenberg’, Frieze, no. 17, September/October 1994, 34 12 Clement Greenberg, ‘The European View of American Art’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3, 60-61 (first published in The Nation, 25 November 1950) 13 Ibid., 60, editor’s note. 14 Serge Guilbaut, ‘Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick’, in: Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut, The MIT Press, 1986, 61-62 15 Ibid., 61 16 Serge Guilbaut, ‘The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde’, 77 17 Idem. 18 Idem. 19 Guilbaut, ‘Postwar Painting Games’, 36 20 Guilbaut, ‘The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde’, 77-78 21 Ibid., 77 22 Discussion session of Clement Greenberg, ‘To Cope With Decadence’, in: Buchloh, et. al, Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, 165-166 23 Ibid., 167 24 Kimmelman, ‘Revisiting the Revisionists’, 39 25 Idem. 26 Ibid., 41 27 Idem. Here, Kimmelman quotes from Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 121 28 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 191 29 Ibid., 192 30 Ibid., 177 31 Ibid., 178 251

32 Idem. 33 Ibid., 193 34 Kay Larson, ‘The Dictatorship of Clement Greenberg’, Artforum 25, Summer 1987, 76 35 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 189, 193 36 Greenberg, ‘A Symposium: The State of American Art’, 288-289 37 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 172 38 Ibid., 165, 167 39 Guilbaut, ‘The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde’, 73 40 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 172 41 Greenberg, ‘The Decline of Cubism’, 215 42 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of an Exhibition of Willem de Kooning’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 229 (first published in The Nation, 24 April 1948) 43 Idem. 44 Greenberg, ‘A Symposium: The State of American Art’, 287 45 Idem. 46 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 168 47 Ibid., 169 (Guilbaut quotes from Greenberg, ‘The Situation at the Moment’, 193) 48 Ibid., 172 49 Ibid., 172, 173 50 Ibid., 173 51 Ibid., 188 52 Idem. Guilbaut quotes from Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing’, 257, but does not name this article in regard to Greenberg in his text, endnotes or bibliography. In the case of Fiedler, though this article is noted on p. 245 (notes 73 and 74), it is not noted in the bibliography. 53 Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing’, 257 54 Idem. 55 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 187 56 Idem. Guilbaut quotes from Leslie A. Fiedler, ‘A Symposium: The State of American Writing’, Partisan Review, Vol. XV, No. 8, 1948, 875 Guilbaut is only able to conflate the views of Fiedler and Greenberg by implying them to be co-authors of the same article. When, in fact, they were separate contributors to this symposium. 57 Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing’, 254 58 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 187-8 59 Ibid., 188: Guilbaut quotes from Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing’, 255 60 Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing’, 257 61 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 188 62 Idem. 63 Ibid., 189: Harnancourt quoted from: René Harnancourt, ‘Challenge and Promise: Modern Art and Society’, Art News, November 1949, 252 64 Idem. 65 Idem. 66 Ibid., 189, 190 67 Greenberg, ‘The State of American Art’, 287 68 Klonsky, ‘Along the Midway of Mass Culture’, 349 69 John O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxvi 70 Clement Greenberg, ‘Letters Concerning J. Alvarez del Vayo’s Column in The Nation’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3, 78-82: consisting of two letters: the first dated February 21, 1951, is to the editor of The New Leader; the second, sent with the first, is the letter to the editor of The Nation, dated February 7, 1951, which was finally published by The New Leader on 19 March, 1951. 71 O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxvii 72 Ibid., xxix, xxx 73 Ibid., xxvii 74 Idem. 75 Idem. 252

To further support his argument, O’Brian cast aside Greenberg’s suggestion that he had he had given up his regular reviewing spot with The Nation because he had had ‘a belly-full of reviewing in general’. Preferring, instead, to see it as in some way connected with the politics supposedly surrounding the del Vayo letter of ‘sixteen months later’ (xxvi-xxvii). Yet this comment, which O’Brian quoted from Greenberg’s ‘Autobiographical Statement’ of 1955, was reiterated by Greenberg in conversation with Trish Evans in 1974, this time with the preface that he ‘quit The Nation, not for political reasons as so many people have it.’ (for this see: Evans, ‘A Conversation with Clement Greenberg’, 5) Needless to say, there is another side to the story of Greenberg’s letter to The Nation, one which suggests that, rather than being in obeisance to the ACCF, Greenberg was merely reflecting, beyond his own views, those of his peers and beyond; that this was an act of courage rather than of subservience, and that he was a leader rather than a follower. That is, if we are to consider Florence Rubenfeld’s account, which runs as follows:

The resulting brouhaha [following publication of Greenberg’s letter in The New Leader, and a subsequent $200, 000 lawsuit brought against him by Freda Kirchwey, owner and editor in chief of The Nation] went on for months in the letters column of the New Leader. The Nation was criticized not only for del Vayo’s columns but for Kirchwey’s refusal to publish letters critical of his position. As the voice of the anti-Stalinist left, Partisan Review inveighed against Kirchwey’s failure to air Greenberg’s charges: “It looks very much like an attempt to shut off political discussion… when it touches the most sensitive spot.” [unreferenced quote, but political discussion seems to be what this argument was about, at base]. Copies of unpublished letters previously sent to the Nation poured into the New Leader offices and were printed. Former contributors such as Richard Rovere, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and F. W. Dupee supported Clem’s position. The Nation was under siege and on the defensive. When Reinhold Niebuhr requested that his name be removed from the list of contributing editors, readers’ queries as to a possible linkage went unanswered.

Clem became a major figure. [Norman] Podhoretz worked briefly at Commentary in 1953. Clem’s letter and the Nation’s suit were still a major subject of discussion: “Within our small circle the lawsuit was a very big deal. [And then, significantly, considering Greenberg’s anti-Stalinism was portrayed by O’Brian as a kow-towing to the ACCF, Podhoretz continued…] We were all fiercely anti-Stalinist. That was taken for granted. No question. Clem was something of a hero. He wasn’t the largest presence in the New York intellectual community, but he was large enough.” (Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 122. Podhoretz quoted from an unpublished interview with Rubenfeld of February 14, 1991, see: Ibid., 312 [n. 23] )

Indicative of the sheer numbers supporting Greenberg’s opinion of del Vayo and Stalinism was the subsequent turn of events. According to Rubenfeld, in 1955 (the date 1995 is a clear misprint): ‘The suit was settled out of court “with a kind of apology” from the Nation to Clem and the New Leader. Del Vayo resigned and Freda Kirchwey stepped down as editor of the Nation.’ (Rubenfeld: Clement Greenberg: A Life, 312 [n. 22] ) For an example of Dondero’s anti-modernist invective (which bears marked similarities to Hitler’s nationalistic antipathy towards modern art) see: ‘Congressman George A. Dondero, “Modern Art Shackled to Communism”’ (from a speech given in the United States House of Representatives, 16 August 1949. Published in Congressional Record, First Session, 81st Congress, Tuesday, 16 August 1949), in: Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 496-497 76 Ibid., xxviii 77 Idem. 78 Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 123; O’Brian, ‘Chronology, 1950-1969’, 287, 288 79 O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxvii-xxviii; Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 123 80 Idem. (Rubenfeld does not give a date for this conversation, but merely says ‘Story from CG’, 312 [n. 24]) 81 Guilbaut, ‘Postwar Painting Games’, 73 82 Ostrow, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Fifty Years Later’, 57 83 Idem. 253

84 For Guilbaut’s and O’Brian’s debts to Lasch see: Guilbaut, ‘Postwar Painting Games’, 79 (n. 61), and O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xix (where O’Brian references a chapter from Lasch entitled: ‘The Cultural Cold War’), xxviii (n. 9) 85 Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left, New York, 1969 (1966), 78-79 86 Ibid., 82 87 O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxvi-xxvii 88 Lasch, The Agony of the American Left, 82 89 Idem. 90 O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxviii, xxix 91 Ibid., xxv-xxvi, xxviii 92 Ibid., xxx, xxxii 93 Lasch, The Agony of the American Left, 74 Dwight Mcdonald’s article ‘America! America!’ was turned down by the magazine Encounter, and subsequently published by Universities and Left Review, Spring, 1959 (Lasch, The Agony of the American Left, 74-75, n. .7). 94 Kramer quoted in: O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxix: quoted from Hilton Kramer, ‘A Critic on the Side of History: Notes on Clement Greenberg’, Arts Magazine 37, October 1962, 61 95 Kramer, ‘Clement Greenberg and the Cold War’, 205 Kramer further suggests that O’Brian had reduced to a ‘purely political scenario’ what he had called ‘the aesthetic beliefs of those years’, when in fact what he had meant by ‘salient achievements’ was, in context, the ‘Abstract Expressionist movement.’ (Kramer, ‘Clement Greenberg and the Cold War’, 204) 96 Ibid., 197: O’Brian quoted from, O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxviii 97 Idem. 98 Annette Leddy, Box 4, Correspondence, 1932-93, Folder 6, 1985-93, Inventory of the Clement Greenberg Papers: 1928-1994, The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, http://www.getty.edu./gri/htmlfindingaids/greenberg_m.l.html 99 Kramer, ‘Clement Greenberg and the Cold War’, 202-203 100 Ibid., 203 101 Idem. 102 Ibid., 203: quoted from Clement Greenberg, ‘Interview Conducted by Lily Leino’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 312 (broadcast for United States Information Service, April 1969) 103 Idem. 104 Greenberg, ‘Interview Conducted by Lily Leino’, 304: ‘Because we Americans felt so much further behind the French, or behind Paris… we tried that much harder to catch up – just catch up. Then what Marx called the law of combined development came into operation: the strenuous effort you make just to catch up sends you ahead in the end; you don’t just catch up, you overtake.’ 105 Kramer, ‘Clement Greenberg and the Cold War’, 204 106 Idem. 107 Idem. 108 Cohen, ‘An Act of Affirmation’, 1 109 Norbert Muhlen, ‘The New Nazis of Germany: The Totalitarians of the Eastern Zone’, Commentary, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1951, 1 110 Ibid., 5 254

CHAPTER EIGHT – CULTURE AND POLITICS

Modern culture – a mixed blessing

In one respect O’Brian was partly right regarding Greenberg’s optimism ‘about the culture of modernity’, but not in the sense that he meant. Reflecting the hopes of Franz Borkenau, who had seen (unlike Oswald Spengler and the historian Arnold J. Toynbee) that barbarism, for all its faults, was nonetheless a ‘creative process’ through which the way lay open ‘to a renewal of creativity’, Greenberg saw that, because ‘radical changes in technology’ had previously always transformed the cultural and social structure of society, there was no reason to expect that things would pan out differently under industrialism.1

Arguing, like Borkenau, against Eliot and Spengler, who each gave ‘one to infer’ that industrialism was ‘but another of the time-bound phenomena that… accompany the decline of any high civilization’, Greenberg saw technology as part of a natural process unrelated to decline.2 Looking to historical precedent, he was able to say that humanity would ‘no more forget industrial technology’ than it had ‘amid the rise and fall of civilizations, forgotten the use of metal tools, the wheel, domestic plants or domestic animals.’3 And there was no doubt in his mind that ‘science and industrialism’ did, and would, ‘make a great difference’, offering up possibilities ‘radically different’ to those of currently known

‘expired or moribund civilizations.’4 Modern technology then, was a potential benefit. But it meant turning over a new leaf, for, in view of the latest developments, ‘many premises based on observation of the relatively recent past’ had to be ‘discarded’, and ‘the prospects of culture… viewed within a new perspective.’5 (All of which suggests that Greenberg’s later disgruntlement with mass-media based arts did not result from a similar disgruntlement with modern technology.) Yet this optimism for the future was tinged with 255

pessimism for a culture which, ‘under advanced industrialism’, had ‘plumbed depths of banality unknown to previous societies’ and was ‘in decline on its highest levels’.6 Along with Spengler and Toynbee, he foresaw this decline as possibly ending ‘relatively soon in the collapse or paralysis of Western civilization, in accordance with the pattern followed by all other high civilizations so far’.7

Greenberg’s optimistic prognosis that ‘science and industrialism’ would ‘make a great difference’ closely parallels that of Marx, whose ‘prognosis of a socialist future’,

Greenberg tells us, ‘was founded on the assumption that science and technology would eventually make it possible for society to produce material goods in such plenty as to render social differences unnecessary’.8 Which, in turn, demonstrates a continuity of thought between this essay and his letter to the editor of Politics back in 1944, where on the one hand he had distanced himself from Trotsky, yet on the other had cited Marxism as asserting ‘that men oppress each other when there are not enough goods to go around’.9 He had seen back then the benefits of industrialism, in that it was only through ‘industrial and agrarian revolution’ that living standards in Eastern Europe might rise and politics and culture become ‘liberalized’ (by which he clearly did not mean a Schlesinger-type liberalism).10

Reflecting his previous concerns for the fate of culture, and in agreement with Eliot,

Greenberg saw that decline predominated in ‘most of the arts, in standards of taste, in some departments of learning, and many aspects of manners’. 11 Although he did ‘hesitate to say this of all the arts, all areas of taste, all departments of learning, or manners on all social 256

levels’.12 Even the avant-garde, which had ‘led the fight for aesthetic truth, high standards’ and ‘continuity with tradition’, came in for criticism.13 In a culture dominated by ‘a middle class confident enough in its philistinism… to insist that politics be expedient rather than ideological’, the avant-garde was now compelled to ‘acquire new content for itself’ in order to ‘stay cogent and not descend into Alexandrianism’.14 An eventuality which Greenberg saw as ‘not so remote.’15 With ‘less and less to say of the truth about life under the industrial system’, the avant-garde was now growing ‘crabbed and half-baked, given over to canonizing, codifying and imitating itself’.16 Of course this did not mean the ‘genuinely ambitious young writer or artist’ who now had to ‘spend more of his energy in establishing distance between himself and the well-meaning but impatient middlebrow than he ever had to do with the out-and-out philistine.’17 And here, it might reasonably be assumed that this

‘ambitious’ sector of the avant-garde included Greenberg’s pantheon of American artists.

As had been the case in ‘The State of American Writing’, previously distinct categories were again becoming harder to define. And the reason for this was the ‘revolutionary cultural phenomenon’ of ‘the rapid expansion of the middlebrow kind and the multiplication of its degrees and shades.’18 Elaborating on his earlier observations,

Greenberg saw this phenomenon as being due to ‘the appearance, for the first time, of a middle class’ which, as an unmistakeable force, had the ‘material position at least to aspire to the kind of culture that used to be the exclusive prerogative of a small minority’.19 As against the lowbrow, the middlebrow’s ‘respect for culture’, though ‘too pious and undifferentiated’ did serve to ‘save the traditional facilities of culture – the printed word, the concert, lecture, museum etc. – from that complete debauching which the movies, radio, 257

and television’ had ‘suffered under lowbrow and advertising culture.’20 Which was all to the good. However, despite this, and the fact that middlebrow culture had spread ‘some sort of enlightenment… on the broader levels of the industrial city’ and opened ‘certain avenues of taste’, Greenberg still saw the ‘damage’ as outweighing the ‘gains.’21

And the ‘damage’ was considerable, for this new-found wealth did not necessarily translate into a real appreciation of high culture, but rather to the bargaining power to demand ‘that high culture be delivered to them by a compromise, precisely, with their limitations’.22 For all their wealth and education, what the middlebrow lacked was the necessary upbringing with not only books and works of art, but also, and most importantly, the assimilation of

‘unconscious taste and habit’ and ‘ingrained sense of proportion’.23 The problem was that the ‘antecedents of the new middle classes’ did not ‘lie in such childhoods’, therefore higher culture ‘came to them from the outside, in adolescence at most’ and had to be

‘acquired by conscious effort’.24 For the majority, it seems, the effort was just too great.

And for this majority, the ‘liberal and fine arts of tradition, as well as its scholarship’ had been ‘simplified’, ‘streamlined’ and ‘purged’ of whatever could not ‘be made easily accessible.’25 This, then, was the nature of middlebrow culture, wherein ‘all types of knowledge and almost all forms of art’ were ‘stripped, digested, synopsized, “surveyed”, or abridged.’26

Since ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, then, the situation had worsened – this new phenomenon being much more dangerous to high culture than the lowbrow. And clearly this situation was unlikely to change in the near future because, since ‘all classes’ now had ‘money to 258

spend on culture, the cheaper, or easier, article must inevitably drive out the more difficult, or expensive, one.’27 And here we turn to another of O’Brian’s suggestions to support his claims of optimism: this being that, while in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ ‘modern technological culture had assumed a routine and vulgar aspect for him’, in ‘The Plight of

Our Culture’ the ‘former picture had shed its banality and tawdriness.’28 Yet in direct contradiction of this, the fourth of the reasons Greenberg gave for society’s current despair was ‘the present tawdriness of our machine-made environment with its commercial culture and its levelling, etc.’.29

To support both this claim and the fact that ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ represented a

‘transfiguration in Greenberg’s thinking’, O’Brian called on perhaps the most optimistic passage in the entire essay (the same passage which Guilbaut seemed to have corrupted and presented as a ‘second part’ of ‘The State of American Writing’), that is:30

But can it not be hoped that middlebrow culture will in the course of time be able to transcend itself and rise to a level where it will be no longer middlebrow, but high culture? This hope assumes that the new urban middle classes in America will consolidate and increase their present social and material advantages and, in the process, achieve enough cultivation to support, spontaneously, a much higher level of culture than now. And then, supposedly, we shall see, for the first time in history, high urban culture on a “mass” basis.31

In the context of the rest of Greenberg’s discussion, this hardly reads as optimism ‘about the culture of modernity’, but rather a plea reflecting the concluding line of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, where he had looked to socialism ‘simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now’. In 1953, as in 1939, the plea was quite clearly related to

Greenberg’s vision of an all-encompassing high culture, stated in 1939 as ‘formal culture 259

with its infinity of aspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehension.’32 That this was an extant vision suggests that any inherent optimism was not of recent derivation, and thus not related to the politics of the Cold War. Precisely because any inherent optimism was related to future possibility, and not present circumstance, such optimism could not be said to be for the culture of modernity per se, but for a future mutation of modernity which would deliver ‘formal culture’.

That in 1953 he held no optimism for culture as it then stood is evident from the immediate context of this supposed ‘transfiguration’ in his thinking, for this passage comes immediately after the observations that middlebrow culture was doing the most ‘to cut the social ground from under high culture’, and that ‘since the socially powerful amateur’ still controlled American culture, the middlebrow level had become the one ‘where the fate of the whole of our culture might be decided.’33 Considered in terms of how he currently perceived the middlebrow, this can only be seen as a disturbing prospect. A third claim of

O’Brian’s this passage was called on to support was that Greenberg had ‘deduced that the newly dominant culture of the middle classes had the capacity to resist dilution and adulteration by mass culture as well as to produce what he still most desired’, that is (as already quoted) ‘formal culture with its infinity of aspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehension’.34 Whilst it is true that this was the culture which Greenberg desired most, he did not say that the middle classes had the ‘capacity’ to resist dilution, but rather, that

‘middlebrow art, if not middlebrow learning or thought’ was ‘not wholly adulteration and dilution’, for it encompassed (along with the Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post and South Pacific) The Times Book Review and Rouault.35 And the point he was making 260

here was that writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and O’Hara might profit or lose ‘by a certain middlebrow impatience with intellectual distinctions’.36 That is, the impatience which demanded the dilution and corruption of genuine culture. A similar impatience, that is, which Greenberg had observed back in 1944 which had resulted in the failure of the Museum of Modern Art and James Thrall Soby to acknowledge the possibility that post-cubist art could be ‘as “romantic” as anything else’ – in this case, the impatience was ‘with the thought and feeling involved in the transposition of the aesthetic to and from the rest of experience.’37 In a similar fashion, the middlebrow person of 1953

‘no matter how much he wants to edify himself… will baulk at anything that sends him to the dictionary or a reference book more than once.’38

The middlebrow, then, was hardly likely to deliver ‘formal culture’ with its ‘large comprehension’, even though part of it now accepted ‘Proust and Eliot, Matisse and

Picasso, Stravinsky and even Schoenberg.’39 And, as we have seen, Greenberg saw the damage as outweighing the gains. What the middlebrow was not accepting, as is evident from these examples (and Greenberg’s comment of 1949, quoted previously, that American society was doing ‘very little to encourage American art in its new advance and a great deal to discourage it’), was the current artistic avant-garde.40 Although Greenberg doesn’t say as much, it is clear that the only faction capable of generating formal culture was the avant- garde itself, or at least the part of it which remained ‘genuinely ambitious’. And it is of significance that he introduced the avant-garde here as the ‘cadre’ leading ‘the fight for aesthetic truth, high standards’ and ‘continuity with tradition’, for here, again, is the suggestion of battle, but this time with a crack battalion (cadre) of aesthetic warriors.41 261

This, then, in conjunction with the war against totalitarianism and anti-Semitism, was

Greenberg’s intellectual battle, in line with his peers and not with cynically-motivated politics. But this cultural war was being hampered by a well-meaning middlebrow which had as little concern for aesthetic truth as the lowbrow. What O’Brian had failed to see was the paradoxical (or even ironic) nature of Greenberg’s hope that the middlebrow might eventually be able to transcend itself and actually support, rather than hinder, the progress of the avant-garde (or authentic culture) in the face of the increasing depletion of its traditional support base, the upper classes.

Far from being a ‘sea-change’ in Greenberg’s line of thought as suggested by O’Brian, there is here enough similarity with ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ to suggest the opposite.42

His view of the middlebrow was, if anything, more scathing than ever. As Hilton Kramer said, it was a ‘categorical indictment’.43 In this Greenberg was simply responding to a phenomenon that had been steadily reaching prominence since the war, as he had been doing since 1946 in his review of the ‘Water-Color, Drawing, and Sculpture Sections of the

Whitney Annual’. And also as he had begun to do seven years prior to this in his comment that the New Yorker was ‘fundamentally high class kitsch for the luxury trade’ – a form of kitsch which, like the postwar middlebrow, converted and watered down ‘a great deal of avant-garde material for its own uses.’44 Certainly, his view of lowbrow culture remained unchanged over the years. He still saw ‘lowbrow… “machine”, commercial culture’ as being ‘everywhere to offer its relief to all those who find any sort of higher culture too much of an effort’.45 As in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, this lowbrow culture was powerful not only because it was ‘easy’, and still suited ‘the majority’, but also because it had 262

‘replaced folk culture as the culture of all childhood’, and had ‘thereby become’ the

‘natural’ culture.46 Unlike folk culture, the lowbrow neither contributed to high culture nor effaced itself in ‘its social presence’.47 And in these respects middlebrow culture was much the same. Not only was it produced by the same ‘rationalizing’, ‘processing’, and

‘packaging’ methods by which industrialism had ‘made lowbrow culture a distinctive product of itself’, but also, because of the way it was ‘produced, consumed, and transmitted’, it was unable to ‘master and preserve fresh experience or express and form that which has not already been expressed and formed’.48 And, ‘like lowbrow culture’ it had always to ‘forget and replace its own products.’49

All this sounds remarkably like kitsch which, for Greenberg, changed according to style: was ‘vicarious experience’; and borrowed from true culture its ‘devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb’ and ‘themes’.50 Because of these similarities, it seems reasonable to suggest that Greenberg saw the same propagandist potential in middlebrow culture that he had seen in kitsch and the lowbrow – a potential he had been reminded of during 1948, in relation to

Soviet propaganda, through Kemenov’s ‘Aspects of Two Cultures’. It is significant, therefore, that before launching into his discussion of the middlebrow, Greenberg had made a point of referring not only to Nazism and anti-Semitism, but also to ‘the war, the exterminations, the oppression [and] the present tawdriness of our machine-made environment with its commercial culture’ as being causes for modern society’s despair.51

Perhaps here he was making similar analogies to Thierry de Duve, who observed that:

‘Every cultivated person who has given the slightest thought to kitsch has realized that behind the little dwarfs in the garden are the SS playing Brahms in the camps.’52 263

Behind Greenberg’s comment on the exterminations might well have been the realisation that history had a propensity to repeat itself, if not with one group of people then with another, and possibly with greater magnitude. Certainly he saw this propensity for culture itself, for, citing Michael Rostovtzeff (presumably his Social and Economic History of the

Roman Empire) he noted that the decline of Roman culture had been due to the fact that

‘the old educated classes were swallowed up by half and uneducated new classes’; many of the ‘traditional functions of culture’ being ‘discarded or oversimplified in order to suit them to the limitations of lowbred people with new social and money power.’53 To which he added that: ‘Purely political and social forces [had] been working to similar effect’ in his own society – the result in this case, though, being ‘magnified, and complicated by the great revolution in technology.’54 A revolution, moreover, which was creating ‘new modes of production, service, and communication’ which did not ‘as a rule, square with inherited social arrangements, everyday habits, or hitherto agreed-upon interpretations of life.’55 If then, all past certainties were now up in the air, who might know how things might eventually pan out, particularly given the background of possible world conflict?

Inveterate Marxism

Whilst it could be said that Marxism was an inherent factor in Greenberg’s Trotskyism, his early letters demonstrate no apparent interest in Marxism per se. The first evidence of this specific interest only appeared in 1939 in his first two articles for Partisan Review, and then only briefly in the title of the Brecht review ‘The Beggar’s Opera – After Marx’ and in the phrase (from the closing paragraph of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’) ‘as in every other 264

question today, it becomes necessary to quote Marx word for word’.56 Speaking of this period, T. J. Clark said:

… there was a considerable and various Marxist culture in New York at this time; it was robust, not profound, but not frivolous or flimsy either… and it is worth spelling out how well the pages of Partisan Review in 1939 and 1940 mirrored its distinction and variety, and its sense of impending doom. (Clark’s italics)57

Given this pervasive influence, it is not difficult to understand Greenberg’s Marxism at this time – a Marxism which, even despite the scant references is not subject to question in any account of Greenberg’s history. Curiously, however, as his Marxism became more defined during the fifties, it was inherently questioned by the claims that he had veered to the right.

Yet Greenberg’s overt Marxism during this period was too compelling to be entirely ignored. And so, in apparent contradiction of his other claims, including an accusation that

Greenberg had inverted Marxist theory, O’Brian does point to the fact that during the early fifties Greenberg’s ‘analysis of the social matrix was still unequivocally Marxist’.58 Yet he stretches the point by saying that from ‘the 1930s through the 1960s, he repeatedly stated that Marxism was the only method capable of extracting meaning from the contradictions of social flux, especially in its relation to the arts’. Greenberg, in fact, only said something precisely of this nature once, in December 1951, and his references to Marx did drop off substantially during the 1960s.59 But never were his references to Marx more extensive, or more revealing of his politics over a period of time, than in ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ and its similarly named revision ‘The Plight of Culture’ – a revision which, circumstantially, is taken here to have been made during 1960.60 In culling this essay to less than a quarter of its original length, Greenberg re-worked and extended the Marxist element of the original.

265

Significantly, from taking up less than a fortieth of the original version, discussion of

Marxism took up more than a thirteenth of its revision. And so it might be said that Marx’s importance to this argument had increased three-fold. Even the most minor of the changes demonstrate that Greenberg was not simply abbreviating but re-stating his case, for instance:

(1953 version) Marx pointed out that the productivity in even the most advanced societies of the past was always so low that the majority had to work full time to provide, in addition to their own necessities, the material surplus to support the leisure and ease of the relatively tiny minority that maintained high culture wherever it appeared.61

(1960 version) Marx was the first to point out that what made class divisions necessary to civilization was the low material productivity so far of even the most advanced societies. This is why the vast majority have had to work full time in order to provide both for their own necessities and for the leisure and ease of the minority that carried on the activities by which civilization is distinguished.62

This re-emphasis through alteration and extension (for instance, the change from simply

‘high culture’ to ‘civilization’ itself, and the underscoring of Marx’s significance by the inclusion of the words ‘the first’) suggests a degree of deliberation which might not be expected from one who had supposedly entirely ‘renounced’ Marx by 1948, as was the suggestion of Nancy Jachec.63 Jachec was not alone in this assumption, but she alone had linked Greenberg’s renouncement of Marxism with a parallel and related renouncement of

Cubism.64

Greenberg’s supposed renouncement of Marx famously occurred, as we have seen, in ‘The

State of American Writing’ of 1948 with the comment: ‘It has become possible lately to pigeon-hole and predict almost everybody… there is the ex- or disabused Marxist (in which 266

category I put myself)’.65 Even Kramer, with the most sympathetic of intentions, has taken this to mean that Greenberg had gone from being ‘an anti-Stalinist Marxist’ (i.e. a

Trotskyist) in his ‘early years as a critic’, to describing himself ‘by the end of the Forties’ as an ‘ex- or disabused Marxist’, to joining ‘the ranks of the anti-Communist liberals’ during the Fifties.66

Clearly, though, since Greenberg had effectively renounced Trotskyism by 1944, this comment on ‘ex- or disabused’ Marxism, occurring four years later, cannot be seen as related to his renouncement of Trotskyism, particularly since between 1944 and 1948 he was to speak of Marx in a favourable light. For instance, in 1945 he said of Mondrian:

With Marx, he anticipated the disappearance of works of art… when the material décor of life and life itself had become beautiful. With Marx, he saw the true end of human striving as complete deliverance from the oppression of nature, both inside and outside the human being. With Marx, he saw that man has to denaturalize himself and the things he deals with in order to realize his own true nature… Mondrian’s art was… guided by an ideal, as all human action in or out of art should be.67

In 1948, just one month prior to ranking himself with ‘ex- or disabused’ Marxists,

Greenberg’s respect for Marx is evident in the comment that:

Anyone who in the twentieth century protects his mind as carefully as [Paul] Valéry did from Marx has small intellectual right to express his views on politics in public. Not that one has to be a Marxist, but that some sense of the role of social forces, of classes, is indispensible to anyone who wishes to say something new about politics and that in order to acquire this sense one must acquaint oneself with Marx…68

By 1951, this commitment to Marxist philosophy would be encapsulated in the phrase which O’Brian takes as paradigmatic of Greenberg’s ‘unequivocally Marxist’ analysis of

‘the social matrix’ over a thirty year period, that is: 267

[Arnold Hauser’s] analysis of the development of society is unequivocally Marxist – appropriately so, because no other available method can extract equally plausible meanings from the seeming contradictoriness of social evolution, especially in relation to art. (Greenberg’s italics)69

Significantly, however, Greenberg then said that: ‘Mr. Hauser’s Marxism is too

“orthodox”, in the Bolshevik sense, for my taste and his interpretation of social history as such follows standard lines closely, leading him often to glib equations.’70 This statement, in conjunction with Greenberg’s obvious continuing sympathy for Marxism, begs a different reading of his self-inclusion into the ranks of ‘ex- or disabused’ Marxists, one in which the word ‘or’ plays a pivotal part. For if, by effectively renouncing Trotskyism, he was equally renouncing a more orthodox Bolshevik form of Marxism, then he might be described as an ‘ex- Marxist’ in that sense. But it is imperative to remember the reasons he gave for renouncing Trotskyism, which were, firstly, that Trotsky and his followers (unlike

Rosa Luxemburg) were failing to engage with the masses because of their remoteness, and, secondly, that Stalin would thwart any subversive Trotskyist push for genuine communism.

That is, by 1944, he no longer saw Trotskyism and communism as viable propositions – but for reasons beyond the philosophy itself. However, being disabused about the feasibility of communism in general did not, of necessity, suggest a complete disenchantment with

Marxist philosophy, and nothing in Greenberg’s writing suggests such a disenchantment.

And this is where the significance of the ‘or’ comes into play, for Greenberg, clearly not an

‘ex’ Marxist, must have intended this statement to be read as meaning that he was a

‘disabused’ Marxist, in the sense that he no longer harboured illusions about the future possibility of pure communism, human nature being what it was.

268

Indeed, as ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ of 1953 and ‘The Plight of Culture’ of 1960 demonstrate, Greenberg saw the enduring relevance of Marxism as extending beyond its cynical appropriation by Stalin, and its less cynical, but unworkable appropriation by

Trotsky. And here, a point worth considering is an observation of David McLellan’s, in

1977, that:

Up until very recently the most accessible large selection of Marx’s works was issued by the Russian Communists and their allies who claimed to be the political incarnation of Marx’s ideas. Naturally they saw Marx from their own point of view and their selection had two deficiencies. First, it ignored Marx’s early writings. These were published around 1930 and reveal a more philosophical, humanist Marx, that many thought incompatible with the economic, materialist Marx of Stalinist orthodoxy. [Second], the Moscow selections… consisted almost entirely of Marx’s political writings together with some simple summaries of his economic doctrines. Over recent years increasing attention had been paid to the three works that Marx produced between 1857 and 1867 – the Grundrisse, the Theories of Surplus Value, and Capital.71

And so, it could be said that American Marxists had been duped by Russian ‘ownership’ and censoring of Marxism (a point not recognized by later neo-Marxists, who have equally failed to recognize that Greenberg’s anti-communism was essentially confined to anti-

Stalinism and anti-Trotskyism). Of particular significance here is that Marx’s Grundrisse

(written during 1857-8), remained (presumably because of Russian ‘ownership’) unpublished until 1941, and ‘virtually inaccessible’ until 1953.72

Because of Greenberg’s connections, it might be assumed that he had had access to this document soon after publication. Even had it been accessible only in German (as is likely), this would, as we know, have presented no obstacle to Greenberg. However, this is to conject. Of utmost significance is that it did finally become commonly accessible in 269

English in 1953, the year in which Greenberg was writing ‘The Plight of Our Culture’. And so, it could be ventured that this new accessibility had generated a renewed interest in

Marxist philosophy which, in turn, might explain Greenberg’s unprecedentedly focussed emphasis on Marx. And, as will become apparent in the next chapter, there are points of similarity between the Grundrisse and Greenberg’s ideology.

As if to emphasize the continuing relevance of Marxism to post-war generations,

Greenberg subjected the following passages to substantial alteration, even changing their position within the text:

(1953 version) Marx’s prognosis of a socialist future was founded on the assumption that science and technology would eventually make it possible for society to produce material goods in such plenty as to render social differences unnecessary and put the dignified leisure required for the pursuit of high culture within the reach of everyone. Whether this expectation is utopian or not, Marx did at least sense the big difference that industrialism would make as far as the structure of society was concerned. [and some forty paragraphs later]… Marx expected socialism, with a working day of four hours or less, to solve the problem of culture under modern industrialism (a problem to which he did not, for that matter, give a great deal of thought). (Greenberg’s italics)73

(1960 version) Marx assumed that scientific technology – industrialism – would eventually do away with class divisions because it would produce enough material goods to exempt everyone from full-time work. Whether he was right or wrong, he did at least appreciate the enormous change in the shape of civilized society that technological revolution was bound to bring with it in one way or another [and seven paragraphs later] …the socialist and Marxist solution [to the problem of culture] is to intensify and extend industrialism, on the assumption that it will eventually make well-being and social dignity universal, at which time the problem of culture will solve itself of itself. This expectation may not be quite as utopian as are the proposals of the idealogues of “tradition”, but it remains a very distant one. (Greenberg’s italics)74

270

Here, the alteration from ‘dignified leisure for the pursuit of high culture’ to ‘social dignity’ is significant, for it demonstrates a closer approximation than previously to Marx, who was clearly suggesting that class divisions resulted in a loss of ‘social diginity’ when he said:

When in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of associated individuals, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for suppressing another.75

In terms of the following chapter, where it will be argued that Greenberg’s elitism and intransigence were connected to his continued hope for a socialist future (however distant), of paramount importance is the shifting of the element of doubt. In the first version,

Greenberg’s doubt seems to have related to the possible elimination of class divisions and the putting of ‘the dignified leisure required for the pursuit of high culture within the reach of everyone’. In the second version, his doubt seems to have related to the possible elimination of class divisions and the exemption of ‘everyone from full-time work.’ Now, the point was clarified that Marx was not entirely utopian in his assumption that industrialism would ‘eventually make well-being and social dignity universal’, thereby solving the problem of culture. In this respect, the change from ‘would’ to ‘will’ is of utmost significance.

In 1960, however, this future possibility was qualified by Greenberg with the statement that: ‘In the meantime, the hope of the liberals – that the greater leisure made possible by industrialism can be turned to the benefit of culture here and now – seems more reasonable.’76 However, this was obviously a ‘meantime’ holding action, not an endorsement of liberalism in general; for Greenberg then said, in a further added passage: 271

‘But precisely in this hope, most liberals show the extent to which they, too [like conservatives such as T. S. Eliot], fail to appreciate the novelty of industrialism and the scope of the changes it makes to life.’77 This, in turn, has to be seen as a reinforcement of

Greenberg’s respect for Marx who, as we have seen, ‘did at least appreciate the enormous change in the shape of civilized society that technological revolution was bound to bring with it’. In this light, another addition has to be taken as a considered tribute (in 1960) to the abiding influence of Marxist philosophy which, in Greenberg’s view, had never been effectively superceded:

Marx made the only real beginning in the discussion of the problem of culture, and neither conservatives nor liberals seem yet to have gone beyond that beginning – or even to have caught up with it. It is to Marx, and to him alone, that we have to return in order to restate the problem in such a way that it has the chance of receiving fresh light. Eliot’s little book [Notes towards the Definition of Culture] has the merit of sending us back to Marx and his beginning. And when we go beyond his beginning, we find ourselves still proceeding along lines that he laid down.78

This new endorsement of Marx reflects, to an extent, Greenberg’s comment in 1951

(quoted above) that Hauser’s ‘analysis of the development of society’ was ‘unequivocally

Marxist’ etc. And here, for comparison, it is worth noting T. J. Clark’s observation on

Greenberg’s seminal essays that, as the Marxism was ‘quite largely implicit’, it remained

‘to the reader to determine just how [Marxism] works in the history and theory presented.’

79 During the Cold War years, it seems, Greenberg’s Marxism had increasingly to be spelled out.

272

And perhaps it had to be, for contrary to Guilbaut’s claim that the ‘new liberalism’ of 1949 was ‘powerfully situated midway between fascism and communism’, according to

Rubenfeld’s account, liberalism:80

… had become a catchall category for a group with substantive [sic] differences. PR and Commentary described themselves as liberal… but were strongly anti-Stalinist. The Nation identified itself as liberal and for most of the forties refected both Stalinist and anti-Stalinist views.81

Perhaps, then, ‘anywhere between fascism and communism’ would have been a more accurate (if less self-servingly dramatic) description of liberalism during this period. Given

Rubenfeld’s inclusive scenario, it might well be assumed that Greenberg had to emphasize the distance between his ideology and the bulk of liberalism. This assumption is borne out by the fact that, in contrast to Greenberg’s increasing endorsement of Marxism, his references to liberalism were only rewritten to further emphasize his dissatisfaction. For instance, occurring in the fourth paragraph of the original was the phrase: ‘the superficialities that have accompanied the popularization of the ideas of the Enlightenment, of Utilitarianism, and “scientism”’.82 Only in the next sentence does it become apparent that by this he meant ‘the ideas of liberalism’.83 In the revised version, this point was reworded, clarified, and moved to the opening line – as if the point should not be missed that what he actually meant was: ‘the superficialities accompanying the popularization of liberal ideas’.84 Given this clarification, and the timing of the original statement, it seems reasonable to suggest that by ‘popularization’ Greenberg was referring to Schlesinger’s

Vital Center, which in 1950 had gone into its second edition. In turn, this might be seen as shedding doubt on a premise of Jachec’s argument that ‘Greenberg’s debt to Schlesinger’s 273

work would extend into the 1950s, and reflect the increasing liberalization of whatever leftist interests Schlesinger may have demonstrated’ in 1947.85

Given Greenberg’s obvious preference for Marxism over other political forms, it seems reasonable to suggest that, in spelling out Marx’s ‘prognosis of a socialist future’ which would ‘put the dignified leisure required for the pursuit of high culture within the reach of everyone’, he was, in fact, restating his own vision for a socialist future which in ‘Avant-

Garde and Kitsch’ he had described, as we know, as ‘formal culture with its infinity of aspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehension.’86 What he had meant by this was a common culture at the highest, not the lowest, level, and socialism (along with the avant- garde) was to bring this about through preserving ‘whatever living culture we have right now’. This is what O’Brian was referring to when he said erroneously that ‘during the

MacCarthy era, Greenberg became an anti-Communist at the same time that he abandoned his earlier hopes for a socialist order’.87

However, as if pre-empting assumptions such as O’Brian’s, Greenberg added a telling amendment to a further passage. The original of this passage, following on from the line that Marx ‘expected socialism, with a working day of four hours or less, to solve the problem of culture under modern industrialism’ (a point which Greenberg questioned because ‘efficiency in work… would still be necessary to the success of an integrally socialist as to any other kind of industrial order’), reads as follows:88

Nor is it likely that the presumably greater security of life under socialism would lessen [the kind of anxiety created by ‘the rule of efficiency’] and the demand for anodynes to relieve it. Thus not purely political or economic, nor purely social or 274

cultural measures appear to promise to solve the problem of authentic and high culture under industrialism – not as long as it goes unsolved in the sphere of work.89

Here, the phrase ‘not purely’ implies that socialism had not been entirely abandoned as a possibility. In context with the entire passage and the later revisions, this might be read as an advocation of a form of Marxism and socialism tempered to contemporary conditions, rather than a Schlesinger-type liberalism which negated both Marxism and socialism as solutions for the plight of modern culture. That this reading of Greenberg’s intention approximates to the truth becomes apparent on looking at the amendments to this passage:

The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved. This should give pause to those of us who look to socialism alone as the way out. Efficient work remains indispensible to industrialism, and industrialism remains indispensible to socialism. Nothing in the perspective of socialism indicates that it will easily dissipate anxiety about efficiency and anxiety about work. Nothing in the perspective of an industrialized world – a perspective that contains the possibility of both good and bad alternatives to socialism – affords any clue as to how work under industrialism can be displaced from the central position in life it now holds.90

Of significance here is the stress on socialism as opposed to its alternatives, as also is the use of ‘those of us’ instead of simply ‘those’. This tends to suggest that, though not a socialist who saw ‘socialism alone as the way out’, Greenberg was nonetheless a socialist.

That is, a socialist who (in essence) agreed with Marx that ‘to intensify and extend industrialism’ would eventually ‘make well-being and social dignity universal’, albeit a socialist who also saw inherent problems in a simplism which ignored the level of anxiety involved in ‘carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture’ (that is, a tradition in which authentic culture had historically flourished) in a work-oriented capitalistic modern culture

– a culture which Greenberg clearly felt to have descended to a level of banality which 275

Marx could not have foreseen. In the following chapter it should become evident that finding a solution to this problem was central to his concerns. For the moment it is sufficient to say that from what we have seen so far in this chapter, there is ample evidence of a continuum of thought running down through the years.

Arguing against continuity, the revisionist portrayal of Greenberg changing ephemerally with the political wind ignores not only the changes to ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, but also the tenacity which saw him clinging rigidly to formalism – a tenacity underscored by Janice

Van Horne’s account of his continuing to read a shredded copy of Heidegger on one of his last visits to the emergency room. Which is, to reiterate, that in trying to understand

Greenberg, however academic the process, his natural tendencies cannot be ignored. In the case of Jachec’s argument, these tendencies were lost in an argument bent on casting

Greenberg in the mould of a born-again Schlesingerite, and therefore as having dispensed with Marxism. Which is not to say that Greenberg was an undiluted Marxist, but that, at least until the publication of Art and Culture, he still deemed Marxist philosophy to have at least equal, and sometimes more, relevance than other forms of political philosophy. If

Greenberg could be loosely described as having been a ‘liberal’, he sat on the outer, socialist edge, and therefore to the left of Schlesingerism. Revisionist arguments, however, firmly cast Greenberg in the role of camp follower – thereby minimising his significant influence. Apropos this influence, a point not considered by any account of Greenberg’s place in the history of the Cold War years is that of the probability that Schlesinger himself was influenced by Greenberg, rather than the converse.91

276

In all, the 1960 reworkings and new additions to ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ beg a reading which suggests that this was his political position at the time of writing – particularly since the additions were entirely new considerations destined solely for publication in Art and

Culture. Combined with the fact that these reworkings were also to restate his earlier position, it seems that Greenberg might have deliberately intended this version as a definitive statement of his politics over this decade. To extrapolate, in consideration of the fact that ‘The Plight of Culture’ was placed immediately after ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in

Art and Culture, these being the first essays in the volume, it seems reasonable to assume that Greenberg had consciously provided the co-ordinates for mapping his politics over a twenty-year period. From this, it might be further extrapolated that this was intended as a background to reading the remainder of the included essays.

Taking this further, it could be said that Art and Culture in its entirety (with all its inclusions, alterations and reconsiderations) reads as a mission statement of Greenberg’s position at the start of the sixties. Read in this way, one of Greenberg’s most famous lines resonates with added significance. That is, the line (quoted in Chapter Three) that ‘some day it will have to be told how “anti-Stalinism” which started our more or less as

“Trotskyism”, turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come’ – a line, as we have seen, that Greenberg had added into ‘The Late

Thirties in New York’ (previously ‘New York Painting Only Yesterday’ of 1957) during

1960. Considering that Greenberg was not saying that all the artists he met back then were anti-Stalinists and Trotskyists, this addition has to read as an acknowledgement of the debt owed by Greenbergian modernism itself to the politics of the late thirties – a reminder that 277

it was grounded in socialist values. This is a point of some significance to the following chapter, which explores the way in which Greenberg’s politics impacted upon his artwriting. 278

Notes

1 Borkenau, ‘Will Technology Destroy Civilization?’, 25; Clement Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3, 131, (first published in Commentary, June and July 1953) 2 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 130 3 Idem. 4 Ibid., 131 5 Idem. 6 Ibid., 128, 142 7 Ibid., 131 8 Ibid., 130 9 Greenberg, ‘Letter to the Editor of Politics’, 186 10 Idem. 11 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 128 12 Idem. 13 Ibid.,139 14 Idem. 15 Idem. 16 Idem. 17 Ibid., 140 18 Ibid., 134 19 Idem. 20 Ibid., 137 21 Idem. 22 Ibid., 136 23 Ibid., 135 24 Idem. 25 Ibid., 136 26 Idem. 27 Ibid., 138 28 O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxix 29 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 128 30 O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxix 31 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 140 32 AGK, 19 (n. 6) 33 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 140 34 O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxvii-xxix 35 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 137 36 Idem. 37 Greenberg, ‘Review of the Whitney Annual’, 172 38 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 136 39 Ibid., 140 40 Greenberg, ‘The New York Market for American Art’, 320 41 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 139 42 O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxvi 43 Kramer, ‘Clement Greenberg and the Cold War’, 198 44 AGK, 13 45 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 135 46 Ibid., 135-136 47 Ibid., 136 48 Ibid., 136, 137 49 Ibid., 137 50 AGK, 12 279

51 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 128 52 de Duve, Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines, 46 53 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 140-141 It seems reasonable to assume, given the reference to the ‘decline of Roman Culture’, that Greenberg had read Rostovtzeff’s Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, original date unknown, but Rostovsteff died in 1952. The only edition available at the time of writing is Oxford, 1957 54 Ibid., 141 55 Idem. 56 AGK, 22 57 Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 141 58 O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xx, xxx However, that O’Brian did not take Greenberg’s Marxism seriously is evident in a comment that:

The infusion of unalienated work into play, the argument ran, had the potential to redeem leisure from its emptiness and passivity. Greenberg’s formulation was nothing if not utopian; it was as if he had taken Marx’s ideas about leisure and material surplus, which he knew by heart, and inverted them. (Ibid., xxx)

59 Ibid., xx 60 The nominal date of revision of ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ is presented here as 1960 for the following reasons. It can be assumed from some of the dates included at the end of essays in Art and Culture that Greenberg had been working on this project since 1956 (the only explanation for these dates, where not referring to the year of revision, being the year of first writing). And we know from accounts in Rubenfeld’s Clement Greenberg: A Life (pp. 208, 213) that Greenberg was working on revisions during 1958, circa the time that he ‘signed a contract with Beacon Press for Art and Culture’. We also know, from the second date attached to ‘The Late Thirties in New York’ that he was still working on revisions until 1960. Since there is no date of change recorded for ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, and since there was no other reason (i.e. for publication elsewhere) to change this essay during the year of first publication, it is therefore assumed that he was working on this particularly extensive revision over a period of time culminating, at the eleventh hour, in 1960. And this is to further assume that he would have included a date had it been finalised substantially prior to 1960. That he would not have been revising beyond 1960 is a reasonable assumption given that he was in receipt of advance copies of Art and Culture in April 1961 – for which see Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 250 61 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 130 62 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Culture’, in: Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, 1961, 26 63 Nancy Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’, Oxford Art Journal, 21.2, 1998, 129 64 According to Jachec, Greenberg had renounced Cubism in ‘The Decline of Cubism’ of March 1948. (Jachec, 129). Yet only three months later, in response to George L. K. Morris’s criticism of this very essay for ‘lumping together Cubism and Abstract art’, Greenberg said: (George L.K. Morris, ‘On Critics and Greenberg: A Communication’, Partisan Review 15, June 1948, 682)

It belongs to the importance of Cubism, to that which makes it the most epochal school of painting since the Renaissance, that it conclusively liquidated the illusion of the third dimension… Pre-figuring the furthest extremes of abstract art in our time, Picasso as a Cubist already contained everything that abstract art has since made obvious. Far from revolting against Cubism and its supposed behind-the- frameness, abstract art, in so far as it is successful… takes from Cubism its cue, inspiration, and total sense of the medium. The main reason why the Kandinsky or “non-objective” school is so lacking in quality is because it is the one section of abstract art that has in fact revolted against Cubism and, abandoning the Cubist conception of the physical integrity of the picture plane, retreated to a disguised academicism. (Greenberg’s reply [same issue as Morris’s criticism], 689. n.b. Listed as ‘Reply to George L. K. Morris’, Greenberg’s reply is also to be found in O’Brian, Vol. 2, 242-245)

280

Jachec’s argument for Greenberg’s renouncement of Cubism is discussed in further detail in Appendix, primarily because it was seminally influential to a work by Francis Frascina to be discussed in Chapter Ten. 65 Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing’, 255 66 Kramer, ‘Clement Greenberg and the Cold War’, 196 67 Greenberg, ‘Review of an Exhibition of Hans Hofmann and a Reconsideration of Mondrian’s Theories’, 19 68 Clement Greenberg, ‘Valéry, the Littérateur in Essence: Review of Reflections of the World Today by Paul Valéry’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 253 (first published in The New York Times Book Review, 4 July 1948) 69 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of The Social History of Art by Arnold Hauser’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3, 95 (first published in The New York Times Book Review, 23 December 1951) 70 Idem. 71 David McLellan, ‘Introduction’, in: Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford University Press, 1977, 1 72 McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 345 73 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 130, 147 74 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Culture’, 26, 29 75 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (1888), first published February 1848, in: McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 237-238 Though authored by Marx, this manifesto incorporated the ideas of Engels as drawn up following a congress in Paris in June 1847 at which the Communist League was formed out of its predescessor, the League of the Just. Marx’s manifesto was written in response to a need expressed at a Congress in London in November 1847 for ‘a clear formulation of the League’s principles’. For this see McLellan, Ibid., 222 76 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Culture’, 29 77 Idem. 78 Ibid., 26 79 Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 141 80 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 190 81 Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 121 82 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 123 83 Idem. 84 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Culture’, 22 85 Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values and Clement Greenberg’, 129-30 Of Jachec’s suggestion, one has only to read Schlesinger to discover that his politics were substantially different to Greenberg’s in one significant respect: this being Schlesinger’s abandonment sometime between 1947 and 1949 of socialism and Marxism (to the latter of which he had never had a demonstrable commitment). In 1947, Schlesinger had seen socialism as ‘quite practicable… as a long-term proposition’ within the ‘frame of reference’ of extended government ownership. (Schlesinger,‘The Future of Socialism’, 232) Indeed, its ‘gradual advance’, Schlesinger felt, ‘might well preserve law and order… and evolve new forms for the expression of democracy.’ (Idem.) And he expected this socialist culture to be brought about by ‘some combination of lawyers, business and labor managers, politicians and intellectuals.’ (Idem.) However, unlike Greenberg, he seems never to have been convinced of the continuing relevance of Marxism; for, as he said, if the acceptance of ‘the actualities of the day… means discarding Marx, let us by all means discard Marx. Too much left-wing political “thinking” is a form of scholasticism.’ (Ibid., 242) By 1949, the year The Vital Center was published, Schlesinger (unlike Greenberg) had discarded Marx, except to dredge him up as an example of mistaken prophecy and the underlying philosophical force (though misappropriated) behind Stalinism. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, Boston, 1949, 70) By 1949, again unlike Greenberg, Schlesinger had discarded socialism as a solution for America. But only just, for he had not moved quite as far from the left as revisionism might indicate, which was evident in his sympathy for the non-Communist left, which had ‘brought what measure of hope there is in our political life today.’ (Ibid., 148) He also saw that socialism had ‘been able to contain Communism’ in many countries, because Socialist parties had ‘always retained their faith in a free society [and had] remained consistently anti-Communist.’ (Idem.) 281

That his position on American culture was left of centre is evident in numerous other comments, for instance: that ‘everyone of us has a direct, piercing and inescapable responsibility in our own lives on questions of racial discrimination, of political and intellectual freedom’, (Ibid., 252) and that ‘a democratic society, based on a genuine cultural pluralism [could] restore meaning to democratic life’. (Ibid., 253) This Leftist leaning was also evident in his concern, for instance, that: ‘We have freed the slaves, but we have not freed the Negroes, Jews and Asiatics of the stigmata of slavery.’ (Ibid., 190) Against all this, he saw American conservatism as ‘rarely marked by stability or political responsibility… in great part because [American] conservative politics [had] been peculiarly the property of the plutocracy.’ (Ibid., 25) And on the world scale, of obvious concern, as for Greenberg, was the dark side of communism – evident in his recounting of ‘reports’ about the ‘dull bitterness of the [Russian] people seeping over… expressing itself increasingly in anti-Semitism.’ (Ibid., 76) All of which is to question not only Jachec, but also Guilbaut (who wrote that: ‘Whereas early forties liberalism was tinged with left-wing philosophy, now [with The Vital Center] liberal attitudes veered to the right’), for it is clear that, at least for Schlesinger, liberalism was still considerably coloured by left-wing philosophy, and he clearly had no time for American conservatism. (Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 191) Greenberg, however, in his references to Marx and socialism has to be seen as further to the left than this. 86 AGK, 19 87 O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxvi-xxvii 88 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 147 89 Ibid., 147-148 90 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Culture’, 32 91 To consider the possibility of Greenberg’s influence on Schlesinger is to return briefly to Jachec’s reading of Schlesinger which, in order to be used as proof of Greenberg’s renouncement of Cubism and Marxism, had first to be presented as proof that Greenberg had acquired ‘the muscularity of Schlesinger’s tone, and even his lexicon’ (an assertion for which no evidence is produced). (Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’, 128) However, applying Jachec’s own logic, what can be said is that Schlesinger’s concept of an elite group keeping culture moving in the face of decadence and the omni-present threat of totalitarianism could have been lifted directly from ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. Which is to consider that ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ had been re-published in The Partisan Reader of 1946, one year before Schlesinger’s ‘The Future of Socialism’ appeared in Partisan Review. (The Partisan Reader, 1934-1944, eds. William Phillips and Philip Rahv, 1946 [cited in O’Brian, Vol. 1, 22] ) Further supporting the idea that Schlesinger was informed by Greenberg is that The Vital Center refers to the Kemenov article Greenberg had criticized only the previous May in Partisan Review, quoting some of the same passages. Whereas Greenberg, as we have seen, had described Kemenov as functioning ‘in a subcellar of consciousness a Neanderthal man should have shrunk from entering’, Schlesinger had described him as exhausting ‘the full arsenal of philistinism in his denunciations of Picasso, Henry Moore, Georgia O’Keefe’ etc. (Greenberg, ‘Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility’, 233; Schlesinger, The Vital Center, 80-81) Significantly, the tone is quite similar. And if lexicon is to be taken as proof of influence, then in ‘Avant- Garde and Kitsch’ ‘philistinism’ was precisely the accusation Greenberg had laid against Hitler and Stalin. Like Greenberg before him, Schlesinger also reveals in the main text (i.e. not in footnote) that the Kemenov article was produced by the USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. (Idem.) Following further Jachec’s logic that tone and lexicon were proof of influence, in an article of December 1946 (that is, three months prior to Schlesinger’s ‘The Future of Socialism’), Greenberg said of the political cartoonist David Low that the attraction of his cartoons consisted ‘in some part in the vividness with which they mirror, to the mind raised on Anglo-Saxon common-sense liberalism, the exact quality of its own attempts to make sense out of contemporary history’, and that he was ‘completely taken in in by the fellow- travellers’ version of Stalin as a benign tomcat.’ (Clement Greenberg, ‘Limits of Common Sense: Review of Years of Wrath: A Cartoon History, 1931-1945 by David Low’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 115, 116 [first published in Commentary, December 1946] ) In what could be an indirect take, we find Schlesinger saying that:

282

The type of official liberal today is the fellow-traveler or the fellow-traveler of the fellow traveler: see the columns of The New Republic and The Nation. For the most chivalrous reasons they cannot believe that ugly facts underlie fair words… for example, the USSR keeps coming through as a kind of enlarged Brook Farm community. Nothing in their system has prepared them for Stalin. (Schlesinger, ‘The Future of Socialism’, 235)

With regard to Jachec’s obvious debt to Guilbaut (who takes Schlesinger as the central and abiding influence on Cold War ideology), it is interesting that Schlesinger is singled out by Jachec as being influential to Greenberg, for, as Jachec notes, Schlesinger’s ‘The Future of Socialism’ was part of a series contributed to by Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Granville Hicks, Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge and George Orwell. Any one of whom could be seen as influential using Jachec’s criteria, yet some of whom, like Schlesinger, might equally be seen to have been influenced by Greenberg. Orwell, for instance, had noted three ‘possibilities’ facing the world. (George Orwell, ‘The Future of Socialism: IV: Toward European Unity’, Partisan Review, Vol. XIV, No. 4, 1947, 346) The first being that: ‘Americans will decide to use the atomic bomb while they have it and the Russians haven’t’; the second being that: ‘the present Cold War will continue until the USSR, and several other countries, have atomic bombs as well.’ (then there would be ‘only a short breathing-space before whizz! go the rockets, wallop! go the bombs, and the industrial centers of the world are wiped out, probably beyond repair.’); the third being that: ‘the fear inspired by the atomic bomb and other weapons yet to come will be so great that everyone will refrain from using them.’ (Ibid., 346-347) This last, for Orwell was ‘the worst possibility of all’, for it would have meant ‘the division of the world among two or three vast superstates, unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion’ – a division which, in turn, would have meant ‘a continuous phony war against rival states’ and, significantly, that ‘civilization of this type might remain static for thousands of years.’ (Ibid., 347) The concern that civilization might become moribund, had been a concern of Greenberg’s since ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, which is why he had appealed to socialism to preserve the last shreds of living culture. In this regard, it is interesting that Schlesinger harboured similar concerns, as is evident from his conclusion to The Vital Center, in which he stated that: ‘The choice we face is not between progress with conflict and progress without conflict’ but ‘between conflict and stagnation’. (Schlesinger, The Vital Center, 255) Here again was the fear, evident in Orwell, yet previously expressed by Greenberg in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, of the awful possibility of a moribund culture. Schlesinger makes the meaning of ‘conflict’ clear in the statement that the ‘new radicalism derives its power from an acceptance of conflict… where conflict issues, not in excessive anxiety, but in creativity.’ (Idem.) And in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, this is precisely where Greenberg’s avant-garde stood, in creative conflict with the rest of stagnant (or, in his terms, decadent) society – perhaps a metaphor for the conflict between democracy and totalitarianism, the outcome of which could have spelled a descent into complete decadence and barbarism, just as in 1949 this might have been Schlesinger’s metaphor for the Cold War conflict. Sidney Hook, for his part, began by saying that he was a democrat and a socialist. He was still a Marxist ‘in the sense that one may speak of a modern biologist as still a Darwinian’, and was a democrat because he believed ‘that the guiding principle of social life should be an equality of concern for all individuals to develop their personalities freely’ (Sidney Hook, ‘The Future of Socialism’, Partisan Review, Vol. XIV, No. 1, 1947, 24, Hook’s italics). Like Hook, Greenberg’s politics were situated in the area of non-extremism and he too shared a concern for equality. And, of course, Greenberg had, since his first association with Partisan Review, been a colleague of Hook – who would have undoubtedly read ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. So can Greenberg be said to have influenced Hook? The point here, of course, is that most of those associated with Partisan Review during the early years shared similar politics. Schlesinger, on the other hand, as Jachec herself acknowledges, was ‘unlike Greenberg… too young to have been a thirties Marxist’ and was ‘imbued with the American pragmatic tradition of Dewey and James’. (Jachec, 125) Significantly, Schlesinger was to say that the ‘new radicalism need not invoke Marx at every turn of the road’, yet, it is clear from Hook’s comments that at mid-century Marxism, though tempered by contemporary concerns, was still a valid issue to Greenberg’s generation. (Schlesinger, The Vital Center, 156) And, as we have seen, for Greenberg this was clearly the case. 283

Of course, Schlesinger, as his notes and acknowledgments suggest, had numerous sources of influence, as did Greenberg, yet neither writer refers to the other, at least not directly (although there is a passage, in ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, as noted in the main text of this chapter, which might be taken as a criticism of The Vital Center). 284

CHAPTER NINE: SERIOUSNESS, THE CENTRE OF GRAVITY

Isolation and Play

In 1948, Greenberg noted that when it came to the Zeitgeist Americans were ‘the most advanced people on earth, if only because [they were] the most industrialized.’1 However,

‘most of the best advanced painting’ (i.e. ‘American abstract painting’), was hidden from view, seemingly, in ‘the shabby studio on the fifth floor of a cold-water, walk-up tenement’.2 This painting was produced by artists who, through poverty and lack of recognition, were suffering ‘the neurosis of isolation’ to a degree unheard of in nineteenth- century Paris.3 Yet, paradoxically, ‘isolation, alienation, naked and revealed unto itself

[was] the condition under which the true reality of [the] age [was] experienced.’4 The

‘experience of this true reality [being] indispensible to any ambitious art’.5 And so isolation, being ‘the natural condition of high art in America’, had to be embraced by the

American artist in order ‘to give the most of honesty, seriousness, and ambition to his work’; and it was this which was now giving American art the edge over its Parisian counterpart.6 As Greenberg saw it, the factors which were once signs of Parisian life (such as ‘the talk… the quick recognition, the tokens of reward, [and] the crowded openings’) had

‘now become a means of suppressing reality, a contradiction of reality, an evasion’.7

In aligning, on the one hand, ‘honesty, seriousness, and ambition’ with ‘true reality’, while on other the enjoyment of the more social aspects of artistic life with the ‘suppression’ or

‘evasion’ of reality, Greenberg had, in effect, made two simple points relating directly back to the concerns of Chapter One. The first being that his strand of modernism was serious in 285

intent, and, in his view, seriously ascetic. The second being that the alternative strand – the bogus avant-garde – was not. Add in the factor of impoverished isolation, and there is the strong implication that this other strand was not prone to similar hardships, and therefore incapable of producing anything of value. Yet by Greenberg’s aescetic standards, Erik Satie and Alfred Jarry, experiencing extremes of true reality, would have been churning out continual masterpieces. In terms of recognition, Satie was forty-four when Ravel revived his career by announcing him as the ‘precursor of modern music’ in 1910.8 On his death in

1925, his living quarters (previously out of bounds to visitors) were found to have no running water, no gas for lighting, and a folding metal cot with no sheets. 9 And Jarry, who had no money for food or heat in the winter before his death (at thirty-two) in 1907, lived in a place described by Apollinaire as being:10

… filled with reductions. This half-floor room was the reduction of an apartment in which its occupant was quite comfortable standing up. [Jarry was particularly short] I had to stay in a stoop. The bed was the reduction of a bed; that is to say, a mere pallet… The writing table was the reduction of a table, for Jarry wrote flat on his stomach on the floor. The furniture was the reduction of furniture – there was only the bed.11

For Satie and Jarry then, as indeed for many of their peers , the alienation of poverty, isolation, and lack of recognition was the everyday reality that came with the job. However, while Greenberg did acknowledge that the ‘myth’ that was lived out in New York was ‘not a new one’, but ‘as old as the Latin quarter’, he seemed to feel that the alienation of nineteenth-century Bohemia was only an ‘anticipation’ rather than a reality.12 This is a point on which Satie and Jarry might have had some words to say, had they lived long enough to see the American government-funded WPA programs.

286

But there was one point on which Satie and Jarry might have agreed, this being that the alienation of post-war artists would have been exacerbated by the realisation that after two

World Wars things were in as bad a state as ever, with the added threat of nuclear war.

Echoing the pessimistic view of culture evident in Greenberg’s circle, in 1958 John Clellon

Holmes wrote that the Beat Generation (in this case those born between 1930 and 1940, rather than the likes of Ginsberg, Kerouac etc.) had more claim than previous generations to the feeling that they had inherited ‘the worst of all possible worlds.’13 This might have been so, but the world Holmes went on to describe was one and the same for all generations –

Greenberg, Abstract Expressionists, Rauschenberg, Cage, et. al. included. Seeing that

‘[c]onventional notions of private and public morality [had] been steadily atrophied’ in the previous ten or fifteen years, Holmes then went on to say that:14

The political faiths which sometimes seem to justify slaughter have become steadily less appealing as slaughter has reached proportions that stagger even the mathematical mind. Orthodox religious conceptions of good and evil seem increasingly inadequate to explain a world of science-fiction turned fact.15

True this was 1958, yet it could have been anytime from 1945 onwards. While older generations, according to Holmes, might have been ‘distressed or cynical or apathetic about this world’, the Beat generation seemed ‘occupied with the feverish production of finding answers – some of them frightening, some of them foolish – to a single question: how are we to live.’16

Greenberg might have argued with little of this, except for where he would have fitted in the scheme of things, for he had, as we know, been occupied with the ‘production of finding answers’ since 1939. However, where he had clung to tradition and time-honoured 287

values in the face of this depressing prognosis, the Beat Generation (in its wider sense as seen by Jonathan Fineberg) was casting tradition and time-honoured values aside. Along the way, for all the alienation, engaging in some serious fun – which is to consider that despite Greenberg’s gloomy assertions, the modern experience of alienation had long been mitigated by comradeship. This was as true for Satie’s coterie of painters, poets and musicians at Le Chat Noir in 1890s Montmartre, as it was for the band à Picasso at

Picasso’s Bateau Lavoir studio circa 1907, as it was for Pollock’s circle at the Club and the

Cedar Tavern in post-war New York, as it was for Cage’s entourage at the Black Mountain summer schools. That is, alienation might well have been a condition of the times, and ambitious postwar American art, like its predescessors, might have largely been produced in conditions of isolated poverty, but these were not the only conditions under which the

‘true reality’ of the age was experienced, and neither were these conditions the sole ‘true reality’ of the age. Even by narrowing the margins down to ‘high art in America’ (i.e.

Abstract Expressionism), and its ‘master-current’ down to a line flowing ‘out of cubism and

Matisse and through Mondrian and Miró’, Greenberg could not legitimately evade this fact17 – for, as Edward Lucie-Smith observed: ‘Pollock would not… have made the impact he did first in America and subsequently in Europe, if he had been completely isolated as a painter’.18 As we have seen, Motherwell and de Kooning were touched by a markedly less serious spirit than Greenberg was suggesting for their genre – or even for Motherwell, who, according to Greenberg, was ‘at the very centre of all that is serious and ambitious in contemporary painting.’19 As Dore Ashton notes, contacts made at the Black Mountain summer schools ‘enriched the activities back in New York and enlarged the vanguard circle’.20 And by these processes it might be said that the tenability of Greenberg’s 288

understanding of the ‘master-current’, except if seen in purely formal terms, was being diminished by degrees.

Perhaps it was that Greenberg perceived the interchange of ideas in social venues and the

‘camp-like atmosphere’ of Black Mountain, so described by Mary Emma Harris, to have been more related to the sphere of leisure activity than serious endeavour.21 And perhaps it was that he saw in this cross-disciplinary interchange a threat to the purity of the avant- garde. Whatever the reason, however, it was clear that he saw little good in the rest of the avant-garde. This point was made obvious with his 1967 criticism of ‘novelty’ art as being, to repeat: ‘middlebrow art masquerading as challenging, advanced art… Not bad art, but art on a low level – and fun on a low level too’. It was also made obvious with his opinion that

Joyce, Eliot, Stravinsky, Picasso and Pollock had ‘become culture heroes’, while Warhol,

Ginsberg, and Robert Lowell simply ‘enjoyed the status of celebrities’ (i.e no heroes here).

As noted in Chapter One, this was Greenberg’s one concession (albeit between the lines) to the influence of the Beat writers. It came a decade after Ginsberg had shot to fame with an obscenity trial over his poem ‘Howl’.22 And ‘Howl’, according to Dore Ashton, was one of the reasons for Ginsberg’s welcome into the 1950s art community – his ‘frank attack in

“Howl” on the vices of McCarthy’s America’ apparently coming ‘as a relief to many who had endured the silences too long.’23 Significantly, Ashton then proceeds to say that these artists ‘had turned, as had “the best minds” of Ginsberg’s generation, to other traditions.’24

And so it seems that Ginsberg was speaking a language they understood, for, like Ginsberg,

‘the artist could recognize the Whitmanesque truth of the great plaint: “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing… America when will you be angelic?”’25 289

By contrast with Ginsberg, Apollinaire, similarly a poet/mentor to the avant-garde, was mentioned by Greenberg numerous times over the years, mostly favourably. Yet still he had to be distanced from Greenberg’s avant-garde, so in 1948 it was made quite clear that

Apollinaire’s:

… true progeny in the arts were not the cubists but those more ebullient and literary artists who sprang up in cubism’s wake and came to notice along with Dada or surrealism in the years shortly after the 1914-18 war.26

Chief among these being ‘Arp, Brancusi, Klee, Kurt Schwitters, Gonzales, Miró [and]

Alberto Giacometti.’27 Although Greenberg did not detail the nature of Apollinaire’s influence, it is inferred in his opinion that Giacometti’s:

… fitting together of tube and block, bar and rod, in new ways, his scratched plaster tablets and geometrical landscapes aim at a new sincerity that will no longer conceal what is, humanly speaking, the arbitrary absurdity of the present world.28

This was no endorsement of the influence of Jarry through Apollinaire, however, nor an endorsement of Giacometti’s more recent work. It was but part of an argument suggesting that Giacometti, though ‘not quite a major artist’, had become ‘almost the main well-spring of [American] contemporary advanced sculpture’ by dint of his ability to ‘adumbrate things more intensely new’ than anything of which ‘the best cubist painting’ was capable.29

Giacometti, who ‘for a while was one of the most important inventors in twentieth-century art’, was useful to Greenberg because, through his earlier and ‘best work’, he demonstrated a direct line through from Cubism to David Smith, David Hare, Alexander Calder, 290

Theodore Roszak, etc.30 In the case of Smith, this was effectively a reiteration of

Greenberg’s assertion, a few months previously, that like Brancusi, Arp, Lipchitz,

Giacometti, Gonzales, and Pevsner, Smith derived ‘from painting much more than he does from what we usually know as the tradition of sculpture.’31 And so it seems that, since the cubists were not the true progeny of Apollinaire, Greenberg was simultaneously negating the significance of Apollinaire’s influence. A point of ambiguity, but necessary for want of other links through from Cubism to the new sculpture. With Cubism itself, however, this problem of how to present a non-purist lineage was exacerbated by the fact that painting, as the exemplar of purity, was the art to which all other arts deferred.

To consider this problem is to return to the element of fun in Pop and ‘Novelty’ art denounced by Greenberg – for Picasso’s cubism emerged hot-on-the-heels of ground broken by his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907, which followed ground broken in the previous decade by Jarry. And Jarry’s work, along with a particularly dark, absurd sense of humor, was introduced to Picasso by Apollinaire. Speaking of this era in relation to its influence on Duchamp, Calvin Tomkins (citing Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years) speaks of ‘four defining traits of the new art and literature in the extraordinarily fertile era from 1885 to the start of the First World War’ – traits best exemplified in the work of

Apollinaire, Jarry, Henri Rousseau and Satie.32 Three of these traits (‘humor verging on the absurd; the cultivation of dreams and hallucination at the expense of rational consciousness; and a pervading sense of ambiguity’) being, for Tomkins, subsumed and illuminated by the fourth.33 That is, ‘the cult of childhood.’34 Going back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the

English Romantic poets, this ‘cult of childhood’, in Tomkins’ view, reached ‘a new plateau 291

with Jarry and his contemporaries’ particularly evident in Ubu Roi, in which Jarry’s

‘schoolboy prankishness [was pushed] to nightmarish extremes without losing the sense of innocence and freshness that gave it life.’35

As noted in Chapter One, early evidence of this influence on Picasso appears in his 1905 drawings of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and was still evident, in John Richardson’s opinion, in drawings dated 1937. In speaking purely formally, Greenberg was able to avoid the effects of Apollinaire and Jarry on Picasso, just as he had been able to avoid the ballet Parade and its links with Satie, Cocteau and, again, Apollinaire. But there was no avoiding Rousseau

(of whose work Greenberg had never been fond): for his influence, at a painterly level, was evident during Picasso’s immediate pre-Cubist phase. Richardson, for one, saw Rousseau as ‘a genius, a caster of spells’, whose ‘instinctive magic’ Picasso had ‘set out to harness’: his specific use value to Picasso having been ‘an antidote to Cézanne’s sway… the opposite end of the pictorial spectrum.’36 This experiment did not alone lead directly to Cubism, but it was only one step from what Richardson calls the ‘hard-edged precision’ of the

Rousseau-influenced work, to the use of passage to ‘amplify not just mass but space’, in the nature of Braque’s recent landscapes.37 That is, the experiments with Rousseau’s naïve technique led to a conscious decision to produce works which would later be seen as the early emanations of Cubism. Despite Picasso’s subsequent casting off of Rousseau,

Richardson noted that he ‘would continue to exploit the Douanier’s innocence of vision and even, on occasion, his hard-edgedness.’38

292

Greenberg, no lover of primitive painting, overcame the problem of having to include

Rousseau by portraying him in a rather different light to Shattuck and Tomkins – that is, as deranged in order to explain that:

… it needed mental cases to show [such relatively cold, hard heads as Matisse and Picasso] the way, to cut through the ultimate truth of life as it is lived at present. In this sense Rousseau deserves to rate as one of the founding fathers of modern art.39

Perhaps influenced by the attitudes driving the modern ‘cult of childhood’, play, by the mid-twentieth-century, was now seen as central to the development of human culture, becoming a topic of modern behavioural study. By contrast, Greenberg’s austere view of the avant-garde was redolent of an eighteenth-century childhood dictum, itself resulting from a suspiciousness with play, which runs: ‘Of idleness comes no good, but in all labor there is some profit’.40

It is not that Greenberg was unaware of contemporary wisdom on the subject of play, for he had read Johan Huizinga, as evidenced by ‘The Plight of Our Culture’. Although no reference is given, it is almost beyond doubt that the text in question was Homo Ludens: A

Study of the Play-Element in Culture, in which Huizinga had said that ‘the contrast between play and seriousness is neither conclusive nor fixed’, and that the ‘great archetypal activities of the human society’ had all been ‘permeated with play from the start.’ In the making of speech or language, for example:41

… the spirit is continually “sparking” between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lies the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.42

293

The parallels to be drawn here between play and the creation of art are clear. Yet Greenberg did not pick up on this. It is not known if Harold Rosenberg had read Huizinga, but there was something remarkably similar in his 1952 portrayal of action painting. Here, unfettered by political concerns, the ‘lone’ action painter ‘did not want the world to be different [but] wanted his canvas to be a world.’43 In Huizingian terms, this might be seen as being the

‘poetic world alongside the world of nature’ – and the act of painting the ‘sparking’ between ‘matter’ (material) and ‘mind’ (concept).

That this canvas world apart was, indeed, the site of play is emphasized by Rosenberg’s characterisation of the painter (as opposed to the person, who ‘may be over forty’) as being

‘around seven’ years of age.44 Casting aside with a ‘gesture of liberation’ all worldly concerns, specifically ‘political, esthetic [and] moral’ value, this seven-year-old had now decided ‘to paint… just to PAINT’.45 The painting itself was a biographical ‘moment’ which might equally be the ‘actual minutes taken up with spotting the canvas’ or ‘the entire duration of a lucid drama conducted in sign language’, with the artist organizing ‘his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation’.46 In this game the artist had ‘become an actor’, which meant that the other participant, the spectator, would now have to think in terms of ‘a vocabulary of action: its inception, duration, direction’ rather than a finished product.47 With ‘traditional esthetic references discarded as irrelevant’, what now gave the canvas its meaning was ‘rôle’. Free of past values, yet confined to the moment of making, ‘act-painting’ represented a negation of ‘The Great

Works of the Past and the Good Life of the Future’ – that is, a negation of the very factors 294

which underpinned the role of Greenberg’s avant-garde as the carrier of tradition and the herald of the hoped for ‘formal’ culture of the future.48

Significantly, as noted in Chapter One, Dore Ashton saw Rosenberg’s description of

‘aspects of abstract expressionist painting as “events” on the canvas’, as having direct connections with Cage’s Theater Piece # 1 of the same year. And, as also noted previously, there was to an extent a shared sense of the ironic, of humour – an undoubtable indication of the joint influence of Jarry and Satie and ‘the cult of all childhood’ – which represented, in effect, a form of anarchy directed against convention concomitant with the general mood of the time. All part of a shared iconoclastic trait also evident de Kooning’s Woman paintings and Pollock’s drip paintings.

When ‘American Action Painters’ hit the shelves in December 1952, five years had passed since Greenberg had pronounced American abstract painting to be the most advanced painting in the world. Given Greenberg’s hierarchies, this would have meant that Abstract

Expressionism was the most advanced art, and therefore the most advanced level of both the avant-garde and culture. As ‘“American-Type’ Painting’ was to demonstrate,

Greenberg’s opinion had not changed by 1955. It was also to demonstrate Greenberg’s first, barely noticeable, challenge to ‘American Action Painters’, slipped in casually as:

… a certain kind of American abstract art… is practiced by a group of painters who came to notice in New York about a dozen years ago, and have since become known as the “abstract expressionists”, or less widely, as “action” painters… Harold Rosenberg, in Art News, concocted the second, but restricted it by implication to but three or four of the artists the public knows under the first term.49

295

In this was a certain confidence that Rosenberg’s ideas were not catching on. It would be another seven years before Greenberg launched his all-out attack; but before coming to this, there is more to be said on the reasons for his seriously ascetic portrayal of the avant-garde.

The importance of work

The revised ‘Plight of Culture’ concluded with the statement of a problem which was: ‘The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society’.50

Greenberg’s resolution for which was ‘to shift [culture’s] center of gravity away from leisure and place it squarely in the middle of work’, for, as he asked:51

With work becoming universal once more, may it not become necessary – and, because necessary, feasible – to repair the estrangement between work and culture, or rather between interested and disinterested ends, that began when work first became less than universal? And how else could this be done but through culture in its highest and most authentic sense? 52

As a definition of terms, what Greenberg meant by a ‘leisure-oriented tradtion’ was a historically elite tradition, and what he meant by ‘a work-oriented society’ was primarily one in which work held a ‘central position in life’ and in which everyone was constrained to work efficiently; for, as he had said: ‘Efficient work remains indispensible to industrialism, and industrialism remains indispensible to socialism.’53 To speak of the

‘interested and disinterested ends, that began when work first became less than universal’ was to hark back to Aristotle’s Politics, quoted by Greenberg, in which ‘the first principle of all action’ was leisure – leisure being both ‘better than work’ and its end. Further to which:54

296

Leisure as such gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment of life; these are experienced, not by the busy man, but by those who have leisure… There are branches of learning and education which we must study merely with a view to leisure spent in intellectual activity, and these are to be valued for their own sake.55

This was active leisure. However, under industrialism the separation between leisure and work had become ‘almost absolute’, thereby reducing leisure to ‘an occasion more exclusively of passivity, to a breathing spell and interlude’ – an occasion, moreover, for

‘nonactivity or aimless activity’.56 Leisure had, then, become ‘something peripheral’ and work had replaced it ‘as the central as well as the positive aspect of life’, as the ‘occasion for the realization of its highest ends’, and for ‘more purely purposeful activity.’57

Exacerbating the problem was ‘five thousand years of [Western] civilization’ which had brought about a separation of various ‘areas of activity’ such as art, work and science, and

‘specialized them in terms of their verifiable results’ so that we now had ‘culture and art for their own sake… and work for the sake of practical ends.’58 Hence Greenberg’s proposal to

‘repair the estrangement between work and culture.’ That this could only be done ‘through culture in its highest and most authentic sense’ is to hark back to ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, to Greenberg’s socialist vision for ‘formal culture, with its infinity of aspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehension.’59

While this was to state the problem and resolution succinctly, it is to the longer ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ of 1953 that we must return for the working out of the problem at length.

And here, as we have seen, Greenberg had made it quite clear that the only sector of society capable of delivering and maintaining authentic culture, at this time, was the ‘genuinely 297

ambitious’ sector of the avant-garde (all mention of which had been eradicated from the second version). Therefore the sole responsibility for the continuation of high culture now fell upon its shoulders. Isolated by poverty and lack of appreciation (as Greenberg had noted in 1948), the avant-garde was further isolated by being a cultural elite. However, the very isolation of the avant-garde, so essential to the production of ambitous art, was presenting a threat to its existence, for, as Greenberg had also said in 1948:

Perhaps the contradiction between the architectural destination of abstract art and the very, very private atmosphere in which it is produced will kill ambitious painting in the end. As it is, this contradiction, whose ultimate causes lie outside the autonomy of art, defines specifically the crisis in which painting now finds itself.60

What Greenberg meant by the ‘ultimate causes’ lying outside the autonomy of art might be ascertained from his proposed solution to the crisis – the ‘only’ solution – which would be:61

… an increasing acceptance by the public of advanced painting, and at the same time an increasing rejection of all other kinds. “Destructiveness” towards what we now possess as American art becomes a positive and creative factor when it is coupled with a real longing for genuinely high art, a longing that will not be deceived into satisfaction with anything less than the genuine, and which is protected against such deception precisely because it goes hand in hand with the courage to reject and to continue rejecting.62

This public ‘longing for genuinely high art’ was undoubtedly a necessary condition for the eventuation of formal culture, and what Greenberg was asking for was a level of public discernment which, by 1953, was no more apparent than it had been in 1948 and 1939. And this seems to have been the crux of his problem, which, put another way might be read, between the lines, as his way of seeking justification (as a socialist) for the maintenance of a cultural elite both in contradiction of the popular status quo and in advance of his distant 298

future utopia. A justification which would have rendered the avant-garde (carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture) more publicly acceptable to a society in which efficiency of work was the central and abiding factor.

A world away from the anarchy inherent in the avant-garde traits he shunned, Greenberg saw the avant-garde (at least that part of it remaining genuinely ambitious), as being firmly conventional, at least within an avant-garde tradition. In terms of the proposition that he was attempting, as a socialist, to reconcile the existence of this elite force within a work- oriented society (given his view that the only remaining carrier of authentic culture was the genuinely ambitious sector of the avant-garde), it might reasonably be said that this, fundamentally, had led to his analysis of the relationship between work and leisure, which was his way of working out the problem he had set. And here, looking first to history, he noted that work had once been ‘regarded as life’s negative aspect’, and however much ‘the peasant or farmer [had] praised himself since time immemorial for doing such work, it was always with the resentful feeling that nobody in city or manor agreed with him.’ 63 Now, however, work had ‘become the main business of life and the ground of reality for all classes of industrial society’, and it was no longer possible to say, as the upper classes once did, ‘Work – that’s your fate, not ours’.64 Unlike the past, where status and prestige were conferred on ‘social origin’, they were now ‘conferred more and more preponderantly on achievement, and sustained achievement at that’.65 And, while the rich might be far less

‘alienated’ from their work than the poor, they were equally subject to the same

‘“banausic” rule and pace of efficiency’.66

299

While it could be said that this was all to the good socially for, in Greenberg’s view,’the majority of people’ were now ‘gentler in their relations than they used to be’ whatever the upper classes had lost ‘in formal grandeur’, on the cultural level this situation was problematic in that, because of the new pace of work, leisure now lacked ’mental ease’.67

Yet it was mental ease which had previously allowed the rich to ‘collect and recreate’ themselves, thereby allowing the prosperity of high culture, which had previously been handed down from one leisured generation to the next.68 Unfortunately, under the prevailing cultural model (the ‘new kind of leisure’), as previously noted, the highest level that humanist culture seemed ‘able to maintain’ was the middlebrow.69 So the challenge was on to find a new model in order that genuine (or authentic) culture might survive.

Greenberg saw that his problem could not be solved, as Eliot sought to do, by harking back to a hierarchical class-ridden past – for industrialism, for all its disbenefits, had for the first time in history opened up ‘the prospect of a higher level of material well-being for all classes.’70 Importantly, this prospect was now beginning to be realised: therefore, to

‘slacken efficiency’ would be to ‘postpone’ this realization.71 For this reason Greenberg had seen that the masses would never consent to any slackening of efficiency; as they were now almost universally aware of the direct relationship between cause and effect. And so, he felt that the only way of ‘achieving an authentic culture under industrialism’ would be by some means which did not reduce efficiency.72 He therefore proposed the ‘improbable’ solution of ‘making work itself the main sphere of culture’.73 That is, the integration of work with culture ‘without sacrifice of its efficiency.’74

300

The old Aristotlean model of leisure spent in intellectual activity, with leisure being ‘the first principle of all action’, clearly no longer applied in a culture in which work and leisure had, since industrialism, become separated. Unlike pre-industrial times, the ‘mental effort’ now required by modern work dictated that leisure ‘in compensation [had] become much more emphatically the occasion for flight from all purposefulness, for rest, respite, and recuperation.’75 Bearing distinct similarities to kitsch, leisure, now ‘a passive state’, rather than an active one, was a state in which ‘one’s least passive need is for distraction and vicarious experience that will give those immediate satisfactions denied one during working hours by the constraint of efficiency.’76 (That is, leisure had moved from the interested to the encumbered). This given, Greenberg then considered Herbert Read’s proposition that ‘authentic non-utilitarian culture’ might develop in ‘industrial leisure on the basis of the kind of interest and activity’ that went into the hobby.77 For, asked

Greenberg, might not leisure in this way ‘be infused with some of the positive spirit of work and be redeemed from its passivity’?78

The problem here, though, was that the hobby lacked due seriousness. Unlike the

‘dilettante’s or leisured man’s avocation’, one worked at the hobby ‘for the sake of pleasure in work’, and one was ‘able to take pleasure in it’ precisely because its end was ‘not serious or necessary enough to subject its means to the rule of efficiency.’79 Therefore the hobby asserted ‘the value of one’s time and energy in terms of immediate rather than ultimate satisfactions’, its ends being related ‘directly to the particular person’ engaging in it.80 And here, analogies could once again be made with kitsch, which likewise granted immediate 301

satisfaction and, equally selfishly, gave nothing back to culture. And further analogies, perhaps, with performance, as Greenberg might have seen it.

Clearly neither Aristotle nor Read could provide the right answers, so this was where

Greenberg turned to Huizinga. Yet, although Huizinga had seen play as ‘the mother of all culture’ and the hobby was play, Greenberg saw play under industrialism as being a ‘detour and escape [and] no longer serious enough to open the way to the heart of things’.81 By contrast, ‘authentic’ culture had to ‘lie at the center, and from there irradiate the whole of life, the serious as well as the not serious’: therefore, by definition it could be neither detour nor escape.82 And here Greenberg was back to his original proposition, that work was now

‘the center’ of everyone’s lives. Therefore, if ‘serious work’ could be ‘infused with something of [the “unseriousness” of] the hobby’, this was all right.83 However, as long as leisure remained ‘peripheral’, as it had to under prevailing conditions, the hobby could not be infused with the spirit of work.84

Unlike Huizinga (and indeed Rosenberg), Greenberg clearly saw a marked contrast between play and seriousness, and he had now, in effect, set up a distinct division between the serious and the non-serious. And perhaps this was his purpose in drawing out a problem to which he seemed to have had the answer at the outset. On the serious side, at the centre of things, lay work and authentic culture (to which might be added the genuinely ambitious avant-garde) and, on the non-serious side, at the periphery, lay leisure, the hobby and play

(to which might be added kitsch culture). This, then, seems to have been Greenberg’s ‘truth about life under the industrial system’ – a truth which, as we have seen, the ‘crabbed and 302

half-baked’ sector of the avant-garde did not reflect; given over, as it was, to ‘canonizing, codifying and imitating itself’. This assessment of the larger portion of the avant-garde might be taken as a back-handed stab at Black Mountain culture and its ilk, which might well have been taken by Greenberg, in its embracement of process and experiment, as being nothing more than a round of imitation of avant-garde methods – that is, the imitation of itself. For it is clear from his writing that methods were only a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

By definition, because of the weight of its mission as the only carrier of authentic culture, the avant-garde of Greenberg’s perception could not be as complacent about its tradition as

Rosenberg implied, and nor could it, in being the vanguard of this tradition and constantly striving for further excellence, lack a sense of future direction. For, as Greenberg was to say in ‘Modernist Painting’, modernism ‘may mean a devolution, an unravelling, of tradition, but it also means its further evolution.’85 That Greenberg’s avant-garde was firmly grounded in work, not play, is evident from the fact that the Modernist tradition in which it followed was (in Greenberg’s view) one of mastery over the medium – that is, as he clearly perceived, genuine art was a skilled profession much like any other under industrialism.

In ‘“American-Type” Painting’ of 1955, just two years after ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, he was indeed emphasising professional skill – for the avant-garde, although fighting ‘against the utilitarian ethos’, still had to have the appearance of being skilled in its process and serious in its intent. Gorky, for instance, had superceded the ‘flashy and superficial’ Matta on account of his ‘selfless devotion to art’, his ‘profounder culture as a painter’ and, 303

significantly, his ‘more solid craft’.86 This mastery of craft, so essential to all fields of industrial endeavour, was, as in industry, achieved, as it always had been, through a form of apprenticeship to past masters. The mission of Greenberg’s avant-garde was to learn from the best, expand upon it, and pave the way for the future formal culture by presenting new obstacles to be overcome. Therefore, it could not reside self-indulgently untutored in the present as in Rosenberg’s portrayal.

The suggestion of a master/apprenticeship relationship enters with Greenberg’s observation that the American avant-garde (which, in painting, he now saw as surviving only in

Abstract Expressionism) had from the outset digested Klee, Miró, Picasso, Leger, etc.

Moving on to the nature of this digestion, the work-like overtones become more obvious.

Gorky, for his apprenticeship, had ‘submitted himself to Miró in order to break free of

Picasso’; and while his early work had ‘independent virtues’, it was still ‘derivative’.87 It was only when he turned to Kandinsky that he was ‘stimulated… to a greater originality.’88

Gottlieb too, learning from Cubism, Klee and Torrès-Garcia, had ‘in his sober, pedestrian way, become one of the surest craftsmen in contemporary painting’ – one who could ‘place a flat, uneven silhouette… with a rightness beyond the capacity of ostensibly stronger painters.’89 For de Kooning, the modern master had clearly been Picasso, and, while

Greenberg doesn’t use the word ‘craft’ here, it is implied in that, like Gorky, he was ‘a draughtsman before anything else’.90 A draughtsman, moreover, proposing ‘a synthesis of modernism and tradition, and a larger control over the means of abstract painting that would render it capable of statements in a grand style equivalent to that of the past.’ 91

Whether or not this was de Kooning’s intention, what this reveals about Greenberg’s 304

language is that it, like his formalist aesceticism, was geared to his big picture of formal culture.

The seriousness of this avant-garde enterprise (as opposed to the comparative levity of

Rosenberg’s account) might well be seen to reflect Marx’s opinion that:

Really free labour, the composing of music, for example, is at the same time damned serious and demands the greatest effort. The labour concerned with material production can only have this character [freedom] if (1) it is of a social nature, [and] (2) it has a scientific character and at the same time is general work, i.e. if it… becomes the activity of a subject controlling all the forces of nature in the production process.92

What Marx was speaking of was individual, rather than collective, labour, the result of which was ‘self-realization and objectivization of the subject, therefore real freedom, whose actuality is precisely labour.’93 Add to this Marx’s observation in The Communist

Manifesto that ‘in the most advanced countries’ all had an ‘equal liability’ to labour

(echoed in Greenberg’s statement that it was no longer possible to say, as the upper classes once did, ‘Work – that’s your fate, not ours’) and what becomes evident is that Greenberg’s emphasis on industry and craftsmanship in the creative process owed a considerable debt to

Marxism – albeit without the revolutionary communist element which he had abandoned in the early forties.94

There are, however, further means by which the socialism underlying Greenberg’s artwriting might be understood. And this is to consider the similiarities between his serious attention to craft and a similar propensity in the Arts and Crafts movement. As discussed in

Chapter Two, a noted authority on this movement was Irene Sargent, Greenberg’s art 305

history professor at Syracuse. Although the American movement was gounded less in socialism than a benevolent form of capitalism, Greenberg might well have learned from

Sargent the necessity of skilled craft to the production of fine art. Greenberg never spoke of

American Arts and Crafts, but in ‘Surrealist Painting’ of 1944 he did speak of the British movement, which had no appeal owing to its ‘antiquarianism’.95 He did, however, make a point of mentioning William Morris’s ‘revivalist socialism’, and in doing so made direct comparisons with the Surrealists – whose work similarly suffered from being ‘literary and antiquarian’, yet who likewise ‘stood firm on socialism’, desiring to make art ‘the affair of everybody’.96 Significantly, Greenberg found this intention ‘most laudable’.97

Unfortunately, because Surrealism had inherited the nihilism of Dada ‘with all the artificial nonsense entailed’ it had tended to attract those ‘who were repelled by the asceticisms of modern art.’98 The ‘laudable’ intention, then, had resulted in ‘a certain vulgarization of modern art’, depressing it ‘to a popular level instead of raising the level of popularity itself’. 99 And clearly the latter was what Greenberg aspired to. As both ‘Avant-Garde and

Kitsch’ and ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ attest, until such time as the popular level rose, until the proletariat acquired the necessary leisure and patience for informed appreciation of the genuine, the genuine avant-garde could not help but remain elitist.

By nature, as the carrier of authentic culture, Greenberg’s avant-garde could be neither antiquarian nor artificial nonsense, and nor could it (like Dali, noted in Chapter Six) be seen to be courting popular and lucrative appreciation, for its place was at the battlefront of a historical and serious line of progress. It was there to herald the way forward, and, significantly in relation to its craft, it was obviously compelled to maintain recognizable 306

standards. Its success, then, lay in the achievement of its own ends – an achievement which might or might not translate into financial return. As Greenberg had said in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, the fact that the avant-garde’s best artists were ‘artists’ artists’ had estranged it from a public which was ‘unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation into [its] craft secrets.’ 100

But craft alone determined neither the status nor the mission of Greenberg’s avant-garde, and could even leave the way open to misinterpretation, as in the case of Pollock’s 1954 exhibition which had been ‘the first to contain pictures that were forced, pumped, dressed up’.101 These pictures, however, had been acceptable to the public precisely because they had ‘made it clear what an accomplished craftsman he had become.’102 Whether Greenberg saw this as a deliberate ploy on the part of Pollock is hard to say, but certainly craft when used simply for virtuoso effect was bad. ‘Buckeye’, for example, the ‘piling’ of dry paint, when used by third-rate landscapists to ‘capture the brilliance of daylight’, had resulted in a form of kitsch on show in many a Greenwich Village restaurant.103 But the same ‘buckeye’ in the hands of a skilled avant-garde artist like Clyfford Still, while ‘occasionally spoiling his pictures’, could also make for ‘the conquest by high art of one more experience, and its liberation from Kitsch.’104 This, then, was craft in the hands of the master craftsperson rather than the hobbyist or academician, and, significantly, put to the use of conquering decadence, which Greenberg saw as an essential function of modernism.

In all, ‘“American-Type” Painting’ demonstrates the paramount importance of the finished product to Greenberg. Unlike Rosenberg, he clearly saw this product as the concrete 307

evidence of skill, tradition, and the degree to which the artist had moved culture forward. 105

Thus for Greenberg the relation between the finished product and avant-garde labour was a social one (as per Marx’s opinion) – each product representing a step further than the last on the path to cultural perfection. That is, avant-garde commodities were performing the social function of keeping culture moving. Which again reflects Marx, who saw the commodity as:

… a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.106

Despite the similarities, however, this was said in relation to the products of ‘alienated’ labour (i.e. labour performed by a worker for the capitalist or landlord, and not for the self).

As the product of ‘free labour’, it could be better said that the avant-garde commodity did represent a form of social relation, but only between each artist and all the artists who had gone before – which is to suggest that the passing down of tradition and skill through the material commodities of art was, in effect, a surrogate for the direct human passage of information in the field of industry.

To consider a potential link between Greenberg’s Marxism, insistence on seriousness and a workman-like attention to craft, and Jewishness, is to return briefly to 1947 and ‘The

Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’. Here, Greenberg had emphasised the industrial qualities of David Smith’s sculpture, seeing it as being identified ‘by its 308

materials and methods – steel, alloys, the blowtorch’, and as being reflective of ‘American industrialism and engineering by its denial of weight and mass and emphasis on direction and trajectory rather than locus’.107 But he had begun this essay with the following paragraph:

The American artist with any pretensions to total seriousness suffers still from his dependency upon what the School of Paris, Klee, Kandinsky and Mondrian accumulated before 1935… Not that they didn’t reflect the present period – they would not count if they did not – but they cannot consult the present for any standard of quality and style: all excellence seems to flow still from that vivacious, unbelievable past which lasted from 1905 until 1930 and which not even the First World War, but only Hitler, could definitely terminate.108

This was, of course, an idealisation – a further excising of that element of play which was instrumental to the development of the strand of modernism evolving from Cubism. What it suggests, though, is that Greenberg was as bent on carrying on the tradition terminated by

Hitler as he seems to have been back in 1939. That is, if Hitler had portrayed modern art as the ridiculous neanderthal scrawlings resulting from a Jewish endeavour to usurp the natural flow of wholesome art, Greenberg, by insisting on a wholesome, industrial quality to Smith’s art, and a wholesome attention to fineness of craft in painting, was, in effect, proving him wrong.

A Marxist work ethic, then, might be seen to have spoken directly to Greenberg’s concerns as a Jew and a champion of modernism. But Marx had also discussed the ‘Jewish question’ in such a way as to make it relevant to the political conditions of the following century, and in his references to Marx, Greenberg might have been inherently referring to this discussion. Of particular concern to Marx (naturally) was the condition of European Jewry, 309

which he saw as having to compete with the prevailing Christian orthodoxy in a no-win situation, for, as he said:

The Christian state can only have its typical, i.e. privileged relationship to the Jew by permitting the separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but at the same time subjecting him to a pressure from the other separated spheres that is all the heavier since the Jew stands in opposition to the dominant religion. But likewise the Jew can only have a Jewish relationship to the state and treat it as alien to himself, for he opposes his own imaginary nationality to actual nationality, and his own imaginary law to actual law, fancies himself justified in separating himself from humanity, as a matter of principle takes no part in the movement of history, and waits on a destiny that has nothing in common with the destiny of mankind as a whole. He considers himself a member of the Jewish people and the Jewish people as a whole.109

Compared to this, Marx saw that ‘in the North American states – or at least part of them… the Jewish question loses it theological importance for the first time and becomes a really secular question.’ 110 In his view, this situation would only occur when:

… the political state exists in its complete perfection that the relationship of the Jew and of the religious man in general to the political state, and thus the relationship of religion to the state, can stand out in all its peculiarities and purity.111

And so it could be said that, in stating the situation as he saw it at the time, Marx had

(unwittingly) predicted the difference between the conditions of European and American

Jewry in the twentieth century. In the light of unfolding events, which Marx could not have foreseen, his observation of the European Jews’ self-imposed separation from gentile history and the gentile state reads as a metaphor for the absolute otherness imposed upon them by fascism. A reminder, therefore, of the physical separation in the ghetto, and the further separation from ghetto to camp and a grim destiny which, like the biblical destiny referred to by Marx, but diametrically opposite in kind, had ‘nothing in common with the destiny of mankind as a whole.’ 310

But Marx had also unwittingly predicted the situation in postwar America where Jews would be protected by secular law. Perhaps, in restating his Marxist sympathies and directing attention to Marx’s utopian vision for a future socialist society, Greenberg was hoping for a state in which secular law would be matched by a more enlightened humanity

– one which did not resort to circumventing the law by placing signs saying ‘Only Christian

Clientele.’ For hadn’t he said in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ that ‘it’s Athene whom we want: formal culture with its infinity of aspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehension.’? Given

Greenberg’s milieu, his religion, and that he had clearly studied Marx, it seems reasonable to assume that he had read Marx’s discussion of the ‘Jewish question’, and possibly made similar connections. Possibly he saw in Marx’s comments of the Jew’s separation from other spheres being ‘all the heavier since the Jew stands in opposition to the dominant religion’ a forewarning of the ‘Only Christian Clientele’ mentality. Certainly this mentality reeks of the ‘otherness’ suggested by Marx, and played upon by Hitler. And equally certainly, Greenberg had been aware of the links between so-called ‘Christianity’ and anti-

Semitism, a point which tends to makes a 1976 comment resonate with added significance, given his promotion of abstraction, that is:

If Christianity is the most urban in origin of all major religions, then it seems appropriate that it should be the one to cultivate the pictorial most. As it certainly has. Pictures – portable pictures and mural pictures – have gone wherever Christianity has as with no other big religion (or even culture). Not even with Tantric Buddhism. Christianity, and Christianity alone, brought wall pictures into Ethiopia. Spasms of iconoclasm have made no difference. Even the strictest of Puritans seem to have construed Old Testament iconoclasm as applying only to three-dimensional likenesses.112

311

In going against their own codes, for the Old Testament is sacred also to Christians, perhaps Greenberg saw these Christian iconicists as essentially similar (in this respect) to the Christian anti-Semites. It does seem strange that he should use a general, and typically formal, discussion of the evolution of the pictorial to equate the pictorial with hypocrisy. In this very strangeness is a certain significance; for the pictorial, in Greenberg’s canon of twentieth-century imagery, was over-represented in the areas of kitsch, academicism and

‘novelty’ art. And in the areas of kitsch and the academic, the pictorial had, as ‘Avant-

Garde and Kitsch’ demonstrated, served both Stalinist and fascist masters. Because the pictorial had been relegated, almost in its entirety, to the areas of kitsch and the academic, it had also, by nature, been relegated to the area of the non-serious.

Which is to return to Greenberg’s attitude towards play and the recalcitrant bogus avant- garde. Again this might be understood through his utopian vision, for such a culture on such a high level could only eventuate through the combined efforts of work, socialism – and the interim maintenance of an elite culture. The only components, in fact, capable of making a real contribution to the fabric of this new order. Since play was now on the non- serious side of things, and therefore not capable of making a significant contribution, it obviously had to be negated as a serious means of achieving these ends. The alternative to this new type of culture would have been, for Greenberg, the complete disappearance of

‘high civilization as such’, with all that this eventuality implied – and as such it is easy to understand the sheer depth of his anger at Rosenberg’s portrayal of Abstract Expressionism as so much play-acting. But Greenberg was still two years from venting this anger when, in

‘Modernist Painting’, he made what appears to be a second challenge to Rosenberg’s views 312

in the comment that ‘journalist intellectuals’ (for which might be read Rosenberg) were seen to be suffering from ‘a complex’ which dictated that ‘each new phase of Modernist art should be hailed as the start of a whole new epoch in art, marking a decisive break with all the customs and conventions of the past.’113

This comment, however, was tempered by a new confidence, evident in the canonical nature of this essay, that modernism was at last making inroads into the battle for formal culture. Which, in turn, reflects the fact that Abstract Expressionism was now starting to achieve international success and record prices. And it could be said that Greenberg’s assertions in the revised ‘The Plight of Culture’ that among the conditions set by industrialism would be ‘in all likelihood a classless society’, and that Marx would ‘be proved right in this part of his prophecy’ reflects this new optimism. For now, as opposed to 1953, there was an appreciative public, which meant that the support base for authentic culture was expanding. Seen in this way, Greenberg’s drift from pessimism in 1953 to apparent optimism in 1960 has to be taken as related to the degree to which his socialist vision for formal culture looked like coming to pass. Which is why the revisionist view that

Greenberg had aligned himself with American imperialism has to be taken with caution: for, as Greenberg’s writings suggest, the dominance of American culture would only have been acceptable to the extent that it carried the promise of the fulfilment of this vision. 313

Notes

1 Greenberg, ‘The Situation at the Moment’, 193 2 Ibid., 194 3 Idem. 4 Ibid., 193 5 Idem. 6 Idem. 7 Idem. 8 Volta, Erik Satie, 8 9 Ibid., 30 10 Richardson, A Life of Picasso: Volume I, 362 11 Apollinaire quoted in: Ibid., 361-362, quoted from: Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years, New York, 1968, 213-214 12 Greenberg, ‘The Situation at the Moment’, 194 13 John Clellon Holmes, ‘The Philosophy of the Beat Generation’, in: Honan, The Beats: An Anthology of ‘Beat’ Writing, 148 (first published in Esquire, 1958) 14 Idem. 15 Idem. 16 Ibid., 148-149 17 Greenberg, ‘The Situation at the Moment’, 194 18 Edward Lucie-Smith, Movements in Art Since 1945, London, 1969, 36 19 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Theo Van Doesburg and Robert Motherwell’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 150-152 (first published in The Nation, 31 May 1947) 20 Ashton, The Life and Times of the New York School, 225 21 Harris, ‘Black Mountain College: European Modernism’, 96 22 George Plimpton, Beat Writers at Work: The Paris Review, ed. George Plimpton, New York, 1999, 31 23 Ashton, The Life and Times of the New York School, 228 24 Idem. 25 Ginsberg quoted in: Ibid., 228-229: quoted from Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, San Francisco, 1956 26 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Alberto Giacometti and Kurt Schwitters’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 205 (first published in The Nation, 7 February 1948) 27 Idem. 28 Ibid., 206-7 29 Ibid., 206 30 Idem. 31 Greenberg, ‘Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’, 167 32 Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, 73 33 Ibid., 74 34 Ibid., 73 35 Ibid., 73-74 36 Richardson, A Life of Picasso: Volume II, 96 37 Idem. 38 Idem. 39 Clement Greenberg, ‘Henri Rousseau and Modern Art’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 94 (first published in The Nation, 27 july 1946) 40 John Barnard quoted in: John F. Walzer, ‘A Period of Ambivalence: Eighteenth-Century American Childhood’, in: The History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd de Mause, London 1976 (1974), 373, quoted from John Barnard, A Call to Parents, Boston, 1737, 28 41 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 149 (where Greenberg refers to him as Jan Huizinga); J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, translator unlisted, Boston, 1950 (1944 German, 1949 English), 4, 5. 314

All quotes from Huizinga are from the first chapter, entitled: ‘Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon’, 1-27; the very title of which suggests a seriousness of approach to this phenomenon in the field of human behaviour – a seriousness also evident in the work of Gregory Bateson during the 1950s (for instance, Bateson’s ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’ – an essay read by Jay Haley at the A.P.A. Regional Research Conference in Mexico City, March 11, 1954, and reproduced in: Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert E. Innis, Indiana University Press, 1985, 131-144). In this essay Bateson, who had proceeded on the assumption that there was ‘no likelihood of finding denotive messages among non-human animals’, had been forced into ‘an almost total revision’ of his thinking after a visit to the Fleishbacker Zoo in San Francisco. (Bateson, ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, 133). Bateson indicates no awareness of Huizinga, yet, suggestive of a common Zeitgeist, prior to Bateson Huizinga had begun his treatise with the line (clearly reflecting a very modern Darwinian philosophy): ‘Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.’ (Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1) Perhaps it was this linkage of play to animal behaviour (including the human as animal) which Greenberg felt compelled to reject. That is, locked into a belief in the superiority of high culture, perhaps he could not accept that the play-element of art (evident, as will become apparent, in Rosenberg’s portrayal of action painters) was a serious issue if it was simply a manifestation of a type of behaviour which, from time immemorial, had been the centre of animal activity. 42 Ibid., 4 43 Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, 30 Huizinga points to a verbal link between the concepts of play and art when he says:

No other modern language known to me has the exact equivalent of the English “fun”. The Dutch “aardigkeit” perhaps comes nearest to it (derived from “aard” which means the same as “Art” and “Wesen” in German, and thus evidence, perhaps, that the matter cannot be reduced further).’ (Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 3, Huizinga’s parentheses)

44 Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, 28-29 45 Ibid., 30 46 Ibid., 28, 29 47 Ibid., 29 48 Ibid., 30 49 Greenberg, ‘“American-Type Painting’, 217 50 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Culture’, 32 51 Idem. 52 Ibid., 33 53 Ibid., 32 54 Ibid., 30 55 Ibid., 30-31 56 Ibid., 31 57 Idem. 58 Ibid., 32-33 59 AGK, 19 (n.6) 60 Greenberg, ‘The Situation at the Moment’, 195 61 Ibid., 196 62 Ibid., 196-197 63 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 144 64 Ibid., 146, 147 65 Ibid., 146 66 Ibid., 147 67 Ibid., 128, 147 68 Ibid., 147 69 Idem. 70 Ibid., 148 315

71 Idem. 72 Idem. 73 Idem. 74 Idem. 75 Ibid., 145 76 Ibid., 146 77 Ibid., 148 78 Idem. 79 Ibid., 148-149 80 Ibid., 149 81 Idem. 82 Idem. 83 Idem. 84 Idem. 85 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 92 86 Greenberg, ‘“American-Type” Painting’, 220 87 Ibid., 220 88 Ibid., 224 89 Ibid., 221 90 Idem. 91 Ibid., 220, 221, 224 92 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (first published in 1941), trans. David McLellan, in: McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 368 93 Idem. 94 Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 237 95 Greenberg, ‘Surrealist Painting’, 226 96 Ibid., 225, 226 97 Ibid., 225 98 Ibid., 225-226 99 Ibid., 225 100 AGK, 10 101 Greenberg, ‘“American-Type” Painting’, 226 102 Idem. 103 Ibid., 230 104 Ibid., 231 105 In fairness to Rosenberg, in 1957 he qualified the impression that action painting was simply an ‘event’ by saying:

If the ultimate subject matter of all art is the artist’s state or tension… that state may be represented either through the image of a thing or through an abstract sign. The innovation of Action Painting was to dispense with the representation of the state in favour of enacting it in physical movement. The action on the canvas became its own representation. This was possible because an action, being made of both the psychic and the material, is by its nature a sign – it is the trace of a movement whose beginning and character it does not in itself ever altogether reveal… yet the action also exists as a “thing” in that it touches other things and affects them. (Rosenberg’s italics. Rosenberg quoted in: Max Kozloff, ‘The Critical Reception of Abstract-Expressionism’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 2, December 1965, 30. Quoted from: Harold Rosenberg, ‘Hans Hofmann: Nature in Action’, Art News, May 1957)

106 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One (first published 1867), trans. David McLellan, in: McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 436 107 Greenberg, ‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’, 167 108 Ibid., 160 316

109 Karl Marx, ‘On The Jewish Question’, in: Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford University Press, 2000 (1977), 47 110 Ibid., 50 111 Idem. 112 Clement Greenberg, ‘Detached Observations’, http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/detached.html (first published in Arts Magazine, December 1976) 113 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 93 Rubenfeld also took Greenberg’s reference to ‘journalist intellectuals’ to be an ‘indirect shot at Rosenberg and other “journalist” critics’; although she doesn’t go so far as to say that this was a specific shot at the views expressed in Rosenberg’s ‘American Action Painters’. (Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 222) 317

CHAPTER TEN: END OF UTOPIA

Francis Frascina

This last chapter, before moving on to explore why Greenberg waited so long to launch his attack on Rosenberg, begins by examining an explanation of ‘Modernist Painting’ counter to the position of this thesis – this being the previously noted ‘Institutions, Culture, and

America’s “Cold War Years”: the Making of Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting”’ of 2003, by Francis Frascina.1

A chief impetus for this text appears to have been Nancy Jachec’s ‘Modernism,

Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’ (discussed in Chapter Eight, predominantly in endnotes, and at length in the Appendix): specifically, Jachec’s claim that because ‘Modernist Painting’ was written for the Voice Of America (VOA) ‘Greenberg would have been particularly attentive to its political slant.’2 This is seemingly an elaboration of John O’Brian’s statement that: ‘Although the politics of the Cold War were nowhere mentioned in “Modernist Painting”, they were everywhere implicit in the essay’s tone of cultural optimism.’3

The crux of Frascina’s argument is that in writing ‘Modernist Painting’, Greenberg was especially mindful of the VOA’s agenda and was thus, by extension, in acquiescence with the agendas of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and its paymaster, the CIA.

With immediate relevance to the discussion of the previous two chapters is an assertion, apparently referring to ‘The Plight of Culture’ (as with Guilbaut’s apparent corruption of the earlier version this is not referenced), that it ‘may have some residue of Marx’s 318

distinctions between productive and unproductive labour’.4 This throwaway statement in a last-minute footnote was presumably included to support an assertion in the main text that by the late fifties, ‘references to “socialism” were buried deep if not expunged from

Greenberg’s texts and replaced by particular beliefs in the politics of autonomous art’

(which seems to be an elaboration on Nancy Jachec’s arguments).5 This assertion, in turn, supports a conjecture that Greenberg had gone from seeing socialism as the means of preserving culture in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ to seeing, in ‘Modernist Painting’, ‘that modernism alone constitutes and by implication preserves “what is truly alive in our culture.”’6

This is, of course, to evade the fact that Greenberg’s merging of art and politics was rarely explicit. It is also to misread Greenberg, for what he had said was: ‘By now [Modernism] covers almost the whole of what is truly alive in our culture’, which does not appear to negate socialism any more than had ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ with its equally implicit politics.7 It is also to overlook the changes to ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ which demonstrate the obverse of what Frascina suggests. Yet the central concerns of his argument are Greenberg’s politics and revisions for Art and Culture.8

As with John O’Brian’s problem in reconciling Greenberg’s Marxism with his supposed imperialist acquiescence, Frascina has some difficulty in reconciling the tenacity of

Greenberg’s political position with the Greenberg of revisionist myth. And this, at times, makes the intention of the argument hard to follow. For instance, there is the suggestion that Greenberg’s use of the word ‘resistance’ as in ‘resistance to the sculptural’ in 319

‘Modernist Painting’ evoked ‘an organised underground movement fighting occupation forces’ which ‘had other meanings in the Cold War years of… CIA operations’.9 Thus creating the impression that Greenberg was covertly challenging the status quo – an impression reinforced by the suggestion that in a ‘case study’ of the image of America as

‘negotiated through the unofficial processes of programmes, committees, and agencies’,

Greenberg had ‘engaged in an implicit critique of what he regarded as the distasteful preoccupation in America with the mental intensity of materialistic production.’10 Again unreferenced, and again an apparent misreading of ‘The Plight of Culture’, this still tallies with the portrait of Greenberg which emerges over the years. However, in a complete turn- about, Frascina then says that:

… in arguing [in ‘Modernist Painting’] for the enjoyment of paintings as ends in themselves, for their own sake, and as “other” to the politicized signifiers of Europe, Greenberg produced for the VOA an account of “Modernist Painting” consistent with [Taylorist or Fordist] streamlined production processes, themselves based on self- criticism in pursuit of the pleasure of profit.11

Under some circumstances this might be taken as meaning that this essay’s political use- value to the VOA (and by extension the CIA) was an ironic and unintended outcome for

Greenberg, beyond his intent. But following this is an accusation that Greenberg had intervened in ‘the politics of domestic culture’: which, in the context of the overall argument reads as a confirmation that Greenberg was acquiescing with an imperialist agenda.12 Thus the arguments of O’Brian and Guilbaut relating to the late forties and early fifties have been carried over into a way of interpreting Greenberg’s motivation in the early sixties – a move possibly encouraged by O’Brian’s comments on the Leino interview of

1969. 320

What Frascina meant by ‘the politicized signifiers of Europe’ were the revolutionary political elements in the paintings of David, which Greenberg had ignored in favour of a formalist appraisal.13 Yet ‘Modernist Painting’ was neither a discussion of the ‘enjoyment of paintings’, nor of politics, but was a formalist appraisal of the condition of modern art based on an initial overview of the philosophy behind the self-critical essence of modernism itself. Nowhere here is there a suggestion of ‘self-criticism in pursuit of the pleasure of profit’, which would have been anathema to Greenberg; and there seem no grounds for supposing that he was presenting paintings as ‘other’ to revolutionary political signifiers.14

Like O’Brian and Jachec previously, Frascina dredges up Greenberg’s association with the

ACCF, and focusses, as had Jachec, on Greenberg’s support for a motion (along with most of the membership) that Stalinism was a greater threat to the American way of life than

McCarthyism. The sole purpose of this reference was to alert the reader to the fact that, seven years later, Greenberg’s politics were acceptable to the CIA, the USIA, and the VOA.

And here Frascina seems to follow on from Jachec who had previously explained that

‘during the anti-communist witch-hunts’ Greenberg had been ‘dissatisfied with

Schlesinger’s reticence concerning the endorsement of the persecution of American communists.’15 Of this two things can be said: firstly, to imply that Greenberg was

‘endorsing’ persecution is as inflammatory as it is misguided, for it is not the natural corollary to a genuine concern for the possible spread of Stalinism, and nothing in

Greenberg’s writings suggests that he would endorse persecution of any kind – indeed, 321

quite the opposite. Even Schlesinger, though supporting the opposite motion, had made it clear that The Vital Center was more commited to ‘protecting the liberal faith from

Communism than from reaction’, not because ‘reaction’ was the ‘lesser threat’, but because it was ‘the enemy we know, whose features are clearly delineated for us, against whom our efforts have always been oriented.’16 Secondly, according to an anecdote in Lasch’s The

Agony of the American Left, it was perfectly acceptable, even valuable, to the CIA to be ‘an anticommunist who happened to be a socialist.’17 It was, therefore, not essential to suggest that Greenberg had renounced socialism in order to be acceptable to the VOA and its paymasters. It was, however, essential to imply something of the kind if Greenberg were to be presented as a compliant party to the VOA’s agenda.

Sailing close to the course set by O’Brian, Frascina goes from emphasizing Greenberg’s

ACCF association to a comment that during the rest of this decade:

… many “ex-radicals and ex-Marxists”, disillusioned with communism or coping with the loss of pre-war socialist hope, became fellow travellers to an unofficial Ministry of Culture funded by a matrix of overt and covert interests.18

From this perspective (which, like O’Brian’s similar statement, seems to echo Lasch),

Frascina proceeds to argue that ‘the agendas of the CIA and State Agencies such as the

[USIA] included ideas about Modernity and Modernism particularly as they related to manageable images of American guardianship.’19 And this leads him to ask: ‘Did such agendas create conditions without which the production of and revisions to “Modernist

Painting”, and to [certain texts for Art and Culture], would have been unlikely?’20

Revisions, that is, which were ‘evidence of attempts to make them consistent with the 322

views and terminology evident in “Modernist Painting”’.21 And here is the direct suggestion by association that Greenberg was now consciously complying with the agendas of the USIA and the CIA, not only in writing ‘Modernist Painting’, but also in compiling

Art and Culture. Reinforcing this implication, Frascina states that the title of ‘Modernist

Painting’ (apparently first called ‘The Abstract Movement’) was changed on the request of

Lamar Dodd (coordinator of this particular series of the Forum broadcasts for the USIA, and Head of the Department of Art at the University of Georgia), who had suggested a change from ‘Abstract’ to ‘Modernism.’22 The Art and Culture changes Frascina suggests as ‘consistent’ with this terminology were title changes from ‘Cross-Breeding of Modern

Sculpture’ to ‘Modernist Sculpture, Its Pictorial Past’, and from ‘The Role of Nature in

Modern Painting’ to ‘On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting’, and a further textual change in ‘The New Sculpture’, in which the phrase ‘Modernist painting’ had replaced the earlier ‘modern painting.’23

A more feasible explanation for these changes is that Greenberg was aiming for consistency. As Frascina notes, Art and Culture had been in preparation for some time, and

‘The New Sculpture’ was changed during 1958, thereby predating ‘Modernist Painting’ by two years.24 In ‘Sculpture of Our Time’, also of 1958 (which remained largely unchanged in Art and Culture), Greenberg had used the terms ‘modernist painting’, ‘modernist reduction’, and ‘modernist aesthetic’.25 Going back to ‘David Smith’ of 1956, he was using the term ‘modernist sculpture’, which remained in the revised version for Art and Culture.26

Further, as noted in Chapter One, by John O’Brian’s account Greenberg was teaching a course entitled ‘The Development of Modernist Painting and Sculpture from Their Origins 323

to the Present Time’ in 1950 at Black Mountain. Although this differs from Florence

Rubenfeld’s account in which the term ‘Modern’ was used.27 And in 1931, as noted in

Chapter Two, Greenberg had used the term ‘modernistic’ in relation to the dancer, Mary

Wigman.

Like Thomas Braden’s CIA, the USIA seemed singularly ill-informed; even to the extent, as Frascina notes, that Dodd had to recommend ‘dictionaries and encyclopaedias’ to explain the term ‘Modernism’ to ‘the envisaged scholars’ of this organisation who would be reading ‘Modernist Painting’.28 Which might seem to counter the claim that any of these agencies’ agendas included any ‘ideas about Modernity and Modernism’, let alone a notion of how these ideas might have ‘related to manageable images of American guardianship.’

If, as Frascina suggests, Dodd’s request for a title change was made because of the frequency of Greenberg’s references to ‘Modernism’, then this suggests that Greenberg was influential to the USIA (rather than the converse), and the fact that Greenberg complied could well be because the original title was not of his choosing.

A point not noted by Frascina is that Greenberg, like so many others, became a pawn in the

Cold War game simply by making a living. Even someone at Dodd’s level, we are told, was beset by ‘frustrations and worries’ over the constant round of ‘snags [e.g. the cancellation of exhibitions] mostly explained as budgetary excuses’, but clearly a result of official interference.29 So why was Greenberg singled out? His crime, it seems, was to be paid

$250, which signified an attachment ‘by an umbilical cord of gold’ to a ‘ruling elite, backed up by overt and covert funding’ – that is, the ruling elite of ‘organizations such as the 324

ACCF, the USIA, and the State Department’, which ‘had their agendas’.30 This was, of course, to paraphrase ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ regarding the avant-garde’s reliance on elite patronage. Perhaps, then, Greenberg was being taken to task for hypocrisy. Beyond the blood money and the use of the word ‘Modernist’, other evidence of this collusion included: ‘references to “the latest abstract painting” and “the authentic art of our time”’

(which apparently took for granted the listeners’ assumption that these were ‘produced in

America’), and the use of the phrase ‘our culture’ to announce to ‘the listeners from differing cultures’ that ‘Modernist’ painting meant ‘American’ painting.31

But, again, this is a misreading, as is evident from the placing of ‘our culture’ and ‘the authentic art of our time’ within the following paragraphs:

Modernism includes more than art and literature. By now it covers almost the whole of what is truly alive in our culture. It happens, however, to be very much of a historical novelty. Western civilization is not the first civilization to turn around and question its own foundations, but it is the one that has gone furthest in doing so…32

… Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is – among other things – continuity, and unthinkable without it. Lacking the past of art, and the need and compulsion to maintain its standards of excellence, Modernist art would lack both substance and justification.33

The term ‘our culture’ was clearly relating to modernism in its entirety. Occurring in the opening paragraph it set the tone for an essay which discussed the Impressionists, the

Cubists, Cézanne, Kandinsky and Mondrian – with Mondrian, not an American, being used to illustrate the proposition that the ‘flatness towards which Modernist painting orients itself can never be an absolute flatness’. 34 While the ‘latest abstract painting’ would, by nature, have meant the American painting he had long promoted, Greenberg refrained from 325

naming a single American artist or art movement, and nor did he use the words ‘America’ or ‘American’.

The phrase, ‘the authentic art of our time’, occurs in the concluding paragraph and clearly relates to modernist art as a whole, being pursuant to the suggestion of the preceding paragraph that Greenberg was talking of modernist art in contrast with pre-modernist art.

And the paragraph preceding this had made it quite clear that pre-modernist art meant everything that had paved the way for modernist flatness – from 16th century Venetian painting and 17th century Dutch painting, to David and Ingres.35

As if to demonstrate just how chauvinistically close to the USIA’s agenda he could have sailed, had he so chosen, in 1961 for an American audience, Greenberg described the WPA

Arts Project as ‘that great incubator to which American painting owes most of the head start it got on the world in the Nineteen Forties’.36 But then, this was not, like ‘Modernist

Painting’, a canonical text. As Greenberg would say in 1978, with ‘Modernist Painting’ he was ‘trying to account in part for how most of the very best art of the last hundred-odd years came about’; which is precisely how it reads, particularly given the omission of any reference to America.37 Despite which, Frascina insists that Greenberg’s arguments ‘were consistent with [the USIA’s and State Government’s] aims to co-opt intellectuals in propagating a particular image of the United States’ – and in another turn-around suggests that Greenberg defended ‘a view of “Modernist” art against various institutional critiques… the antithesis of the USIA’s and the State department’s emphases on artists’ political beliefs’.38 The bottom line, which Frascina neglects to mention, is that during this period, 326

and beyond the VOA, Greenberg was writing for journals as varied as Commentary and

The Saturday Evening Post, and Art News and Country Beautiful – perhaps tailoring his arguments to the various audiences, but always following his own agenda.

Rosenberg earns art a bad name

By 1962 the optimism of ‘Modernist Painting’ had all but vanished with Greenberg’s realisation that Abstract Expressionism's overseas success was due in large part to its being portrayed as action painting, and thus as everything he was against. Although ‘How Art

Writing Earns Its Bad Name’ was essentially a salvo against a range of critics of the period, under primary attack was Rosenberg’s proposition that the Abstract Expressionists were seeking ‘to discover their own identities through the unpremeditated and more or less uncontrolled acts by which they put paint to canvas’, rather than ‘seeking to arrive at art’.39

Most particularly, Greenberg was angered by the suggestion that the picture had become

‘an indifferent matter [where everything] lay in the doing [and] nothing in the making’, which can be seen as the antithesis of the mastery of craft so important to him.40

The catalyst for this article was Lawrence Alloway (the ‘ardent champion of [extremist art], especially of the new American kind’) who had ‘rescued Mr. Rosenberg’s article and set its ideas and terms in effective circulation’.41 These ‘ideas and terms’ being Rosenberg’s

‘subversive and futurist explanation of the subversive and futurist and very American species of art that Pollock seemed to represent.’42 In the process of propagating

Rosenberg’s ‘notions’ in England, Alloway was said to have been presenting Abstract

Expressionism as ‘a freakish, new fangled way of applying paint to canvas [that] made it 327

seem all the more appropriate to what struck most people as being a freakish, new fangled kind of art – or non-art’.43 Then, ‘with the prestige conferred upon them by Alloway’,

Rosenberg’s ideas ‘were exported to the Continent and back to the United States.’44 Yet still it was Rosenberg who had turned art writing bad through his influence not only on

Alloway, but also, for instance, on Michel Tapié, Herbert Read and Robert Goldwater. As

Greenberg saw it, there was now a ‘widening of the gap between art and discourse’ which was soliciting:45

… perversions and abortions of discourse: pseudo-description, pseudo-narrative, pseudo-exposition, pseudo-history, pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-psychology, and – worst of all – pseudo-poetry (which last represents the abortion, not of discourse, but of intuition and imagination).46

Since this ‘pseudo’ list is ostensibly about art discourse, it has to be assumed that by saying immediately afterwards that the pity was ‘not in the words [but] in the fact that art itself has been made to look silly’, Greenberg was referring to art writing – and then specifically to

Rosenberg, who had orignated this particular style.47 But the inclusion of pseudo-poetry, singled out for specific criticism, suggests something else – something evident in another passage where Greenberg recalled a conversation with Pollock, who apparently had said that the main ideas of Rosenberg’s ‘action painting’ article had come from himself.48 To which Greenberg added in parentheses ‘if so, Pollock had been parroting in that conversation things he had heard from his friends.’49 Since the type of art writing under attack stemmed from the early fifties, it seems that Greenberg was using this opportunity to castigate Beat writing and its ilk – in fact the entire sensibility of which Rosenberg’s 1952 essay was a part. He was yet to attack this sensibility outright, but it might be seen as the fundamental cause of the article. 328

This impression is furthered by the suggestion that, for Rosenberg, the covered canvas was

‘left over as the unmeaning aftermath of an “event”, the solipsistic record of purely personal “gestures”’, and therefore not belonging to the ‘same reality’ as works of art.50

That this was the sort of silliness Greenberg meant is certain, and in linking the two together he was, in effect, saying that those promoting these views or working to their order cared less about ‘the truth about life under industrialism’ than about an obsolete truth of life for the leisured classes prior to industrialism.

Placed in the modern context, this obsolete truth might be seen as something approaching dilettantism – which, by Greenberg’s standards, could only be seen as decadence, for clearly the freedom to create was won at the same price as the rest of industrial society. As we have seen, Greenberg had been aware of this playful spirit in the American avant-garde since at least 1950, and he had made an occasional remark suggestive of his dissatisfaction with Rosenberg, so we return to the question, raised in the introduction to this thesis, of why he waited a decade to openly attack ‘The American Action Painters’. To suggest an answer is to return briefly to Greenberg’s negations. For this is the route Greenberg travelled from denying the very existence of the majority of the fifties’ avant-garde, to being unable to deny the sixties’ culture which it spawned.

As a definition of terms, these negations do not mean the purely formal negations of modernism as argued by T. J. Clark, but the more worldly negations, as presented by Serge

Guilbaut in ‘The Relevance of Modernism’ of 1983, wherein the avant-garde was said to 329

have negated ‘the integrating positivism of consumerist culture’.51 By which Guilbaut meant the ‘uniformity of culture which Kitsch (propagated by capitalism) and programmed art (spawned by propagandist art and authoritarian regimes) both symbolized’ – a uniformity which ‘had to be opposed in order to protect a freedom rejected by both political systems.’52 Notwithstanding that, for Greenberg, kitsch encompassed both authoritarian and non-authoritarian forms of vulgarization, Guilbaut here had hit on the fundamental point that Greenberg was waging a battle against all forms of ersatz culture, against the fake forms which had sprung up after the advent of industrialism. For Greenberg, as we know, this amounted to decadence, and decadence was a subject on which he was most singularly outspoken in 1983 in ‘To Cope With Decadence’.

Here, agreeing with Spengler that periods of decline occurred when civilizations had run their ‘biological courses’, and clearly seeing this as a period of decline, Greenberg noted that ‘authentic, genuine Modernism’ alone had the capacity to continually ‘define itself only by superior quality’, for it was able to ‘resist decline and maintain the vitality of high art in general, of high art anywhere.’53 Indeed, it had emerged specifically in answer to ‘a radical lowering of… esthetic standards’.54 By contrast postmodernism and post- industrialism were but signs of ‘lateness’ or ‘Western decline’. 55 And here it can be safely assumed that by ‘post-Modernism’ Greenberg meant everything since Pop Art, except, of course, his own pantheon. This much he had made clear in the essay ‘Counter-Avant-

Garde’ in which (as discussed in Chapter One) all mainstream art failing to conform to his standards was designated ‘avant-gardist’ or ‘novelty’. Yet, given that Greenberg thought historically, it seems reasonable to suggest that he was, in attacking postmodernism, also 330

attacking all the recalcitrant tendencies that came before. However, to read again between the lines of ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, perhaps he was on this very tack even earlier when he distinguished the ‘ambitious’ avant-garde from its ‘half-baked’ counterpart – the counterpart which was given over (very much like decadence) to ‘the canonizing, codifying, and imitating of itself.’ Lending weight to this suggestion is that this is precisely how he was later to present avant-gardism and novelty art.

In the face of various manifestations of decadence, the avant-garde ‘both child and negation of Romanticism’ (and Romanticism, as we have seen, had undoubted associations with

Nazism), was embarked from the outset on a mission of self-preservation.56 For, if society were in the state of advanced decadence implied by Greenberg’s appraisals, then the avant- garde was, indeed, fighting for its life not simply against ‘consumerist culture’, but against everything challenging the values upheld by the genuine avant-garde – the only values which would prevent the final collapse into decadence (and, by extension, barbarism). And so, between the lines of Greenberg’s negations must be read his personal battle against this tide which had risen around him since the early fifties, if not before. Washing in with this tide, at first slowly, was a wave of anti-Abstract Expressionist feeling well illustrated by

Larry Rivers’ comments on his George Washington Crossing the Delaware of 1953:

Luckily for me I didn’t give a crap about what was going on at the time in New York painting… I was angry enough to want to do something no one in the New York art world could doubt was disgusting, dead, and absurd. So what could be dopier than a painting dedicated to a national cliché.57

Before the decade was out this anti-Abstract Expressionist spirit would also enter the work of Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns; and, by 1961, Rivers’s anti-aesthetic sentiments were 331

to be echoed and canonized in Claes Oldenburg’s classic statement ‘I am for an art’. But even prior to this, by the end of the fifties there was no avoiding the reality that this was the way of the future. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (and by extension the Beat movement) received considerable fame in 1957 through the obscenity trial noted previously – with Howl winning on the grounds that it had cultural value. With these sensibilities permeating down to the masses the way was paved for the instant acceptance of Pop Art, helped, not least, by a substantial increase in the number of art galleries which effectively broadened the base of what was being shown. Again, Greenberg, given his connections, cannot have been unaware of these trends – and yet ‘Modernist Painting’ demonstrates a supreme confidence in the continuation of modernism as he saw it, suggesting that he had not yet made (or refused to make) the link between the general progression of mass culture and the eventual demise of his notion of high art.

The following year, however, and the first months of 1962 before Pop emerged triumphant, would see a spate of exhibitions, endorsed by critics, by of a range of artists including Allan

Kaprow, Jim Dine, Yoko Ono, Claes Oldenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, James

Rosenquist and Tom Wesselman, many of whom might be seen as reflecting Alloway’s mass-media sympathetic ideology (Greenberg had clearly been reading Alloway prior to writing ‘How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name’). And many of whom, by the same token, might be seen as reflecting Rosenberg’s action ideology. This general critical endorsement of a sensibility anathema to Greenberg on so many levels was, it is suggested, the real catalyst for this essay, which first appeared in March 1962, just a month after Oldenberg had received a favourable and lengthy review in Arts Magazine from Sidney Tillim.58 By 332

attacking the critics of this art, Greenberg could essentially do some damage without granting gratuitous publicity to the art itself. Which is to come to a possible reason for why he waited so long for this opportunity.

Greenberg’s mode of operation, as evident in Chapter One, was to maintain a silence against the art he disliked until such time as it could no longer be ignored. As long as this new sensibility (which seemingly made a virtue of its tackiness) remained relatively anonymous, the best tactic for Greenberg was to negate it by averting his gaze for, as he had said of the avant-garde of 1949, even adverse publicity could be ‘a promising sign’ – which could well be the reason that he failed to mention the avant-garde activities at Black

Mountain, and their like in New York.59 By contrast, he had been outspoken on Surrealism, which, unlike the more recent avant-garde trends, was mainstream. Once the art world had publicly embraced the new sensibility through its endorsement of Pop Art, happenings etc., as a critic he could no longer be so silent in his negation of its significance. That is, the risk of granting it gratuitous publicity was now outweighed by the risk of losing his credibility as a critic of avant-garde art. Now, in early 1962, with the new art being sanctioned by gallery owners and critics alike, it was only a step away from this art circumventing the direction of modernism itself (that is, the direction he had reiterated only two years previously) – which, it is suggested, is why he waited so long to attack: for had this new phenomenon not occurred, he might never have responded so outrightly. Now, he was forced to respond in an effort to circumvent, through his influence, the almost inevitable.

333

Seven months later, in ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, Greenberg seemed to be of the impression that the new art would be a flash in the pan, in that depictions of ‘plucked chickens’, ‘coffee cans’ and ‘pieces of pastry’, while ‘refreshing’, was ‘novelty’ with ‘no staying power’.60 Even Jasper Johns, of whom he spoke with reasonable favour, was, as noted in Chapter One, seen as singing the ‘swan song of homeless representation’, which,

‘like most swan songs’ carried ‘only a limited distance.’61 Just two months after this, however, Greenberg had enlarged ‘How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name’ for publication in the magazine Encounter. Perhaps in the realisation that its first publishing had failed to stem the tide.

In attacking both Rosenberg’s and Alloway’s art writing, Greenberg was effectively admitting to a continuity of the 1950s avant-garde spirit he had long denied. And this was tantamount to admitting that the ascetic tradition he had promoted was now under the gravest threat. Seen in this light, it is not surprising that this article would pave the way for some of the most vitriolic criticism of his career, which, as we saw in Chapter One, was targetted not only at the new art forms of the sixties, but, most scathingly, at Duchamp as the prime progenitor. The utopian dream was effectively over. 334

Notes

1 Francis Frascina, ‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”: the Making of Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting”’, Oxford Art Journal, 26.1, 2003, 69-97 (my thanks to my supervisor Assoc. Prof. Alan Krell for pointing out this article) 2 Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values and Clement Greenberg’, 131 For Frascina’s debt to Jachec, see: Frascina, ‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”, 69-97, note 4. Here he says that his concerns (related to ‘historical and ideological queries’ surrounding ‘Modernist Painting’) were prompted by: firstly, a paper he had delivered in Washington D.C. in 1991; secondly, research conducted on that trip, and thirdly, two articles by Jachec – including that mentioned above and ‘Adorno, Greenberg and Modernist Politics’, Telos, No. 110, Winter, 1998, 105-118. Although Frascina does not openly state which aspects of these articles prompted him, it is clear, since his argument revolves around the politics surrounding ‘Modernist Painting’, that Jachec’s comment, noted above, would have been a driving factor. 3 O’Brian, ‘Introduction’ (Vol. 3), xxxiii 4 Frascina, ‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”’, 97 (n. 189) Frascina’s failure to reference ‘The Plight of Culture’ (Art and Culture version) bears a resemblance to Guilbaut’s failure to reference the 1953 version. Indeed, in the context of their arguments, there seems to be a measure of difficulty in drawing the reader’s attention to the precise location of these essays. 5 Ibid., 91-92 6 Ibid., 92 7 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 85 Frascina’s comment that Greenberg had gone from seeing socialism as the means of preserving culture in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ to seeing, in ‘Modernist Painting’, that modernism alone constituted (and by implication preserved) ‘what is truly alive in our culture’, echoes Jachec’s opinion that ‘contemporary modernism had wilfully, in Greenberg’s assessment, broken its alliance with socialism.’ An opinion which has been argued against in note 20, Chapter Eight. In the opinion of T. J. Clark (Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 139), the arguments of ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ had been taken up ‘directly’ and ‘sometimes almost verbatim’ in ‘Modernist Painting’, and, as argued above, there is the underlying suggestion of politics in the second essay. It might seem, therefore, that Greenberg had intended the amended ‘Plight of Culture’ (seen by Hilton Kramer as a successor to ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’) to be read in conjunction with ‘Modernist Painting’ – each demonstrating Greenberg’s updating of his first arguments to account for contemporary conditions. 8 In 1993, Yves-Alain Bois made a study of various changes Greenberg made for Art and Culture. Like Frascina, yet for a simpler purpose (to track seemingly contradictory changes in Greenberg’s formulations) Bois confines his study to Greenberg’s art critical efforts, thereby also not referring to ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ or its changes. For this, see: Yves-Alain Bois, ‘Les Amendments de Greenberg’, Les cahiers du Musee national d’art moderne, Automne/hiver 1993, 52-60 9 Frascina ‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”’, 96 10 Ibid., 96-97 11 Ibid. 97 The suggestion that these ‘streamlined production processes’ were ‘Taylorist or Fordist’ steps in earlier in Frascina’s argument with the comment that: ‘In defending a view of “Modernist” art against various institutional critiques, Greenberg produced an argument consistent with Taylorist or Fordist streamlined American production processes’ (Ibid., 93) However, if ‘Modernist Painting’ had provided an account of streamlined American production processes (the arguments for which are not strong), this could more reasonably be put down to earlier connections Greenberg had made between the modern, the streamlined, and modern technology in the 1954 review ‘Master Leger’, than to Taylorism and Fordism. For here modernism itself had clearly derived its inspiration from just such processes – and not simply American. As Greenberg had said:

In France, and elsewhere, the generation of the avant-garde that came of age after 1900 was the first to accept the modern, industrializing world with any enthusiasm. Even poets – thus Apollinaire – saw, at 335

least for a moment, aesthetic possibilities in a streamlined future, a vaulting modernity; and a mood of secular optimism replaced the secular pessimism of the Symbolist generation. This mood was not confined to the avant-garde; here, for once, the latter has been anticipated by the philistines; but the avant-garde was drawing the aesthetic conclusions at which the philistine balked. Nor was painting – and sculpture – the only department of culture to benefit by this. Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Proust, Mann, Valéry, Rilke, George, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Freud, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Einstein all developed or matured in the years of that same mood, which underpinned even those who rejected it… [Fernand Leger} has told us about, and we see, his enthusiasm for machine forms. And we also see in his art all the qualities conventionally associated with “materialism”… (Clement Greenberg, ‘Master Léger’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3 [first published in Partisan Review, January-February 1954], 166)

12 Idem. 13 Frascina disusses these signifiers in Ibid., 96 14 That ‘the pleasure of profit’ would have been anathema to Greenberg is evident from his sarcasm in the review of the 1944 Whitney Annual [discussed in Chapter Six]in which Dali,‘the baptizing John of the neo- baroque and the neo-romantic… felt that modern art isolated him from society, to which he wanted and wants very much to belong, and whose attention he needs no less than its money.’ (Greenberg, ‘Review of the Whitney Annual’ [1944], 172) 15 Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’, 126 16 Schlesinger, The Vital Center, ix 17 Lasch, The Agony of the American Left, 109 Lasch’s anecdote related to Norman Thomas who, through his Institute of International Labor Relations (unbeknownst to him funded by the CIA), ‘thought he was working for democratic reform in Latin America, whereas the CIA valued him as a showpiece, an anticommunist who happened to be a socialist.’. 18 Frascina, ‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”’, 77 19 Ibid., 77 20 Idem. 21 Idem. 22 Ibid., 81-82 23 Ibid., 77-78 Other points of evidence presented by Frascina were a letter of invitation to participate in the Forum Broadcasts, and Greenberg’s letter of acceptance. However, as Frascina notes, the letters of invitation (which were, apparently, standard) had made clear that ‘without any attempt at propaganda’, the basic objectives of the broadcasts were: (Ibid., 79)

…to establish a nexus between America’s foremost academic and cultural figures and institutions and their counterparts abroad, to highlight current American trends and developments in the arts and sciences, and to gain added appreciation and respect for American intellectual achievement by displaying its best products. We believe that a program so conceived should also serve to stimulate among the intelligentsia behind the Iron Curtain an awareness of and interest in patterns of thought and creative endeavour differing substantially from those to which they are currently restricted. (Idem.)

Although these quotes were from a letter from Walter Nichols (Forum Project officer at the USIA) to Lamar Dodd in February 1953, Frascina maintains they were also included in all standard letters of invitation to participate. Likewise the comment that two ‘indispensible’ aspects to the success of the Forum were ‘the moral support of the American academic and cultural community as a whole [and] the personal participation of its most distinguished members’. Beyond this, the letters of invitation included the line that, as participants: (Idem.)

…we would have a wonderful opportunity of making an outstanding contribution to our government and, indeed, to the prestige of the United States. In addition to our own profession in relation to its proper place in American society. (Ibid., 81)

336

Given what we know of Greenberg from his writings, it is probably the latter to which he was responding on his own behalf. Yet in terms of his supposed compliance with the type of contribution sought by the USIA, he took this opportunity to lambast the majority of his profession (American or otherwise), with an accusation of ‘journalism’ (as opposed to ‘criticism or art history’). (Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 93) For all this, Frascina seems intent on using these letters to implicate Greenberg in USIA politics. For instance, seeing ‘the politics of approval’ for participation in the VOA broadcasts as ‘significant but difficult to pin down’, Frascina reveals that Greenberg, as with other participants, would have been thoroughly vetted prior to being invited to participate – with the ‘formal approval’ of Nichols dictating that the invitation list would be ‘bound to take on a particular character’. By which Frascina meant that an affiliation with communism would disbar anyone from inclusion. Which, of course, raises the question as to what, precisely, this knowledge adds to our understanding of Greenberg. Instead of elucidating on this point, Frascina asks, ‘Why Greenberg?’ And yet the reason for this should have been apparent from a full-page advertisement which had been cited some pages previously: (Frascina, ‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”, 81)

MODERNIST PAINTING: A definitive essay on the nature of modernism by CLEMENT GREENBERG. America’s leading avant-garde art critic sums up his views on the historical uniqueness as well as the historical continuities of the modern movement in painting. (Ibid., 73 [n.16], quoted from: Arts, October 1960, Vol. 35, no. 1)

Greenberg was, indeed, considered a leading personality, one who had long championed the American painting avant-garde. So, why not Greenberg? His response to Dodd signifies his delight at being asked to contribute:

Thank you for your most flattering request to do a talk for the new Forum of the USIS [sic]. I accept with great pleasure… The new Forum program sounds exciting. I especially like the idea of not being required to talk down to one’s audience. More power to you and the USIS in that direction. (Ibid., 81, quoted from letter to Dodd, dated 11 January 1960)

A gushing acceptance by any account, but then this was a golden opportunity. And, of course, Greenberg was only congratulating the USIA for ‘not being required to talk down to one’s audience’, and not for its politics. The fact that he had referred to USIS (United States Information Service) rather than the USIA, is a slip Frascina portrays as ‘significant’ − the reason being that USIS ‘referrred to officers and agents overseas: typically, in larger posts, a public affairs officer, an information officer, and a cultural affairs officer.’(Idem.) Which is really of no significance, particularly since USIS was simply the overseas wing of USIA, being situated in embassies and consulates world-wide. 24 Ibid., 78; Clement Greenberg, ‘The New Sculpture’, in: Art and Culture. For use of the term ‘modernist’ see 139, 140, 142, 145 25 Clement Greenberg, ‘Sculpture in Our Time’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 4 (first published in Arts Magazine, June 1958), 56, 59, 61 26 Clement Greenberg, ‘David Smith’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 3 (first published in Art in America, Winter 1956-1957), 276; Clement Greenberg, ‘David Smith’, in: Art and Culture, 204 27 Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, 145 28 Frascina, ‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”’, 82 29 Ibid., 84 30 Ibid., 92 31 Idem. Of particular curiosity is that Frascina (while ignoring the Marxist connotations of changes to ‘The Plight of Our Culture’) at this point in his argument picks on the seemingly innocuous word ‘tendency’ (as in ‘self- critical tendency’). Presenting Greenberg’s use of this word as an ‘issue’, Frascina then imbues it with political intent by saying that it had ‘long been associated with politics and political art, most notably with Marxism and socialism.’ (Frascina, ‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”, 92) 32 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 85 33 Ibid., 93 337

34 Ibid., 87, 90 35 Ibid., 88, 93-94 36 Greenberg, ‘The Jackson Pollock Market Soars’, 113 37 Greenberg’s 1978 postscript to ‘Modernist Painting’ quoted in: O’Brian, Vol. 4, 94, quoted from: Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in: Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, Buffalo, N.Y., 1978 (no page given) 38 Frascina, ‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”’, 92 Providing a possible clue to the slant of Frascina’s argument is a final footnote stating that Greenberg’s arguments (presumably in ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ or, more likely, its revision) were ‘exclusive in their euro-centric assumptions and language in which there is no recognition of African American or Native American traditions’, and that: ‘Arguably, too, his broadcast and the Forum series were pronouncements from the centre of the dominant post-war Empire.’ (Frascina, ‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”’, 97 [n. 189] ) All of which reads as a form of accusation. This inevitably raises questions about Frascina’s purpose, thus causing some confusion. Is his aim to provide a critique of this era (and Greenberg) in the light of more recent values? Or is it to promote a deeper understanding of Greenberg in relation to the politics of the time and the inevitable circumstances under which numerous careers were, of necessity, conducted during this era? If the latter, then the following points can be made: Firstly, the charge that Greenberg was pronouncing from the ‘centre of the dominant post-war empire’ would seem a truism related not to politics but to circumstance (that is, the circumstance of an American citizen broadcasting to the world through an American radio station). Secondly, regarding the charge of ‘euro-centrism’, presumably included to add fuel to the implication that Greenberg had become a cultural imperialist, Frascina fails to add that even at the point of writing ‘Avant- Garde and Kitsch’ (his Trotskyist period), Greenberg was essentially euro-centric in outlook. Thirdly, inherent in the charge that Greenberg failed to recognize ‘African American or Native American traditions’ is the implication that Greenberg alone should have been more vocal on such issues, that he should have been different to various other intellectuals of his time. And this raises the question as to how much Greenberg could reasonably, given his era, have been expected to champion or fight. 39 Greenberg, ‘How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name’, 136 40 Idem. 41 Ibid., 137 42 Idem. 43 Ibid., 139 44 Ibid., 140 45 Ibid., 144 46 Idem. 47 Idem. 48 Ibid., 148 49 Idem. 50 Ibid., 136 51 Serge Guilbaut, ‘The Relevance of Modernism’, in: Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, eds. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983, XIII 52 Idem. 53 Greenberg, ‘To Cope With Decadence’, 163, 164 54 Ibid., 164 55 Ibid., 163 56 TNL, 28 57 Frank O’Hara, ‘Larry Rivers: “Why I Paint As I Do”’, in: Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Steven Henry Madoff, University of California Press, 1997, 1-2 58 Sidney Tillim ‘Month in Review: New York Exhibitions’, in: Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 25-28 (excerpt, first published in Arts Magazine, February 1962, 34-37) 59 Greenberg, ‘The New York Market for American Art’, 320 60 Greenberg, ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, 134 338

61 Ibid., 127 339

CONCLUSION

The primary purpose of this thesis has been to answer the question of what motivated

Greenberg to remain a formalist, indeed a purist, to the point of risking both his career as a critic and his credibility as a defender of avant-garde values. This was, after all, a risk he had knowingly taken since at least his visit to Black Mountain in 1950, when it would have been clear that there were avant-garde art forms requiring something other than formalist analysis.

As these chapters have demonstrated, Greenberg’s political idealism must be seriously considered as a reason for his maintenance of a formalist stance, and likewise his Judaism.

Behind his intransigence, it has been argued, were his feelings on what might have happened if certain aspects of culture were to degenerate – feelings evident in his concern about anti-Semitism. Seemingly stemming from a combination of these factors was a utopian vision for an egalitarian society with the best, not the worst, of everything. This vision, shaped by Marxism and formed in the climate of events leading up to the Second

World War, was demonstrably re-expressed in various ways over the years. These, it is suggested, are the reasons why he was actively seeking solutions to the problems of capitalist culture; for he clearly saw connections between the cultural effects of capitalism and the effects which had facilitated the rise of fascism and Stalinism. His formalism and his favouring of abstraction might be seen to have reflected all of this, in that the former was an egalitarian means of evaluating art and skill, and the latter meant supporting an artform which was resistant to the ersatz (and thus to the machinations of propagandists) 340

and which fitted, to an extent, the non-iconic requirements of Judaism. And here, a rhetorical question from 1956 (quoted above in Chapter Five) seems particularly significant, especially since it was reprinted in Art and Culture:

But might not all art, “prosaic” as well as “poetic”, begin to appear falsifying to the Jew who looked closely enough? And when did a Jew ever come to terms with art without falsifying himself somehow?1

Further, it might not be mere coincidence that his strongest volleys against the art of the sixties occurred around the turn of the decade, reaching full force in ‘Counter-Avant-

Garde’ of 1971 in which one finds an anger not unlike the anger expressed in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, ‘Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility’, and ‘The Plight of Our Culture’. For, to quote Earl Raab’s ‘Is there a New Anti-Semitism’ of 1974, American Jews had been

‘experiencing a “certain anxiety” since about 1967’ when the war in the Middle East had

‘exposed some unsettling trends on the American Left’.2

For all the points above, and despite the objective and mostly sympathetic scholarship of, for instance, T. J. Clark, Thierry de Duve, Donald Kuspit, Margaret Olin, and Sidney

Tillim, Greenberg seems to have become a bête noir for some factions – his inclusion into the Cold War revisionist discourse seemingly announcing open season on denouncing him.

As in a game of Chinese Whispers, opinion seems to have compounded opinion until, by

1991, David Craven was saying on the pages of the Oxford Art Journal that ‘Greenberg was an active McCarthyist’,3 and terms like ‘authoritarian’ and ‘dictatorship’ were being used by others to create the impression that he was similar to the regimes to which he was so vehemently opposed. In 1987, for instance, Artforum published Kay Larson’s ‘The 341

Dictatorship of Clement Greenberg’ in which Greenberg was said to have been

‘responsible’ for a number of things, including ‘a long list of roads not taken… and proscriptions drawn up, to be obeyed by a generation of artists on the pain of critical banishment to the grim gulags of the retrograde.’4 As to how reasonable such an assessment is in terms of the various avant-garde developments which proceeded despite Greenberg’s influence, and even within his own pantheon, is a moot point.

A term favoured by Larson, ‘authoritarian personality’, might well have derived from The

Authoritarian Personality, by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Samuel Flowerman et. al., of 1950, which was introduced with the comment:

It is our opinion… that no politico-social trend imposes a greater threat to our traditional values and institutions than does fascism, and that knowledge of the personality forces that favour its acceptance may ultimately prove useful in combatting it.5

Attributing the term directly to this source was a 1994 article, entitled: ‘Frascina on

Greenberg: Francis Frascina discusses Greenberg and the authoritarian personality’, which seems to be a precursor to Frascina’s 2003 essay (discussed in Chapter Ten). The reason for referring to this study is made apparent in the following sentence:

To argue that Greenberg’s work has much in common with the ‘authoritarian personality’ is to make a case for finding the authoritarian personality within all social networks including those artistic groups which proclaim to be on the left. (Frascina’s emphasis)6

Frascina’s article appeared in the July/August edition of Art Monthly two months after

Greenberg’s death. It was written on the invitation of the magazine ‘in recognition of 342

[Greenberg’s] formidable influence’.7 Lending authority to this exercise was a previously published exchange between Greenberg and T. J. Clark, confronting but respectful, with

Clark saying: ‘I really say this with respect’, and Greenberg saying: ‘I appreciated your talk very much, and felt highly complimented by it.’8 Unfortunately, what had been said in fair exchange was now supporting a very different style of argumentation made when fair exchange was out of the question.

This particular style of argumentation is well illustrated by Frascina’s derivation of a nine- point list of ‘variables’ of personality traits from The Authoritarian Personality.9 His general attack is on Greenberg but, coming to the list, he says that in both Greenberg’s

‘publications and many written by those in the Greenbergian “group”, there is strong evidence of the basic variables.’10 After the list he slips back to Greenberg, the personality study being related directly to him. So what Frascina seems to be saying is that, while some of the group exhibited some of the variables, Greenberg exhibited them all. The tendency to attribute the presumed characteristics of a group directly to Greenberg is, it seems, a familiar pattern in revisionism, the influence of which is evident in the following passage:

[Greenberg’s] cultural status cannot be divorced from the effect of his activities in the 1950s: from publicly denouncing his former editors at the Nation as Communist sympathisers to becoming a member of the hawkish American Committee for Cultural Freedom (CIA funded)… Greenberg regarded himself as ‘on the left’ despite, eventually, repudiating his earlier quasi-Marxist/Trotskyist writings, his support for US involvement in Vietnam and growing fascination with the writings of Spengler. (Frascina’s parentheses)11

In reality, as we have seen, there seems no reason to suppose that Greenberg was aware of covert CIA interference. Nor that he would have been aware of such interference in almost 343

every organisation. A plank of Frascina’s 2003 argument was that Greenberg had voted, along with the majority of that committee, to challenge Stalinism in advance of challenging

McCarthyism. But, as previously discussed, there appears to have been a feeling at the time that the outside threat was more immediately dangerous. In respect of Greenberg’s choice of reading matter, as has been demonstrated, Spengler’s concept of decadence had been a source of Greenberg’s understanding of culture from as early as 1932. But Spengler had not been read uncritically. To suggest ‘a growing fascination’ with Spengler’s writings, therefore, is to cast a quite different slant on the matter.

Beyond questioning Greenberg’s right to read Spengler, Frascina directly challenges

Adorno’s endorsement of Greenberg, when he had said:

I know Clement Greenberg very well from my American time and I think exceedingly highly of him. His opinion on Benjamin, without any doubt, will not only agree with my own one but will also carry great objective weight.12

Adorno’s letter (of February 19, 1962) had apparently been addressed to the editor of the

University of Chicago Press, and according to Frascina:

Adorno and Benjamin disagreed in the 1930s about fundamental issues of culture, yet here Adorno claims that Greenberg and he would not only share the same ‘opinion on Benjamin’ but also that it will ‘carry great objective weight’. Texts which confuse opinion and objective weight, evident in Greenberg’s own criticism, are the culmination in either disaster or salvation. (Frascina’s emphases)13

The supreme irony here is that despite Adorno’s supposed lack of objectivity, his study of the authoritarian personality has been utilised, yet no evidence is offered in support of

Frascina’s own opinion on either Adorno or Greenberg. Similarly, in his 2003 essay, 344

Frascina had called Hilton Kramer’s criticism of John O’Brian (discussed in Chapter

Seven) into question, by saying that his review of the third and fourth volumes of The

Collected Essays and Criticism had been published in the so-called ‘notoriously right-wing’

The New Criterion.14 And yet, there is, as demonstrated, a case for believing that Kramer’s opinions on O’Brian’s misreading of his words and ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ are supportable. By contrast, Frascina’s concerns regarding ‘the historical circumstances in which “Modernist Painting” had been written’ had been partly prompted, as previously discussed, by Nancy Jachec’s ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement

Greenberg’.15 Unlike Kramer’s acccount, the problematic aspects of Jachec’s text are numerous – not the least being the suggestion (discussed in Chapter 8 [n. 64] and

Appendix) that Greenberg had renounced Cubism and Marxism in line with the politics of

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Raising questions as to the reason for this new round of anti-Greenbergian rhetoric is that, by the time of Frascina’s Art Monthly article, ‘Greenberg’ had been effectively challenged on numerous fronts for some considerable time, and for obvious reasons. As Michael J.

Lewis observed in 1998, ‘to some people in the art world the problem with Greenberg had always been the narrowness of his formalism, which tolerated only one channel of aesthetic development.’16 But, said Lewis, ‘this was no longer particularly relevant: formalism, after all, was dead. Now a new critique took shape, and one with a decidedly political hue.’17

This ‘new view would become crystalised in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern

Art… within a few years [finding] its way into introductory art-survey books for college 345

students’.18 And by the 1980s it had become ‘hard to find anyone willing to go on record with anything positive to say about Clement Greenberg.’19

Taking the anti-Greenberg discourse to different extremes was Louis Kaplan’s ‘Reframing the Self-Criticism’ (briefly discussed in Chapter Two). Evolving from Susan Noyes Platt’s interpretation of Greenberg in the 1930s, Kaplan’s text commenced with the sub-heading

‘Joke’s on Clem: Greenberg Given the Slip’, which refers to the fact that Greenberg had mistranslated a Hebrew word.20 This simple error was used to subject Greenberg to a psychological analysis. The analysis was then extended into a negative comparison between

Greenberg and various Jewish characters in modern history including Sigmund Freud, the so-described ‘so-called Marburg School’ in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century

Germany, and Walter Benjamin.21

The comparison with Benjamin is interesting, for two essays he wrote on Franz Kafka, dated 1933 and 1938, are contrasted with an essay by Greenberg dated 1946 (his

‘Introduction to “The Great Wall of China” by Franz Kafka’). Kaplan does not provide the date of Greenberg’s essay, and so the point is lost that it was written after the war, and this is reflected in the following passage:

The epilogue to Kafka’s life and work was furnished by history and the outside world – the world of officials and of strangers on the street, of janitors and peasants and coachmen, of Gentiles – the world that filled him with such apprehension. His dread was confirmed as senselessly and arbitrarily as he divined it would be: his sisters and their families, including two brothers-in-law, a niece, and a nephew, were taken from their homes in Czechoslovakia by the Nazis and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.22

346

Ignoring this passage, and the fact that this essay was one of Greenberg’s few attempts at a biographical explanation for motivation (points which seem significant) Kaplan simply remarks that:

In contrast to Benjamin’s allegorical impulse (which renders him so appealing to postmodernism), there is a rigidity in Greenberg’s modernist reading of Kafka that meshes with his securing of the borders of self-criticism. (Kaplan’s parentheses)23

Essays written closer in time, and which might have provided for a sympathetic comparison, are Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

(1936) and Greenberg’s ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ of 1939. And here we find marked similarities, for, as these texts demonstrate, neither writer had much feeling for positive modern progress during the pre-war era. This is unsurprising, since they had each witnessed a period of financial depression following on from a major war and phasing in to a period of imminent war. Whilst Benjamin, on a different continent, clearly saw the march of technological progress as a progression to war, both he and Greenberg were formulating their theories in direct relation to fascist propaganda.

Benjamin saw that fascism had clung on to the ‘property structures’ the masses wanted eliminated.24 Denying these masses their right to change ‘property relations’, fascism sought to ‘give them an expression while preserving property.’25 And so, the ‘logical result’ of fascism was ‘the introduction of aesthetics into political life.’26 While the ‘Fűhrer cult’ of fascism was violating the masses, forcing them to their knees, it was also violating ‘an apparatus… pressed into the production of ritual values.’27 That apparatus was film which, for Benjamin, was the ‘most powerful agent’ of the ‘contemporary mass movements’.28 347

And film, denying contemplation and received in a state of distraction, was being invested with the cult values of Nazism.

This was essentially similar to Greenberg’s warning, as, devoid of genuine tradition, or academicised to the point of lacking genuine meaning, the art enjoyed by the masses displaced by industrialism might fall prey to propagandist exploitation. Where, however,

Benjamin saw film as the most effective means of disseminating propaganda, Greenberg saw kitsch in this role, for kitsch had erased ‘a fairly constant distinction made between those values to be found only in art and the values which can be found elsewhere.’29 As he had said: ‘kitsch is the culture of the masses [and the] encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects.’30 And, further, that the masses, ‘precisely because power was being withheld from them, had to be cozened in every other way possible [thus] it was necessary to promote… the illusion that the masses actually rule.’31

An essential difference between Greenberg and Benjamin was that the latter saw some quite positive aspects of Dadaism, and some positive value in the use of the mass media for propaganda, whereas Greenberg saw only its use-value to fascism and Stalinism.32

However, in this period, the fundamental problem for each writer was how to circumvent the flow of Nazism, and in Greenberg’s case, Stalinism too. As noted at the outset to this thesis, Nazism and anti-Semitism were alive and well in America prior to the war, and

Greenberg, along with many other Jews, attended a Nazi rally in Madison Square to protest the Nazi presence – a democratic freedom which was unavailable to their German 348

counterparts. As has been argued, in the case of Greenberg, such points seem seminal to understanding his subsequent position on modernism.

As Kaplan suggests, Benjamin has been appealing to postmodernism, whereas Greenberg has not. However, if an ‘allegorical impulse’ is the measure of Benjamin’s appeal, so too it might be said that there is much to commend Greenberg’s early essays. As has been argued, the literary devices of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ veil a powerful allegory for the fear and despair of the first months of 1939, harking back, as they seemingly do, to past situations where the world was on the brink of war and the fate of Jews was in the balance. ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, although a canonical apology for abstraction, harbours in its title the threat of treachery and defeat. If an ‘allegorical impulse’ is lacking in Greenberg’s subsequent work, this does not negate the significant contribution he made to modernism.

He did, after all, help to effect substantial change in the public perception of American art; primarily because, ahead of his time in the early thirties, he saw the possibilities for a world-class American art. And it might be said that, in supporting Abstract Expressionism when it was little understood and far from appreciated, he contributed substantially towards its success, and so helped pave the way for the success of subsequent American art. In his disfavour, against the grain of other avant-garde developments he presented his pantheon

(the ‘genuine’ avant-garde) as an ascetic and isolated cadre of the industrialised world, in line with his politics. But, that said, abstract painting itself was never intended to be so ascetic as to exclude the natural, as is evident from his 1949 comments on the nabis,

Kandinsky and Joseph Albers.

349

There is no doubt that in his art writing Greenberg was dogmatic – or even, as Lawrence

Alloway had said in 1958, that he was ‘fatally prejudiced when he [left] modern fine art’.

Yet still, within that narrow framework, Alloway saw him as ‘an art critic and a good one’

– a point on which this thesis agrees.33 Certainly, in the final analysis, Greenberg was a good and clear writer with a vision for a better future, however dated the theory supporting that vision might seem today. But it was a vision nonetheless, and an admirable one.34 350

Notes

1 Greenberg, ‘Kafka’s Jewishness’, 273 2 Earl Raab, ‘Is There a New Anti-Semitism?’, Commentary, Vol. 57, No. 5, May 1974, 53 3 David Craven, ‘Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to “American” Art’, Oxford Art Journal, 14:1, 1991, 47. Craven’s evidence for Greenberg being an ‘active McCarthyist’ was that he had ‘won praise for his “anti- Communism” from Congressman George Dondero in The Congressional Records.’ Craven does not seem to find it necessary to explain what Greenberg’s anti-Communism meant, and nor that what had been read out by Dondero to the Congress was Greenberg’s letter to the editor of The Nation criticising J. Alvarez del Vayo’s defense of Soviet policy – this incident has been discussed in relation to O’Brian’s account. It was a public letter which Dondero grabbed for his own use. O’Brian certainly does not suggest the connection made by Davis, but the question must be asked as to why he raises an incident unrelated (except by Dondero’s opportunism) to Greenberg. A similar question might be asked as to why Frascina also saw fit to include this incident in his appraisal of Greenberg – for which see Frascina, ‘Institutions, Culture and America’s “Cold War Years”, 76 4 Larson, ‘The Dictatorship of Clement Greenberg’, 75 5 Max Horkheimer and Samuel Flowerman, ‘Foreword to Studies in Prejudice’, in: The Authoritarian Personality: by T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, David J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford, New York, 1950, v 6 Francis Frascina, ‘Frascina on Greenberg: Francis Frascina discusses Clement Greenberg and the authoritarian personality’, Art Monthly, July-August, 1994, 19 7 Editorial: ‘Clement Greenberg 1904-1994: Demagoguery’, Art Monthly, July-August, 1994, 12 8 Ibid., 13 The exchange between Clark and Greenberg was originally published in T. J. Clark, “More on the Differences Between Comrade Greenberg and Ourselves’, in: Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, eds. Benjamin H. D., Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983, 188-193. The section printed in Art Monthly (from pp. 190-193), has been substantially edited and altered without notice. Apparently this excerpt from the original transcript was previously published in: Paul Richter, ‘Modernism and After’ Part One, Art Monthly 54, March 1982 9 Ibid., 19, the list runs as follows:

1. Rigid adherence to conventional values established within the self-appointed Modernist discourse. 2. A submissive, uncritical attitude towards idealized moral authorities of the ingroup. 3. A tendency to be on the look-out for, and to condemn, reject and punish people who violate the conventional values. 4. Opposition to the subjective, the tender-minded, the ‘feminine’. 5. The disposition to think in rigid categories. 6. A pre-occupation with dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower; identification with power figures; over-emphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerrated assertion of strength and toughness.. 7. Generalized hostility, vilification of the human and social to emphasize a ‘logic of development’. 8. The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the actual social, political, moral and gendered world (producing kitsch and commitment) which is outside of ‘Art’ and ‘aesthetic experience’; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses as though ‘objective judgements’. 9. Exaggerated concern with sexual activities but the denial of the importance of sexuality and gender in ‘Art’.

10 Idem. 11 Idem. 12 Ibid., 18 13 Idem. 351

14 Frascina, ‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”’, 74 (n. 23) 15 Ibid, 71, 71 (n. 4) 16 Michael J. Lewis, ‘Art, Politics and Clement Greenberg’, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/9806/lewis.html, 5 (first published in Commentary, June 1998) 17 Idem. 18 Idem. 19 Idem. 20 Kaplan, ‘Reframing the Self-Criticism’, 180 In poring over such inconsequential minutiae, Kaplan notes a ‘spooky’ misprint previously noted by Robert Storr, where the word ‘hunted’ had acquired an ‘a’ to become ‘haunted’. (Ibid., 183) Frascina, as discussed in Chapter Ten (note 23), followed a similar path, finding it ‘significant’ that Greenberg had mistakenly used the acronym USIS instead of USIA. The word ‘hunted’ occurs on p. 32, TNL, where Greenberg writes: ‘The arts, then, have been hunted back to their mediums, and there they have been isolated, concentrated and defined.’ 21 Kaplan explains that the Marburg School was led by the philosopher Hermann Cohen, 1842-1918. (Ibid., 191) As demonstrated in Chapter Two, Kaplan’s account of when Greenberg ‘first invoked Kant as an authority figure’ does not match available evidence. The late date of 1950 is suggested in order to lend authority to a derogatory anecdote regarding Greenberg’s knowledge of Kant. (Ibid., 190) Further, in order to compare Greenberg’s understanding of the Jewish joke unfavourably with Sigmund Freud’s, the suggestion is made that Greenberg had aligned ‘his interpretation of Jewish humor with the model of self-criticism found in… Freud’s classic Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious (1905).’ (Kaplan, ‘Reframing the Self-Criticism’, 188) However, Kaplan provides no evidence (circumstantial or otherwise) for Greenberg’s familiarity with this work. 22 Clement Greenberg, ‘Introduction to “The Great Wall of China” by Franz Kafka’, in: O’Brian, Vol. 2, 103 (first published in Commentary, October 1946) 23 Kaplan, ‘Reframing the Self-Criticism’,186 24 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London 1992 (1973), 234 (first published in Great Britain 1970, first published in Germany 1955) 25 Idem. 26 Idem. 27 Idem. 28 Ibid., 215 29 AGK, 15 30 Ibid, 20 31 Ibid., 21 32 Ibid., 227 For Benjamin, the Dadaists had turned the work of art into an instrument of ballistics by its ‘alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound’. (Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 231) It ‘hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality.’(Idem.) Connections were made between Dadaism and film, and stated in endnote was the observation that before the rise of the movie ‘the Dadaists’ performances tried to create an audience reaction which Chaplin later evoked in a more natural way.’ (Ibid., 242 [n. 17] ) It was in ‘the progressive reaction’ of the masses to a Chaplin movie, as against their ‘reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting’, that Benjamin saw the possibilities for the ultilisation of film (which was then being used for fascist propaganda) for communist propaganda. (Ibid., 227) At that time Benjamin clearly supported communism. He did not speak of Russian communism, but it is of utmost significance that in the very near future American communists, as we have seen, would be distancing themselves from Communism as they came to realise the nature of the Stalinist regime. Trotsky, their informer, would later be assassinated for speaking out against Stalin. 33 Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Arts and the Mass Media’, in: Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History (first published in Architectural Design and Construction, February 1958), 7-8 34 My thanks to my supervisor, Assoc. Prof. Alan Krell for suggesting this last line. 352

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CITED MATERIAL

By Greenberg:

In: Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, 1961: (n.b. parenthesised dates are those provided by Greenberg at the end of each essay, some of which appear to refer to the year of revision) ‘Byzantine Parallels’ (1958), 167-170: No apparent prior version. ‘David Smith’, 203-208: Slight revision of ‘David Smith’, 1956. ‘John Marin’ (1958), 181-183: Revision of ‘Review of an Exhibition of John Marin’, 1948. ‘Kafka’s Jewishness’ (1956), 266-273: Revision of ‘The Jewishness of Franz Kafka: Some Sources of His Particular Vision’, 1955. ‘Late Thirties in New York, The’ (1960), 230-235: Revision of ‘New York Painting Only Yesterday’, 1957. ‘New Sculpture, The’ (1958), 139-145: Identical, except for some minor verbal changes, with ‘Sculpture in Our Time’, 1958: which, in turn, appears to be a drastic revision of ‘The New Sculpture’, 1949. ‘On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting’ (1949), 171-174 substantial revision of ‘The Role of Nature in Modern Painting’, 1949. ‘Plight of Culture, The’ (1953), 22-33. Drastic revision of ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 1953, which suggests that this date refers to the time of first writing.

In: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments: 1939-1944, ed., John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1986: ‘An American View’, 38-41 (first published in Horizon, September 1940) ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, 5-22 (first published in Partisan Review, Fall 1939) ‘Beggars Opera – After Marx: Review of A Penny for the Poor by Bertolt Brecht, The’, 3-5 (first published in Partisan Review, Winter 1939) ‘Bertolt Brecht’s Poetry’, 49-62 (first published Partisan Review, March-April 1941) ‘Letter to the Editor of Politics’, 185-187 (first published in Politics, March 1944) ‘Mr. Eliot and Notions of Culture: A Discussion’, 217-220 (first published in Partisan Review, Vol. XI, No. 3, Summer 1944). This discussion also involved: R. P. Blackmur, William Phillips, and I. A. Richards. ‘Poems: A Note by the Editor’, 95-97 (first published in Partisan Review, March-April 1942) ‘Renaissance of the Little Mag: Review of Accent, Diogenes, Experimental Review, Vice Versa, and View’, 42-47 (first published in Partisan Review, January-February 1941) ‘Review of an Exhibition of André Masson’, 99 (first published in The Nation, 7 March 1942) ‘Review of Exhibitions of Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, and Wassily Kandinsky’, 62-65 (first published in The Nation, 19 April 1941) 353

‘Review of Exhibitions of Marc Chagall, Lyonel Feininger, and Jackson Pollock’, 164- 166 (first published in The Nation, 13 November 1943) ‘Review of Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Work by Paul Frölich’, 77-79 (first published in Partisan Review, September-October 1941) ‘Review of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’, 140-141(first published in The Nation, 30 January 1943) ‘Review of the Whitney Annual and the Exhibition Romantic Painting in America’, 171- 174 (first published in The Nation, 1 January 1944) ‘Surrealist Painting’, 225-231 (first published in The Nation, 12 and 19 August 1944) ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, 23-38 (first published in Partisan Review, July-August 1940) ‘Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews’, 176-179 (first published in Contemporary Jewish Record, February 1944) ‘Venusberg to Nuremberg: Review of Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler by Peter Viereck’, 79-83 (first published in Partisan Review, November-December 1941)

In: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose: 1945-1949, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1986: ‘A Martyr to Bohemia: Review of Out of this Century by Peggy Guggenheim, 97-99 (first published in Commentary, September 1946): This was written under the pseudonym ‘K. Hardesh’ and, according to O’Brian’s editorial note (p. 99), Hardesh is Hebrew for Greenberg. ‘A Symposium: The State of American Art’, 287-289 (first published in Magazine of Art, March 1949) ‘Decline of Cubism, The’, 211-215 (first published in Partisan Review, March 1948) ‘Henri Rousseau and Modern Art’, 93-95 (first published in The Nation, 27 july 1946) ‘Introduction to “The Great Wall of China” by Franz Kafka’, 99-104 (first published in Commentary, October 1946) ‘Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility’, 230-235 (first published in Partisan Review, May 1948) ‘Jewish Joke: Review of Röyte Pomerantzen, edited by Immanuel Olsvanger, The’, 182- 187 (first published in Commentary, December 1947) ‘Limits of Common Sense: Review of Years of Wrath: A Cartoon History, 1931-1945 by David Low’, 115-116 (first published in Commentary, December 1946) ‘New York Market for American Art, The’, 319-322 (first published in The Nation, 11 June 1949) ‘Pessimism for Mass Consumption: Review of An Essay on Morals by Philip Wylie’, 158-160 (first published in Commentary, October 1947) ‘Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture, The’, 160-170 (first published in Horizon, October 1947) ‘Question of the Pound Award, The’, 304-305 (first published in Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 5, May 1949): Other contributors to this article included: W. H. Auden; Robert Gorham Davies; Irving Howe; George Orwell; Karl Shapiro, and William Barrett. 354

‘Reply to George L. K. Morris’, 242-245 (first published in Partisan Review, 15 June 1948): This responds to: George L. K. Morris’, ‘On Critics and Greenberg: A Communication’, same issue, 685-690 ‘Review of an Exhibition of Hans Hofmann and a Reconsideration of Mondrian’s Theories’, 18-19 (first published in The Nation, 21 April 1945) ‘Review of an Exhibition of Joan Miró’, 153-155 (first published in The Nation, 7 June 1947) ‘Review of an Exhibition of John Marin’, 168-270 (first published in The Nation, 25 December 1948) ‘Review of an Exhibition of Mordecai Ardon-Bronstein and a Discussion of the Reaction in America to Abstract Art’, 216-218 (first published in The Nation, 6 March 1948) ‘Review of an Exhibition of School of Paris Painters’, 87-90 (first published in The Nation, 19 June 1946) ‘Review of an Exhibition of Willem de Kooning’, 228-230 (first published in The Nation, 24 April 1948) ‘Review of Exhibitions of Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Josef Albers’, 285-286 (first published in The Nation, 19 February 1949) ‘Review of Exhibitions of Alberto Giacometti and Kurt Schwitters’, 205-209 (first published in The Nation, 7 February 1948) ‘Review of Exhibitions of David Smith, David Hare, and Mirko’, 140-143 (first published in The Nation, 19 April 1947) ‘Review of Exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb’, 187-189 (first published in The Nation, 6 December 1947) ‘Review of Exhibitions of Max Beckmann and Robert de Niro’, 80-81 (first published in The Nation, 18 May 1946) ‘Review of Exhibitions of Mondrian, Kandinsky and Pollock; of the Annual Exhibition of the American Abstract Artists; and of the Exhibition European Artists in America’, 14-18 (first published in The Nation, 7 April 1945) ‘Review of Exhibitions of Paul Gauguin and Arshille Gorky’, 76-80 (first published in The Nation, 4 May 1946) ‘Review of Exhibitions of Theo Van Doesburg and Robert Motherwell’, 150-152 (first published in The Nation, 31 May 1947) ‘Review of the Exhibition Collage’, 259-263 (first published in The Nation, 27 November 1948) ‘Review of the Water-Color, Drawing, and Sculpture Sections of the Whitney Annual’, 57-59 (first published in The Nation, 23 February 1946) ‘Role of Nature in Modern Painting, The’, 271-279 (first published in The Nation, 8 January 1949) ‘Situation at the Moment, The’, 192-196 (first published in Partisan Review, January 1948) ‘State of American Writing 1948: A Symposium, The’, 254-258 (first published in Partisan Review, August 1948). Other contributors to this article included: John Berryman; R. P. Blackmur; Robert Gorham Davis; Leslie A. Fiedler; John Crowe Ransom; Wallace Stevens; Lionel Trilling, and H. L. Mencken.

355

‘Valéry, The Littérateur in Essence: Review of Reflections of the World Today by Paul Valéry’, 252-254 (first published in The New York Times Book Review, 23 December 1951)

In: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals: 1950-1956, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1993: ‘“American-Type” Painting’, 217-235 (first published in Partisan Review, Spring 1955) ‘Autobiographical Statement’, 194-196 (first published in Twentieth-Century Authors [first supplement], New York, 1955) ‘David Smith’, 275-279 (first published in Art in America, Winter 1956-1957) ‘European View of American Art, The’, 59-62 (first published in The Nation, 25 November 1950) ‘Jewishness of Franz Kafka: Some Sources of His Particular Vision, The’, 202-209 (first published in Commentary, June 1955) ‘Letters Concerning J. Alvarez del Vayo’s Column in The Nation’, 78-82 (letters dated February 21, 1951, and February 7, 1951: the latter being published in The New Leader, 19 March 1951) ‘Master Léger’, 164-173 (first published in Partisan Review, January-February, 1954) ‘Plight of Our Culture, The’, 122-152 (first published in Commentary, June and July 1953) ‘Religion and the Intellectuals: A Symposium’, 39-42 (first published in Partisan Review, Vol. XVII, No. 5, May-June 1950) ‘Review of The Social History of Art by Arnold Hauser’, 94-98 (first published in The New York Times Book Review, 23 December 1951) ‘Sculpture in Our Time’, 55-61 (frist published in Arts Magazine, June 1958) ‘Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism: Some Reflections on “Positive Jewishness”’, 45-48 (first published in Commentary, November 1950) ‘T. S. Eliot: The Criticism, The Poetry’, 66-71 (first published in The Nation, 9 December 1950)

In: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance: 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1993: ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, 121-134 (first published in Art International, 25 October 1962, slight revision of a lecture given on October 29, 1961 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for the opening of the exhibition The American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists Show) ‘America Takes the Lead, 1945-1965’, 212-217 (First published in Art in America, August-September 1965) ‘Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties’, 293-303 (‘Power Lecture’ delivered at the University of Sydney, 17 May 1968, first published by the Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1969) ‘How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name’, 135-144 (first published in Encounter, December 1962) ‘Interview Conducted by Edward Lucie-Smith’, 277-282 (first published in Studio International, January 1968)

356

‘Interview Conducted by Lily Leino’, 303-314 (broadcast for United States Information Service, April 1969) ‘Jackson Pollock Market Soars, The’, 107-114 (first published in The New York Times Magazine, 16 April 1961) ‘Louis and Noland’, 94-100 (first published in Art International, May 1960) ‘Modernist Painting’, 85-9 (broadcast for the Forum Lectures, Washington, D.C., Voice of America, 1960) ‘New York Painting Only Yesterday’, 19-26 (first published in Art News, Summer 1957) ‘Picasso at Seventy-Five’, 26-35 (first published in Arts Magazine, October 1957) ‘Picasso Since 1945’, 234-239 (first published in Artforum, October 1966) ‘Where is the Avant-Garde?’, 259-265 (first published in Vogue, June 1967)

Other works by Greenberg: ‘An Interview With Ignazio Silone’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 5, Fall 1939, 22-30 ‘Bennington College Seminars: Night Seven, April 20, 1971, The’, in: Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste, ed. Janice Van Horne, Oxford University Press, 1999, 156-169 ‘Can Taste be Objective’, in: Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste, ed. Janice Van Horne, Oxford University Press, 1999, 23-30 ‘Detached Observations’, http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/detached.html (first published in Arts Magazine, December 1976) ‘Counter Avant-Garde’, Art International, 15 May 1971, 16-19 Harold Letters 1928-1943: The Making of An American Intellectual, The, ed. Janice Van Horne, Washington, D.C., 2000 ‘To Cope With Decadence’, in: Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, eds. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983, 161-168 with Dwight Macdonald, ’10 Propositions on the War’, Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 4, July-August 1941, 271-278 ———, ‘Reply by Greenberg and Macdonald’ (reply to Philip Rahv, ’10 Propositions and 8 Errors’, same issue), Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 6, November-December 1941, 506-508

*******

Articles in Partisan Review: Abel, Lionel, ‘Ignazio Silone’, Partisan Review, Vol. IV, No. 1, December 1937, 33-39 Arendt, Hannah, ‘The Concentration Camps’, Partisan Review, Vol. XV, No. 7, 1948, 743-763 Barrett, William, ‘World War III: The Ideological Conflict’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVII, No. 7, 1950, 651-660 Breton, André, and Diego Rivera, ‘Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 1, Fall, 1938, 49-53 Editorial, ‘This Quarter’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No.1, Fall 1938, 7-9 Editorial, ‘This Quarter’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter 1939, 3-12 357

Eliot, T. S., ‘Notes Towards a Definition of Culture’, Partisan Review, Vol. XI, No. 2, Spring 1944, 145-157 (first published in The New English Weekly, Jan-Feb 1943) Farrell, James T., ‘Theatre Chronicle’, Partisan Review, Vol. III, No. 5, June 1936, 25-27 Fiedler, Leslie A., ‘The State of American Writing, 1948’, Partisan Review, Vol. XV, No. 8, 1948, (Fiedler’s contribution 870-875) Hook, Sidney, ‘Reflections on the Jewish Question’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 5, May 1949, 463-482 ———, ‘The Anatomy of the Popular Front’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No.3, Spring 1939, 29-45 ———, ‘The Future of Socialism’, Partisan Review, Vol. XIV, No. 1, 1947, 23-36 Howe, Irving, ‘This Age of Conformity’, Partisan Review, Vol. XXI, No. 1, 1950, 7-33 Klonsky, Milton, ‘Along the Midway of Mass Culture’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 4, April 1949, 348-365 Laughlin, James, ‘A Letter to Hitler’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 4, Summer 1939, 68 Macdonald, Dwight, and Clement Greenberg, ‘10 Propositions on the War’, Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 4, July-August 1941, 271-278 ——— , ‘Reply by Greenberg and Macdonald’ (reply to Philip Rahv, ’10 Propositions and 8 Errors’, same issue), Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 6, November-December 1941, 506-508 Macdonald, Dwight, ‘Soviet Society and Its Cinema’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter 1939, 80-95 ———, ‘This Quarter: War and the Intellectuals: Act Two’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 3, Spring, 1939, 3-20 Morris, George L.K., ‘Art Chronicle: The Architectural Evolution of Brancusi’, Partisan Review, Vol. V, No. 3, August-September 1938, 33-34 ———, ‘On Critics and Greenberg: A Communication’, Partisan Review 15, June 1948, 681-685 Nabokov, Nicolas, ‘Russian Music After the Purge’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 8, August 1949, 842-851 Niall, Sean, ‘Paris Letter’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No.1, Fall 1938 (letter dated 7 October, 1938), 101-105 ———, ‘Paris Letter’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter 1939 (letter dated Christmas Day, 1938), 103-107 Orwell, George, ‘London Letter’, Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 2, March-April 1941, 108-113 (letter dated January 3, 1941), ———, ‘London Letter’, Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 6, November-December 1941, 491-498 (letter dated August 17, 1941) ———, ‘The Future of Socialism: IV: Toward European Unity’, Partisan Review, Vol. XIV, No. 4, 1947, 346-351 Philips, William, ‘Thomas Mann: Humanism in Exile’, Partisan Review, Vol. IV, No.6, May 1938, 3-10 ‘Question of the Pound Award, The’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 5, May 1949, 512-522: For contributors see under Greenberg above. Rahv, Philip, ‘10 Propositions and 8 Errors’, Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 6, November-December 1941, 499-506 358

———, ‘A Season in Heaven’, Partisan Review, Vol. III, No. 5, June 1936, 11-13 ———, ‘This Quarter: Twilight of the Thirties’, Partisan Review, Vol VI, No. 4, Summer 1939, 3-15 ———, ‘Trials of the Mind’, Partisan Review, Vol. IV, No. 5, April 1938, 3-11 Rosenberg, Harold, ‘Myth and History’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter 1939, 19-39 Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M., ‘The Future of Socialism: III: The Perspective Now’, Partisan Review, Vol. XIV, No. 3, 1947, 229-242 Schwartz, Delmore, ‘The Poet as Poet’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 3, Spring 1939, 52-59 Silone, Ignazio, ‘The School for Dictators’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 1, Fall 1938, 20-42 (excerpt taken from: Ignazio Silone, The School for Dictators, New York and London, 1938, Ch. IX, 131-165) ———, ‘Two Syllables’, trans. Samuel Putnam, Partisan Review, Vol. III, No. 6, October 1936, 3-5 Spender, Stephen, ‘September Journal’, Partisan Review, Vol. VII, No.2, 1940, 90-106 ‘Statement of the L.C.S.F.’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 4, Summer 1939, 125-127 ‘This Month’, Partisan Review, Vol. III, No. 6, October 1936, 2 Trilling, Lionel, ‘Hemingway and His Critics’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI., No. 2, Winter 1939, 52-60 Trotsky, Leon, ‘Art and Politics: A Letter to the Editors of Partisan Review’, Partisan Review, Vol. V, No. 3, August-September 1938, 3-10 (letter dated June 18, 1938) ———, ‘Leon Trotsky to André Breton’, Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter 1939, 126-127 (letter dated December 22, 1938)

Articles in Commentary: Abrams, Charles, ‘…Only the Very Best Christian Clientele’, Commentary, Vol. 19, January 1955, 10-17 Borkenau, Franz, ‘Will Technology Destroy Civilization? Why the Prophets of Doom Are Wrong’, Commentary, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1951, 20-26 Cohen, Eliot, ‘An Act of Affirmation: Editorial Statement’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1945, 1-3 ‘Crisis of the Individual: A Series, The’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1945, 1-2 (editorial introduction to this series) Lewis, Michael J., ‘Art, Politics & Clement Greenberg’, Commentary, June 1998, 6 June 2000, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/9806/lewis.html Meyer, Peter, ‘Stalin Follows in Hitler’s Footsteps’, Commentary, Vol. 15, No. 1, January 1953, 1-5 Muhlen, Norbert, ‘The New Nazis of Germany: The Totalitarians of the Eastern Zone, Commentary, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1951, 1-10 Niebuhr, Reinhold, ‘Will Civilization Destroy Technics?’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1945, 2-3 Pick, Robert, ‘A Refugee Looks at Anti-Semitism Here’, Commentary, Vol. 6, No. 3, September 1948, 207-213 Raab, Earl, ‘Is there a New Anti-Semitism?’, Commentary, Vol. 57, No.5, May 1974, 53-55 359

Riesman, David, ‘The “Militant” Fight Against Anti-Semitism: Education and Democratic Discussion is the Better Way’, Commentary, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1951, 11-19 Rorty, James, ‘American Fuehrer in Dress Rehearsal’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1945, 13-20

Other articles, chapters, excerpts, correspondence, etc.: Albright, Daniel, ‘Notes: The Tower’, in: W.B. Yeats: The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright, London, 1990, 628-692 Alloway, Lawrence, ‘The Arts and the Mass Media’, in: Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Stephen Henry Madoff, University of California Press, 1997, 7-9 (first published in Architectural Design and Construction, February 1958) Bateson, Gregory, ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, in: Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert E. Innis, Indiana University Press, 1985, 131-144 (essay read by Jay Haley at the A.P.A. Regional Research Conference in Mexico City, March 11, 1954) Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London 1992 (1973), 210-244 (first published in Great Britain 1970, first published in Germany 1955) Bois, Yves-Alain, ‘Les Amendments de Greenberg’, Les cahiers du Musee national d’art moderne, Automne/hiver 1993, 52-60 Broch, Hermann, ‘Notes on the Problem of Kitsch’ (1950), in: Kitsch: An anthology of bad taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles, London, 1969, 49-67 (text of a lecture given by Broch to the students of the faculty of German at Yale University, Winter, 1950) Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., ‘Cold War Constructivism’, in: Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut, The MIT Press, 1986, 85-112 Burstow, Robert, ‘The Limits of Modernist Art as a “Weapon of the Cold War”: reassessing the unknown patron of the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner’, The Oxford Art Journal, 20:1, 1997, 68-80 Clark, T. J., ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, Critical Inquiry 9, September, 1982, 139-156 (also published as “More on the Differences Between Comrade Greenberg and Ourselves’, in: Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, eds. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983, 169-193) ———, ‘In Defense of Abstract Expressionism’, October 69, Summer 1994, 23-48 ‘Clement Greenberg 1904-1994: Demagoguery’, Art Monthly, July-August, 1994, 12-13 (editorial) Cockcroft, Eva, ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’, Artforum, Vol. 12, No. 10, June 1974, 39-41 Collins, Bradford, ‘Le pessimisme politique et “La haine de soi” juive: Les origines de l’esthetique puriste de Greenberg’, Les cahiers du Musee national d’art moderne, Automne/hiver 1993, 61-84 Craven, David, ‘Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to “American” Art’, Oxford Art Journal, 14:1, 1991, 44-66 360

Crowther, Paul, ‘Greenberg’s Kant and the Problem of Modernist Painting’, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 25, No. 4, Autumn 1985, 317-325 Crowther, Paul, ‘Kant and Greenberg’s Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 42, Summer 1984, 442-445 Curtin, Deane W., ‘Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40, Vol. XL, No. 3, Spring 1982, 315-326 D’Arschot, Philippe, ‘Transfiguration de la mimesis: Portrait d’une Exposition’, Art International, Vol. VIII, No. 8, October 20, 1964, 25-28 De Kooning, Willem, ‘Willem de Kooning, “The Renaissance and Order”, 1950’, in: Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp, University of California Press, 1975, 555-556 (excerpt from a lecture given in 1950 at Studio 35, New York; first published in trans/formation [New York], Vol. I, No. 2, 1951, 86-87) De Duve, Thierry, ‘Silences in the Doctrine’, in: Thierry de Duve, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines: including a previously unpublished debate with Clement Greenberg, trans. Brian Holmes, Paris, 1996, 39-86 ———, ‘The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas’, in: Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, 244-310 Dondero, George, ‘Congressman George A. Dondero, “Modern Art Shackled to Communism”’ (from a speech given in the United States House of Representatives, 16 August 1949. Published in Congressional Record, First Session, 81st Congress, Tuesday, 16 August 1949), in: Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp, University of California Press, 1975, 496-497 Dorfles, Gillo, ‘Kitsch’, in: Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles, London, 1969, 14-35 Eliot, T. S., ‘Imperfect Critics’, in: T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, London, 1932 (1920), 17-46 ———, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in: T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, London, 1932 (1920), 47-59 Evans, Trish, and Charles Harrison, ‘A Conversation With Clement Greenberg’, Art Monthly, No. 73, February 1974, 3-9 Frascina, Francis, ‘Frascina on Greenberg: Francis Frascina discusses Clement Greenberg and the authoritarian personality’, Art Monthly, July-August, 1994, 18-19 ———, ‘Institutions, Culture, and America’s “Cold War Years”, the Making of Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting”’, Oxford Art Journal, 26.1, 2003, 69-97 Fried, Michael, ‘How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark’, Critical Inquiry 9, September 1982, 217-234 Gaiger, Jason, ‘Constraints and Conventions: Kant and Greenberg on Aesthetic Judgement’, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 39, No. 4, October 1999, 376-391 Glaser, Bruce, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd: Interview by Bruce Glaser Edited by Lucy Lippard’, in: Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York, 1968, 148-164 (discussion broadcast on WBAI-FM, New York, February, 1964 as ‘New Nihilism or New Art?’) Greenberg, Martin, two letters dated 28 March and 18 April, 2002

361

Guilbaut, Serge, ‘Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick’, in: Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut, The MIT Press, 1986, 30-84 ———, ‘The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America: Greenberg, Pollock or from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the “Vital Center”’, trans. Thomas Repensek, October 15, Winter 1980, 61-78 ———, ‘The Relevance of Modernism’, in: Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, eds. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983, IX-XV Harris, Mary Emma, ‘The Black Mountain College: European Modernism, the Experimental Spirit and the American Avant-Garde’, in: American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1919-1933, eds. Christos Joachamides and Norman Rosenthal, exh. cat., The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1993, 93-99 Hitler, Adolph, ‘Speech inaugurating the “Great Exhibition of German Art 1937”, Munich’, (excerpts) trans.Ilse Falk, in: Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, eds. Herschel B. Chipp et. al., University of California Press, 1968, 474-483 Holmes, John Clellon, ‘The Philosophy of the Beat Generation’, in: The Beats: An Anthology of ‘Beat’ Writing, ed. Park Honan, London, 1987, 145-158 (first published in Esquire, 1958) Holst, Adolf, ‘Der Drachentöter’ (‘The Dragonslayer’), trans. Jack Zipes, www.gwu.edu/~folktale/GERM232/sleepingb/Dragonslayer.html Honan, Park, ‘Introduction’, in: The Beats: An Anthology of ‘Beat’ Writing, ed. Park Honan, London, 1987, ix-xxvi Horkheimer, Max, and Samuel Flowerman, ‘Foreword to Studies in Prejudice’, in: The Authoritarian Personality: by T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, David J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford, New York, 1950, v-viii Huizinga, J., ‘Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon’, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, translator unlisted, Boston, 1950 (1944 German, 1949 English) Jachec, Nancy, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’, Oxford Art Journal, 21.2, 1998, 121-132 Kant, Immanuel, ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’, in: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment: Including the First Introduction, trans. Werner S. Pulhar, Indianapolis, 1987 (1790), 43-232 Kaplan, Louis, ‘Reframing the Self-Criticism: Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” in Light of Jewish Identity’, in: Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine M. Soussloff, University of California Press, 1999, 180-199 Kästner, Erich, ‘The Apparently Dead Princess’, trans Prof. Mary Beth Stein, www.gwu.edu/~folktale/GERM232/sleepingb/Apparently_Dead _Princess.html Kemenov, Vladimir, ‘Vladimir Kemenov, “Aspects of Two Cultures,” 1947’, in: Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp, University of California Press, 1975, 490-496 (excerpts from the article in VOKS Bulletin (Moscow), U.S.S.R. Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, 1947, 20-36)

362

Kimmelman, Michael, ‘Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War’, in: The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, 39-55 Kostelanetz, ‘From Claes Oldenberg’, in: Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Stephen Henry Madoff, University of California Press, 1997, 235-240 (excerpt from: ‘Claes Oldenberg’, The Theatre of Mixed Means, New York, 1968) Kozloff, Max, ‘The Critical Reception of Abstract Expressionism’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 2, December 1965, 27-33 Kramer, Hilton, ‘Clement Greenberg and the Cold War’, in: Hilton Kramer, The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War, Chicago, 1999, 195-206 (first published in The New Criterion, Vol. 11, No. 7, March 1993) Larson, Kay, ‘The Dictatorship of Clement Greenberg’, Artforum 25, Summer 1987, 75-79 Leino, Lily, ‘Interview Conducted by Lily Leino’, in: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance: 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, 303-314 (broadcast for United States Information Service, April 1969) Levi, Neil, ‘ “Judge for Yourselves!” – The Degenerate Art Exhibition as Political Spectacle’, October 85, Summer 1998, 4—64 McCormick, Edward Allen, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in: Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, ix-xxx McLellan, David, ‘Introduction’, in: Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford University Press, 1977, 1-2 Marx, Karl, Capital, Volume One (first published 1867), trans. David McLellan, in: Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford University Press, 1977, 415-487 ———, Grundrisse (first published 1941) trans. David McLellan, in: Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford University Press, 1977, 345-387 ———, ‘On The Jewish Question’, in: Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford University Press, 2000 (1977), 46-64 ———, The Communist Manifesto (first published February 1848), trans. Samuel Moore (1888), in: Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford University Press, 1977, 219-247 Melville, Stephen, ‘Kant After Greenberg’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56:1, Winter 1998, 67-74 Morris, Jonathan, and Robert Smith, eds., ‘Language and Social Class’, in: Cambridge School Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice, Cambridge University Press, 1992, 180-181 Motherwell, Robert, ‘Symposium: “What Abstract Art Means to Me”, 1951’ (excerpts), in: Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, University of California Press, 1968 (from a symposium held on 5 February 1951 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America’; first published in: What Abstract Art Means to Me, Bulletin of The Museum of Modern Art [New York], XVIII, 3 [Spring 1951] ), 562-564

363

O’Brian, John, ‘Chronology to 1949’, in: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments: 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, 253-256 ———, ‘Chronology, 1950-1969’, in: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 3, Affirmations and Refusals: 1950-1956, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, 287-292 ———, ‘Introduction’, in: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments: 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, xv-xxv ———, ‘Introduction’, in: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 3, Affirmations and Refusals: 1950-1956, ed. John O’Brian, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, xv-xxxiii O’Hara, Frank, ‘Larry Rivers: “Why I Paint As I Do”’, in: Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Stephen Henry Madoff, University of California Press, 1997, 1-2 Oldenburg, Claes, ‘I am for an art…’, in: Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1995, 96-97 (previously published in Claes Oldenburg, Store Days: Documents from the Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theater (1962), New York, 1967, 39-42) ———, ‘Ray Gun’ (1959), in: Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1995, 42 Olin, Margaret, ‘C[lement] Hardesh [Greenberg] & Co.:Formal Criticism and Jewish Identity’, in: Margaret Olin, The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art, University of Nebraska Press, 2001, 159-177 (first published in: Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt, Rutgers University Press, 1996, 39-59). An abbreviated version of this text appeared in, New Art Examiner, Vol. 24, June 1997, 18-15) ———, ‘Graven Images on Video? The Second Commandment and Contemporary Jewish Identity’, in: Margaret Olin, The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art, University of Nebraska Press, 2001, 179-203 Ostrow, Saul, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Fifty Years Later’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 4, December 1989, 56-57 Pincus-Witten, Robert, ‘Six Propositions on Jewish Art’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 50, No. 4, December 1975, 66-69 Platt, Susan Noyes, ‘Clement Greenberg in the 1930s: A New Perspective on His Criticism’, Art Criticism, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1989, 47-64 Rose, Barbara, ‘ABC Art’, in: Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York, 1968, 274-297 (first published in Art in America, October-November, 1965) Rosenberg, ‘Pop Culture: Kitsch Criticism’, in: Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, New York, 1971 (1959), 259-268 ———, ‘The American Action Painters’, in: Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, New York, 1971 (1959), 23-39 (first published in Art News, Vol. 51, No. 8, December 1952, 48-50) ———, ‘The Art World: Marilyn Mondrian’, in: Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Stephen Henry Madoff, University of California Press, 1997, 180-185 (first published in The New Yorker, 8 November 1969) 364

Ross, Clifford, ‘Chronology’, in Creators and Critics: An Anthology, ed. Clifford Ross, New York, 297 Schimmel, Paul, ‘The Faked Gesture: Pop Art and the New York School’, in: Hand- Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955-62, ed. Russell Ferguson, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1993, 19-55 Severy, Merle, ‘The Byzantine Empire: Rome of the East’, National Geographic, Vol. 164, No, 6, December 1983, 709-766 Stadler, Ingrid, ‘The Idea of Art and Its Criticism: A Rational Reconstruction of a Kantian Doctrine’, in: Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, eds. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, The University of Chicago Press, 1982, 195-218 Storr, Robert, ‘No Joy in Mudville: Greenberg’s Modernism Then and Now’, in: Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings in High and Low, eds. Kirk Varnedoe et al, New York, 1991, 161-190 Tillim, Sidney, ‘Criticism and Culture or Greenberg’s Doubt’, Art in America, May 1987, 122-127 & 201 ———, ‘Month in Review: New York Exhibitions’, in: Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 25-28 (excerpt, first published in Arts Magazine, February 1962, 34-37) Toner, Paul, and Robert Smithson, ‘Interview with Robert Smithson (1970)’, in: Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, University of California Press, 1996, 234-241 Van Horne, Janice, ‘Preface’, in: Clement Greenberg, The Harold Letters 1928-1943: The Making of An American Intellectual, ed. Janice Van Horne, Washington, D.C., 2000, vii-ix Wagner, Linda and Lewis Macadams Jr., ‘Robert White Creeley’ (composite interview 1963-1968), Beat Writers at Work: The Paris Review, ed. George Plimpton, New York, 1999, 69-96 Walzer, John F., ‘A Period of Ambivalence: Eighteenth Century American Childhood’, in: The History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd de Mause, London 1976 (1974), 351-382 Yeats, W.B., ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in: W.B.Yeats: The Poems, London, 1990 (written 1927), ed. Daniel Albright, 239-240

Books, reference sites, catalogues, and separately published short texts: 1995 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopaedia, Version 7.0.2 for Macintosh, The Albright, Daniel, ed., W.B.Yeats: The Poems, London, 1990 Ashton, Dore, The Life and Times of the New York School, Bath, Somerset, 1972 Babbitt, Irving, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts, London, Boston and New York, 1910 Beaumont, Cyril W., The Complete Book of Ballets: A Guide to the Principal Ballets of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries , London, 1937 Bocola, Sandro, The Art of Modernism: Art, Culture, and Society from Goya to the Present Day, Munich, London, New York, 1999 Busignani, Alberto, Pollock, London, 1971 Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes, The, http://www.bartleby.com/220/1011.html Caveney, Graham, The ‘Priest’ They Called Him: The Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs, London, 1999 (1997) 365

Cheetham, Mark A., Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline, Cambridge University Press, 2001 Chipp, Herschel B., ed., Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, University of California Press, 1975 Collier, Peter, and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic, New York, 1987 Cooney, Terry A., The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1986 De Duve, Thierry, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, trans. Brian Holmes, Paris, 1996 Eliot, T. S., After Strange Gods, London, 1934 ———, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, London, 1948 ———, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, London, 1939 ———, The Idea of a Christian Society, London, 1939 ———, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, London, 1932 (1920) Fineberg, Jonathan, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, London, 1995 Gilbert, James, Writers and Partisans: A History of Radicalism in America, Columbia University Press, 1992 Gilman, Sandler L., Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986 Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, The University of Chicago Press, 1983 Goldberg, RoseLee, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, New York, 1988 Hayward Gallery, Claes Oldenberg: An Anthology, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1995 Helm, MacKinley, John Marin, Boston, 1948 Herbert, James D., The Political Origins of Abstract-Expressionist Art Criticism: The Early Theoretical and Critical Writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, Stanford Honors Essay in Humanities, Stanford, California, 1985 Hockney, David, David Hockney by David Hockney, London, 1976 Irene Sargent Papers, The, archives.syr.edu/arch/faculty (/isarg.htm; /sargscope.htm, and /sargcon.htm) Irving Babbitt Project, The, http://www.nhinet.org/babbitt2.htm Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment: Including the First Introduction, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, 1987 (1790) Kuspit, Donald, Clement Greenberg: Art Critic, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1979 ———, The Critic is Artist: The Intentionality of Art, UMI Research Press, 1984 Lasch, Christopher, The Agony of the American Left, New York, 1969 (1966) Leddy, Annette, Inventory of the Clement Greenberg Papers: 1928-1994, The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, http://www.getty.edu./gri/htmlfindingaids/greenberg_m.l.html Leja, Michael, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s, Yale University Press, 1993 Leonard, Thomas M., Day by Day: The Forties, New York, 1977

366

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984 (1766) Lewis, Gilbert N., The Anatomy of Science, Yale University Press, 1926 Lucie-Smith, Edward, Movements in Art Since 1945, London, 1969 McDarrah, Fred W., and Gloria S. McDarrah, Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village, New York, 1996 Madoff, Stephen Henry, ed., Pop Art: A Critical History, University of California Press, 1997 Maxwell, D.E.S., The Poetry of T.S. Eliot, London, 1952 McLellan, David, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford University Press, 1977 O’Brian, John, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments: 1939-1944, The University of Chicago Press, 1986 ———, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose: 1945-1949, The University of Chicago Press, 1986 ———, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals: 1950-1956, The University of Chicago Press, 1993 ———, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4: Modernism With a Vengeance: 1957-1969, The University of Chicago Press, 1993 Oldenberg, Claes, Store Days: Documents from the Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theater (1962), New York, 1967 Orwell, George, The Road to Wigan Pier, Harmondsworth, England, 1962 (1937) Plimpton, George, ed., Beat Writers at Work: The Paris Review, New York, 1999 Potock, Chaim, Wanderings: Chaim Potock’s History of the Jews, New York, 1978 Richardson, John, A Life of Picasso: Volume I: 1881-1906, New York, 1991 ———, A Life of Picasso: Volume II: 1907-1917, London, 1996 Rosenbaum, Ron, Explaining Hitler: The search for the origins of his evil, New York, 1998 Rosenberg, Harold, The De-definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks, London, 1972 ———, The Tradition of the New, New York, 1971 (1959) Ross, Clifford, ed., Creators and Critics: An Anthology, New York, 1990 Rubenfeld, Florence, Clement Greenberg: A Life, New York, 1997 Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, Boston, 1949 Silone, Ignazio, The School for Dictators, New York and London, 1938 Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West: Volume 1, Form and Actuality, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, London, 1980 (1926) Tomkins, Calvin Duchamp: A Biography, London, 1997 Vishny, Michele, Mordecai Ardon, New York, 1974 Venturi, Lionello, History of Art Criticism, trans. Charles Marriot, New York, 1964 (1936) Volta, Ornella, Erik Satie, trans. Simone Pleasance, Paris, 1997 Walker, John A., Art in the Age of the Mass Media, London, 1983 Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion, The, http://www.spumco.com/magazine/eowbcc/eowbcc-c.html: Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, Volume 1, Springfield, Mass., 1965 367

Wistrich, Robert S. Weekend in Munich: Art, Propaganda and Terror in the Third Reich, London, 1996 Zalampas, Michael, Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in American Magazines, 1923-1939, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989

SELECTED UNCITED MATERIAL

By Greenberg:

Articles passim in the four volumes of The Collected Essays and Criticism, and in Art and Culture and Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste.

Other works by Greenberg: Greenberg, Clement, ‘Autonomies of Art’, Moral Philosophy and Art Symposium, Mountain Lake, Virginia, October, 1980, http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/autonomies.html ———, Henri Matisse (1869- ), New York, 1953, virtual facsimile, http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/mb1.html ———, ‘Greenberg/Headley/Krauss’, ‘Letters’, Art in America, March/April 1978, 5 (Greenberg’s reply, after four years, to Rosalind Krauss’s criticism of his stripping the paint from David Smith’s sculptures. On the same page is a rejoinder from Krauss.) ———, ‘Greenberg/Headley/Krauss’, ‘Letters’, Art in America, May-June 1978, 5 (Greenberg’s response to Krauss’s rejoinder. On the same page are letters of support for Greenberg from William Rubin and Stanley E. Marcus.)

*******

Articles in Partisan Review: Abel. Lionel, ‘“Beyond the Fringe” (review of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs)’, Partisan Review, Vol. XXX, No. 1, Spring 1953, 108-112 Arnold, G. L., ‘The Aftermath of War and the End of the Neo-Liberal Utopia’, Partisan Review, Vol. XXII, No. 1, Winter 1955, 83-100 Barzun, Jacques, ‘Artist Against Society: Some Articles of War’, Partisan Review, Vol. XIX, No. 1, 1952, 60-77 Blackmur, R. P., Clement Greenberg, William Phillips, and I. A. Richards, ‘Mr. Eliot and Notions of Culture: a Discussion’, Partisan Review, Vol. XI, No. 3, Summer 1944, 302-312. Greenberg’s contribution to this discussion is noted above. Fiedler, Leslie A., ‘Koestler and Israel’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVII, No. 1, 1950, 92-96 Frankenthaler, Helen, ‘A Critic in the Making’, Partisan Review, Fall 2000, 652-654 Hook, Sydney, ‘On the Battlefields of Philosophy’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 3, March 1949, 251-268 Kees, Weldon, ‘Miro and Modern Art’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 3, March 1949, 324-326 (Review of Joan Miro, by Clement Greenberg) ———, ‘Socialism and Liberation’, Partisan Review, Fall, 1957, Vol. XXIV, No. 4, 497-518 368

Macdonald, Dwight, ‘Comment: Notes on a Strange War’, Partisan Review, Vol. VII, No.3, 1940, 170-180 ———, ‘Masscult and Midcult: II’, Partisan Review, Vol. XXVII, No. 4, Fall 1960, 590-631 ———, ‘Masscult and Midcult’, Partisan Review, Vol. XXVII, No. 2, Spring 1960, 203- 233 Malraux, André, ‘Replies to 13 Questions’, Partisan Review, Vol. XXII, No. 2, Spring 1955, 157-170 Mattick, Paul, ‘How New is the ‘New Order’ of Fascism?’, Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 4, July-August 1941, 289-310 Porter, Fairfield, ‘Letters’, Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 1, January-February, 1941, 77 (An early challenge to Greenberg’s art criticism.) Rahv, Philip, ‘What is Living and What is Dead’, Partisan Review, Vol. VII, No. 3, 1940, 175-180 Schwartz, Delmore, ‘The Literary Dictatorship of T. S. Eliot’, Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 2, February 1949, 119-137 Tyler, Parker, ‘“View” Objects’, ‘Letters’, Partisan Review, Vol. VII, No. 1, January- February 1941, 77 Wilkin, Karen, ‘A Critic and His Critics: the reception of Clement Greenberg: A Life by Florence Rubenfeld’, Partisan Review, Vol. LXV, No. 4, Fall, 1998, 627-634

Articles in Commentary: Baeck, Leo S., ‘The Task of Being an American Jew’, Commentary, March 1951, 217- 221 Bendiner, Robert, ‘Has the American Voter Swung Right? The Mid-Term Election in Perspective’, Commentary, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1951, 27-35 Broyard, Anatole, ‘Keep Cool Man’, Commentary, April 1951, 359-362 Daiches, David, ‘American Judaism: A Personal View’, Commentary, February 1951, 131-136 Farrell, James T., ‘The Dangers of Mass Culture’, ‘Letters from Readers’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 6, April 1946, 87-88 Flowerman, Samuel H., and Marie Jahoda, ‘The Study of Man: Polls on Anti-Semitism: How Much Do They Tell Us?’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 6, April 1946, 82-86 Friedman, Murray, ‘Virginia Jewry in the School Crisis’, Commentary, Vol. 27, No. 1, January 1959, 17-22 Greenberg, Martin, ‘America Through the Soviet Looking-Glass: World Peace at the Mercy of Stereotypes and Delusions’, Commentary, February 1951, 153-157 Howarth, Herbert, ‘Jewish Art and the Fear of the Image: The Escape from an Age Old Inhibition’, Commentary, Vol. 9, No. 2, February 1950, 142-150 Kaplan, Mordecai M., ‘The Truth About Reconstructionism’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1945, 50-59 Konvitz, Milton R., ‘A Letter to David Daiches: Change and Tradition in American Judaism’, Commentary, May 1951, 428-434 Lasky, Melvin J., ‘The First Glimmer of Extermination’, Commentary, Vol. 6, No. 2, August 1948, 157-160

369

Lowenthal, Leo, ‘The Crisis of the Individual: Terror’s Atomization of Man’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1-8 Muhlen, Norbert, ‘The Return of Goebbels’ Film-Makers’, Commentary, March 1951, 245-250 Poliakov, Leon, ‘European Anti-Semitism East and West: The Jewish Stake in Democracy’, Commentary, Vol. 23, No. 6, June 1957, 553-56 Rorty, James, ‘No Exodus Down Here’, ‘Letters from Readers’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 1946, 86-87 Schmidt, H. D., ‘Bigotry in Schoolchildren’, Commentary, Vol. 29, No. 3, March 1960, 253-257 Schoeps, Hans Joachim, ‘How Live by Jewish Law Today? A Proposal for Those Who Have Fallen Away’, Commentary, Vol. 15, No. 1, January 1953, 38-45 Shuster, Zachariah, ‘Must the Jews Quit Europe? An Appraisal of the Propaganda for Exodus’, Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1945, 9-16 Thorburn, David, ‘Art and the Masses: review of Popular Culture and High Culture: an Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, by Herbert J. Gans’, Commentary, Vol. 59, No. 5, May 1975, 83-86 Wakefield, Dan, ‘Greenwich Village Challenges Tammany: Ethnic Politics and the New Reformers’, Commentary, Vol. 28, No. 4, October 1959, 307-312 Westin, Alan F., ‘Winning the Fight Against McCarthy’, Commentary, Vol. 18, No. 1, July 1954, 10-15

Articles, chapters, excerpts, correspondence, etc.: Alloway, Lawrence, ‘Systemic Painting’, in: Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York, 1968, 37-60 (first published in Systemic Painting, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1966) ‘A Symposium on Pop Art’, Arts Magazine, April 1963, 36-45: moderated by Peter Selz, with contributions by Henry Geldzahler, Hilton Kramer, Dore Ashton, Leo Steinberg, and Stanley Kunitz. (Though this publication doubles up on its reprint in Madoff’s Pop Art: A Critical History, listed above, it has the benefit of contemporary illustrations.) Bannard, Walter Darby, ‘The Unconditional Aesthete’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 62, September 1987, 59-61 Battcock, Gregory, ‘Willem de Kooning’, Arts Magazine, November 1967, 34-37 Bois, Yves-Alain, ‘Whose Formalism?’, Art Bulletin, March 1996, 9-12 Brodsky, Joyce, review of Clement Greenberg: Art Critic by Donald B. Kuspit, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1, Fall 1970, 107-108 Brook, Donald, ‘Art Criticism: authority and argument’, Studio International 180, September 1970, 66-69 Caro, Anthony, (in conversation with Peter Fuller), ‘Anthony Caro’, Art Monthly, No. 23, February 1979, 6-15 Carrier, David, ‘Art Without Its Objects?’, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 1979, 53-62 ———, ‘Artwriting Revisited’, Leonardo, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1992, 197-204 ———, untitled review of Vols. 3 & 4 of Greenberg’s Collected Essays and Criticism, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 135, October 1993, 707-708 370

Carroll, Noël, ‘Avant-Garde Art and the Problem of Theory’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 29, No. 3, Fall 1995, 1-13 Cavaliere, Barbara, and Robert C. Hobbs, ‘Against a Newer Laocoon’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 51, No. 8, April 1977, 110-117 Collins, Bradford R., ‘Clement Greenberg and the Search for Abstract Expressionism’s Successor: A Study in the Manipulation of Avant-Garde Consciousness’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 61, No. 9, May 1987, 36-43 Crow, Thomas, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’, in: Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, eds. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983, 215-277 Danto, Arthur C., ‘From Aesthetics To Art Criticism and Back’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 54, No. 2, Spring 1996, 105-115 ———, ‘Us and Clem’, Artforum, March 1998, 13-14 De Duve, Thierry, ‘Peachy Cobbler’ (review of Greenberg’s Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste), Artforum, Summer 1999, 17-18 Evans, Trish, and Charles Harrison, ‘A conversation with Clement Greenberg Part II’, Art Monthly, No. 74, March 1984, 10-14 ———, ‘A conversation with Clement Greenberg Part III’, Art Monthly, No. 75, April 1984, 4-6 Feaver, William, ‘Clement Greenberg “An Unerring Demolisher of Pretension”’, Artnews, September 1994, 44 Fenton, Terry, ‘The Man Who Loved Pictures’, 1994, http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/tribute.html (originally written as a memorial tribute for the Mendel Art Gallery’s newsletter, Folio) Fisher, Philip, ‘The Future’s Past’, New Literary History 6, Spring 1975, 587-606 Frank, Elizabeth, ‘Farewell to Athene’, Salmagundi, No. 80, Fall 1988, 246-263 Fuller, Peter, ‘American painting since the last war’, Art Monthly, June 1979, 6-13 Gardner, Paul, ‘“An Age of Darkness”?’, Artnews, January, 1992, Vol. 91, 16-18 Gibson, Ann, ‘Abstract Expressionism’s Evasion of Language’, Art Journal, Fall 1988, 208-214 ‘Greenberg Effect: Comments by Younger Artists, Critics, and Curators, The’, Arts Magazine, December 1989, 58-59 Guiles, Fred Lawrence, Loner At the Ball: The Life of Andy Warhol, London, 1989 Halasz, Piri, ‘Art Criticism (and Art History) in New York: The 1940s vs. the 1980s: Part Three: Clement Greenberg’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 57, April 1983, 80-89 Hart, Paul, ‘The Essential Legacy of Clement Greenberg from the Era of Stalin and Hitler’ (review of Vols. 1 & 2 of Greenberg’s Collected Essays and Criticism), The Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1988, 76-87 Heron, Patrick, ‘A kind of cultural imperialism?’, Studio International, February 1968, 62-64 Herrera, Hayden ‘Gerald Murphy, An Amurikin in Paris’, Art in America, September- October 1974, 76-79 Higgins, Andrew, ‘Clement Greenberg and the idea of the avant-garde’, Studio International 182, October 1971, 144-147

371

Hilton, Tim, ‘Clement Greenberg’, The New Criterion: on line, http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/19/sept00/clement.htm, 7 (first published in The New Criterion, Vol. 19, No. 1, September 2000. Originally a chapter from Telling Lives, ed. Alistair Horne, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., UK, 2000) Holt, David K., ‘Postmodernism: Anomaly in Art-Critical Theory’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 29, No. 1, Spring 1995, 85-93 Hussan, Ihab, ‘The Subtracting Machine: The Work of William S. Burroughs’, in: William S. Burroughs: At the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989, eds. Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg, Southern Illinois University Press, 1991, 53-67 Kelly, Mary, ‘Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism’, Screen 22, No. 3, Autumn 1981, 41-62 Kosuth, Joseph, ‘Eye’s Limits: Seeing and Reading Ad Reinhardt’, Art and Design, January/February 1994, Vol. 9, Nos. 1-2, 46-53 Kramer, Hilton, ‘A Critic on the Side of History: Notes on Clement Greenberg’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 37, No. 1, October 1962, 60-63 ———, ‘Jackson Pollock and the New York School’, The New Criterion on Line, http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/jan99/pollock1.htm (first published in The New Criterion, Vol. 17, No.5, January 1999) Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Changing the Work of David Smith’, Art in America, Vol. 62, No. 5, September-October 1974, 30-34 Kuspit, Donald, ‘Authoritarian Aesthetics and the Elusive Alternative’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Spring 1983, 271-288 ———, ‘The Unhappy Consciousness of Modernism’, Artforum, Vol. XIX, No. 5, January 1981, 52-57 ———, ‘Critics, Primary and Secondary’, in: American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1919-1933, eds. Christos Joachamides and Norman Rosenthal, exh. cat., The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1993, 145-149 Lippard, Lucy, ‘Ad Reinhardt: One Art’, Art in America, September-October 1974, 65- 74 Lynton, Norbert, ‘London Letter’, Art International, Vol. VIII, No. 8, October 20, 1964, 57-60 Mack, Roxie Davis, ‘Modernist Art Criticism: Hegemony and Decline’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52:3, Summer 1994, 342-348 McLean, John, correspondence dated 22 January, 2001 McDonald, John, ‘Back from the edge: From defiant statements to wall hangings…such is the fate of all that colour’, The Sydney Morning Herald, July 21-22, 2001, 12-13 Mattick, Paul, Jr., ‘Aesthetics and Anti-Aesthetics in the Visual Arts’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 51, No. 2, Spring 1993, 253-259 Mitchell, W. J. T., ‘Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and the Repression of Language’, Critical Inquiry, Winter 1989, 348-371 Morgan, Robert C., ‘Formalism as a Transgressive Device’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 4, December 1989, 65-69 Morley, Simon, ‘Willem de Kooning Then and Now’, Art Monthly, March 1995, 6-9 Olitski, Jules, ‘Clement Greenberg in My Studo’, American Art, Summer/Fall 1994, 125- 129 Orton, Fred, ‘Action, Revolution and Painting’, The Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 14, No.2, 1991 372

———, and Griselda Pollock, ‘Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed’, Art History, Vol. 4, No. 3, September 1981, 305-327 Ratcliffe, Carter, ‘Art Criticism: Other Minds, Other Eyes’, Art International 18, December 1974, 53-57 Reise, Barbara M., ‘Greenberg and the Group: a retrospective view: Part 1’, Studio International, Vol. 175, No. 800, May 1968, 254-257 ———, ‘Greenberg and the Group: a retrospective view: Part 1’, Studio International, Vol. 175, No. 901, June 1968, 314-316 Robinson, Lillian S., and Lise Vogel, ‘Modernism and History’, New Literary History, Vol. III, No. I, Autumn 1971, 177-199 Robson, Deidre, ‘The Avant-Garde and the On-Guard: Some Influences on the Potential Market for the First Generation Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and Early 1950s’, Art Journal, Fall 1988, 215-221 Rosenberg, Harold, ‘After Next, What?’, Art in America, Vol. 52, No. 2, 1964, 65-73 Schwabsky, Barry, ‘At The End of the Fifties: Four Abstract Painters and the Search for Structure’, Arts Magazine, Vol. 61, No. 10, June/Summer 1987, 22-24 ———, ‘Irreplaceable Hue’, Artforum International, September 1994, 91-97, 127 Solomon, Alan R., ‘Jim Dine and the Psychology of the New Art’, Art International, Vol. VIII, No. 8, October 20, 1964, 52-56 Staller, Natasha, ‘Jack Bush and Clement Greenberg: The Empire and the Limits of Theory’, in: The Art of Interpreting, ed. Susan Scott, Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania University, Vol. IX, 1995, 217-242 Stubbs, Ann, ‘Interview with Clement Greenberg’, Flash Art, No. 96-97, March/April, 1980, unpaginated Swenson, G.R., ‘What is Pop Art? Part 1’, in: Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Steven Henry Madoff, University of California Press, 1997, 103-111 Wilkin, Karen, correspondence dated 31 March 2000 ———, ‘The Real Greenberg’, The New Criterion, Vol. 16, No. 10, June 1998, 74-79

Books, reference sites, catalogues, and separately published short texts: Altschuler, Bruce, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century, New York, 1994 Amaya, Mario, Pop as Art: A Survey of the New Super-Realism, London, 1965 Burroughs, William, Naked Lunch: With an introduction by J. G. Ballard, London, 1993 (1959) Carrier, David, Artwriting, University of Massachusetts Press, 1987 Caveney, Graham, The ‘Priest’, They Called Him: The Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs, London, 1997 Collings, Matthew, It Hurts: New York Art from Warhol to now, London, 1998 Cooper, Douglas, The Cubist Epoch, London, 1971 Danto, Arthur C., After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton University Press, 1997 Eagleton, Terry, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Oxford, 1996 Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England, (trans. not listed), London, 1987 (1845) Fer, Briony, On Abstract Art, Yale University Press, 1997 373

Geldzaler, Henry, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970, London, 1969 Hill, Anthony, ed., duchamp:passim: a marcel duchamp anthology, G + B Arts International Limited, 1994 Hughes, Robert, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, London, 1997 ———, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change, British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980 Hunter, Sam, American Art of the 20th Century, London, 1973 Krauss, Rosalind E., The Optical Unconscious, The MIT Press, 1998 ———, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, The MIT Press, 1986 Lippard, Lucy R., Pop Art: with contributions by Lawrence Alloway, Nancy Marmer and Nicolas Calas, London, 1967 Mahsun, Carol Anne, ed., Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue, UMI Research Press, London, 1989 Massey, Anne, The Independent Group: Modernism and mass culture in Britain, 1945- 59, Manchester University Press, 1995 Mitchell, W. J. T., The last dinosaur book: the life and times of a cultural icon, Chicago, 1998 Müller, Grégoire, the new avant-garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies, London, 1972 Nochlin, Linda and Tamar Garb, The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, London, 1995 Olsvanger, Immanuel, Röyte Pomerantzen: Jewish Folk Humor Gathered and Edited, New York, 1965 (1947) O’Neill, John P., ed., Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, New York, 1990 Paris – New York: Un Album, exh. cat., Centre national d’art de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1977 Read, Herbert, The Philosophy of Modern Art, London, 1964 Reill, Peter Hanns, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism, University of California Press, 1975 Rubin, Lawrence, Frank Stella: Paintings 1958 to 1965, New York, 1986 Schlipp, Paul Arthur, and Maurice Friedman, eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber, Cambridge University Press, 1967 Skerl, Jennie, and Robin Lydenberg, eds., William S. Burroughs: At the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989, Southern Illinois University Press, 1991 Smithson, Robert, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, University of California Press, 1996 Taylor, A. J. P., The Origins of the Second World War, Harmondsworth, Mddx, 1964 (1961) Vargish, Thomas, and Delo E. Mook, Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative, Yale University Press, 1999 Warhol, Andy, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B & Back Again, London, 1975 Wolfe, Tom, The Painted Word, New York, 1975

374

APPENDIX

Nancy Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’.

Continuation of an argument begun in Chapter Eight, note 64.

For Jachec, Greenberg’s renouncement of Marxism and Cubism are pivotal points of evidence in demonstrating that Schlesinger’s concept of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ (an ideology ‘which could appeal to both liberals and leftists by grounding it in the critical faculties of the individual’) had informed the writing of Greenberg’s ‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’ of 1947, ‘The Decline of Cubism’ of 1948,

‘“American-Type” Painting’ of 1955, and ‘Modernist Painting’ of 1960.1 Shedding doubt, however, is that Greenberg did not see liberalism as a ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, but a

‘popularization of the ideas of the Enlightenment’.2

Further, a central plank of Jachec’s argument is Schlesinger’s supposed assertion in ‘The

Future of Socialism: III: The Perspective Now’ of 1947 that:

With the confidence in the inevitability of social progress now undermined, political decision-making should be left to the politicians, with artists and intellectuals restricting their activities to the provision of the critical awareness and ethical conscience which would protect democracy from revolution.3

And here, Jachec seems to have taken a cue from Guilbaut, for Schlesinger did not mention

‘artists’, and nor did he suggest that ‘decision-making should be left to politicians’ – indeed, this entire statement is a corruption of Schlesinger’s intent, for what he said was:

375

Between the irresponsibility of the capitalists, the confusion of the intellectuals, and the impotence of the working class, there may arise a state of irresolution which produces a political vacuum; and a political vacuum inevitably attracts activists – gangsters, terrorists and totalitarians.4

Therefore, for Schlesinger, it was now incumbent upon the intellectual (not artist) to ‘serve as the custodian of honesty and clarity in a turbulent and stricken society’ in order to

‘restore a serious sense of the value of facts, of the integrity of reason, of devotion to truth’, and, significantly, to ‘provide intellectual leadership’.5

At some point in this scenario, then, it can be assumed that the intellectual would have had some influence on political decision-making. And this assumption is borne out by

Schlesinger’s subsequent comment that ‘when the politician-manager-intellectual type… is intelligent and decisive, he can get society to move just fast enough for it to escape breaking up under the weight of its own contradictions.’ The intellectual, then, was on a decision-making and influential par with the politician, and not on a separate and rarefied plane. Yet, while on this same plane, the intellectual had to bear a greater burden than the politician, for, in the absence of ‘intellectual leadership within the frame of gradualism… the professional revolutionist [would] fill the vacuum and establish a harder and more ruthless regime than the decadent one he displace[d].’6

To prove that Schlesinger’s 1947 article ‘The Perspective Now’ had influenced

Greenberg’s ‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’, which was supposedly the ‘convergence between Greenberg’s “leftist” positivism and Schlesinger’s new radical thinking’, Jachec said:7 376

Focusing on Jackson Pollock as the sole genius of American painting at that time, the artist had, in Greenberg’s assessment, achieved that accolade through his ‘positivist’ world view. The epitome of the ‘modern man’, his art resonated rationality in the face of a post-Holocaust, Atomic age condition of irrationality, hysteria, and denial.8

However, the phrase ‘modern man’ does not seem to have come from Schlesinger’s ‘The

Future of Socialism’, and in ‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’,

Greenberg did not see Pollock’s art as resonating ‘rationality’. Far from it. For, while

Pollock’s art was ‘an attempt to cope with urban life [dwelling] entirely in the lonely jungle of immediate sensations, impulses and notions’, it was narrowed by its ‘Gothic-ness… paranoia and resentment’.9 And while Pollock (like David Smith) was a product of ‘a completed assimilation of French art’, the art ‘of no country’ could ‘live and perpetuate itself exclusively on spasmodic feeling, high spirits and the infinite subdivision of sensibility’.10

Contrary to Jachec’s suggestion, then, Greenberg saw a deficiency of rationality in modern art at this time – a point confirmed by subsequent comments that ‘the great and absent art of our age’ was an art of ‘balance, largeness, precision, enlightenment, contempt for nature in all its particularity.’ And so he perceived that the ‘task facing culture in America [was] to create a milieu that [would] produce such an art – and literature – and free us (at last!) from the obsession with extreme situations and states of mind.’ Because of this, what America now needed were

… men of the world not too much amazed by experience, not too much at a loss in the face of current events, not at all overpowered by their own feelings, men to some extent aware of what has been felt elsewhere since the beginning of recorded history.11 377

Jachec’s argument then proceeds to the assertion that, for Greenberg:

Pollock’s modernism… was not a self-contained process of formal reduction, but an individual, yet consciously restrained response to the current political situation which entrusted practical action to professional politicians.12

And so the misreading of Schlesinger (who had not recommended the abstinence of intellectuals – and certainly not artists – from political action) was re-presented as also being Greenberg’s position in order to further the impression that Greenberg would now follow Schlesinger to the right. The difference that Jachec detected between ‘Present

Prospects’ and ‘The Decline of Cubism’ of the following year was that, in the latter, ‘the political aspect of [Pollock’s] subjectively grounded rationality was clarified [and] now acquired overtly anti-Marxist overtones’.13 Greenberg then supposedly ‘recast’ the

‘relationship between Cubism and Marxism for the purpose of renouncing them both.’14

For Jachec, it was essential to portray Greenberg as anti-Marxist in order to connect him to the politics of Schlesinger’s The Vital Center of 1949.15 Yet the example she gives for the supposed renouncement of Marxism and Cubism predates The Vital Center by a year, that is, that:

At first glance we realize that we are faced with the debacle of the age of ‘experiment’, of the Apollinairian and Cubist mission and its hope, coincident with that of Marxism and the whole matured tradition of Enlightenment, of humanizing the world. In the plastic arts cubism, and nothing else, is the age of ‘experiment’… and the main factor in the recent decline of art in Europe is the disorientation of the Cubist style.16

378

This passage was taken entirely out of context, for Greenberg clearly saw Cubism as part of a golden age, the passing of which was to be regretted, a fact made evident in his accompanying comment that

… cubism remains the great phenomenon, the epoch-making feat of twentieth- century art, a style that has changed and determined the complexion of Western art as radically as Renaissance naturalism once did.17

Further to which, he stated here that ‘cubism is still the only vital style of our time, the one best able to convey contemporary feeling, and the only one capable of supporting a tradition which will survive into the future and form new artists.’18 As we have seen (in

Ch. 8, n. 63), he was consolidating this position only three months later in his reply to

George L. K. Morris. If, then, Greenberg had chronologically aligned Cubism with

Marxism, it could be said that, in making this connection, he was also saying that Marxism was equally vital. (Somewhat surprisingly, considering that Greenberg’s politics from this period were under scrutiny, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, with its strong Marxist element, is not even mentioned by Jachec.)

Elaborating further, Jachec then proceeds to imply that Greenberg’s 1955 essay

‘“American-Type” Painting’ also demonstrated the direct influence of The Vital Center.

Taking the view that she had made clear (which she seems not to have done) ‘the parallels between the overall functions of the artist [as supposedly described by Schlesinger] and

Greenberg’s gestural abstractionist as “modern man”’, Jachec suggested that Greenberg was ‘in the next few years, to doubt the appropriateness of gestural painting toward this end.’19 The evidence for this was, apparently, the fact that, in ‘ “American-Type” Painting’, 379

he had noted that Pollock and de Kooning ‘both remained late Cubists through their inability to free themselves from the grid.’20 However, Greenberg had stated categorically that Pollock had gone ‘beyond late Cubism in the end’, although he did return to Cubist

‘value contrasts… as if in violent repentance’ circa 1952, producing ‘a set of paintings in black line alone on unprimed canvas.’21 This Jachec alludes to in the comment that

‘Pollock’s retreat to, and Franz Kline’s current devotion to, the black and white canvas was a return to Cubism’s reliance on value contrast as the basis of its structure.’22 However, while Pollock’s use of black and white might be described as a ‘return’, the fact that Kline had worked ‘with black and white exclusively in a succession of canvases’ was, as

Greenberg admitted, due as much to his interest in Oriental art than anything.23 That is,

Kline, of all the American painting avant-garde, was the least obvious inheritor of Cubism.

Jachec suggests that Kline’s and Pollock’s ‘capitulations, in Greenberg’s assessment, not only betrayed Abstract Expressionism’s claim to radical innovation, they also subscribed to the most “conservative and even reactionary” aspects of Cubist painting.’24 However, despite the fact that Jachec puts into quotes ‘conservative and reactionary’, this is not a phrase used by Greenberg, who certainly did not use the word ‘reactionary’, replete with its emotive political connotations. What he did say was that ‘the most radical of all developments in the painting of the last two decades’ (evidenced by the painting of

Clyfford Still) in looking back to Monet and Pisarro in preference to Cézanne, ‘contained almost no allusion to Cubism’.25

380

Because of this new development, which involved ‘a more consistent and radical suppression of value contrasts than seen so far in abstract art', Greenberg saw that it was now possible to ‘realise… from this point of view, how conservative Cubism was in its resumptions of Cézanne’s efforts to save the conventions of dark and light.’26 But this was

Still going beyond Cubism, not Greenberg renouncing it, for, as ‘ “American-Type”

Painting’ demonstrates, the legacy of Cubism lingered on in the very fact that its influence had enabled Abstract Expressionism to break out of American provinciality and enter the mainstream of Western art.

At this point, however, Greenberg was critical of the fact that the Cubist tendency to ‘echo the rectangular shape of the surface… with vertical and horizontal lines and with curves whose chords were definitely vertical or horizontal’ had eventually ‘led to the kind of late

Cubist academicism that used to fill the exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists group, and which can still be seen in much of recent French abstract painting.’27 But this aspect of

Cubism had also served the purpose of the American avant-garde. Pollock, for instance, in working through Cubism, had gone beyond it (even if he was later to ‘repent’); and

Clyfford Still, coming later, had reaped the benefits of Pollock’s ground-breaking generation. It was Still, however, whose art had shown ‘abstract painting a way out of its own academicism’ (meaning the Abstract Expressionist tendency to adhere to Cubist value contrasts, and not meaning academicized Cubism).28 Indeed, the fact that Greenberg saw the more recent tendencies of modernism as owing a considerable debt to Cubism was never more evident than in ‘Modernist Painting’ of 1960.

381

In terms of Jachec’s insistence that Greenberg had followed Schlesinger, this disagreement over seemingly small points is significant, for despite Greenberg’s obvious disdain for

‘academicized Cubism’ (which might be seen to reflect his observation in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ that academicism was simply one of the ‘infinite gradations of popularized

“modernism” and “modernistic” kitsch’),29 there is no evidence to suggest that he ever renounced Cubism, but ample evidence (particularly in his reply to Morris) to suggest that he had not. Yet for Jachec’s argument to work, the impression that he had renounced

Cubism had to be maintained, for, as we have seen, this ‘renouncement’ had been directly related to his renouncement of Marx. And this argument would eventually lead to the proposition that:

… the politics of Greenberg’s repeated condemnation of Cubism and its progeny as both reactionary and susceptible to kitsch [an assertion for which Jachec provides no proof]… were most clear in ‘Modernist Painting’. This is unsurprising, given that this text was originally written in 1960 as a lecture for the Voice of America. Consequently, Greenberg would have been particularly attentive to its political slant.30

Perhaps the salient points here are: firstly, that there is seemingly no evidence in

Greenberg’s writings to suggest that he repeatedly condemned ‘Cubism and its progeny’; secondly, that Greenberg saw all forms of the genuine as inherently susceptible to kitsch, as is evidenced by ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ and various other statements over the years, and, thirdly, that Jachec does not disclose what she means by ‘progeny’. If, by this, she means the American and French producers of ‘academicized Cubism’, then she is probably right.

But in not defining her terms, the impression left by this comment is that ‘progeny’ referred specifically to the Abstract Expressionist avant-garde.

382

Either way, there is no condemnation of Cubism in ‘Modernist Painting’, in which all

Greenberg had to say of Cubism was that it ‘reacted against Impressionism’, and that ‘the

Cubist counter-revolution’ to David and Ingres ‘eventuated in a kind of painting flatter than anything in Western art since before Giotto and Cimabue – so flat indeed that it could hardly contain recognizable images’.31 And it was to this pushing of flatness to its furthest extreme which modernist painting ‘in its lastest phase’ (a phase which undoubtedly included the art of Clyfford Still) owed one of its greatest debts. That is, the abandonment

‘in principle’ of the ‘representation of the kind of space that recognizable objects can inhabit.’32 Hardly, then, a condemnation of Cubism or its progeny. And neither had this

‘progeny’ been condemned back in 1955 in ‘“American-Type” Painting’, for, despite the

Abstract Expressionist tendency to maintain Cubistic value contrasts, Greenberg had still been able to say:

If I say that such a galaxy of powerfully talented and original painters as the abstract expressionists form has not been seen since the days of Cubism, I shall be accused of chauvinistic exaggeration, not to mention a lack of a sense of proportion. But can I suggest it? I do not make allowances for American art that I do not make for any other kind. At the Biennale in Venice this year, I saw how de Kooning’s exhibition put to shame, not only that of his neighbour in the American pavilion, Ben Shahn, but that of every other painter present in his generation or under… What I hope for is a just appreciation abroad, not an exaggeration, of the merits of ‘American-Type’ painting.33

And this is surely the light in which Greenberg’s observation that Still’s art had shown

‘abstract painting a way out of its academicism’ has to be seen. For Greenberg’s intention was not to belittle the achievements of early Abstract Expressionism, but merely to state that it had moved on to the next generation.

383

In approaching a conclusion, Jachec was convinced that, in ‘Modernist Painting’,

‘contemporary’ modernism’s ‘critique of Enlightenment practices’ was ‘done on an individual basis [and consequently] could embrace a plurality of styles, which situated it comfortably within postwar liberal theory.’34 Hence ‘the differentiation of the political from the cultural sphere which we have seen in Schlesinger’s work ensured that radical critique would not translate into radical practice, and this distinction served a similar function in

“Modernist Painting”’.35 All of which led Jachec to finally conclude that because

‘contemporary’ modernism was now ‘a science in its own right [and was] ensconced within its own discipline [it] had wilfully, in Greenberg’s assessment, broken its alliance with socialism.’36

The arguments against this are numerous, and include: Firstly, that Greenberg, in speaking of self-criticism and science, was not speaking of contemporary (i.e. postwar) modernist abstraction, but of modernism as a whole. Secondly, that modernist self-criticism was not a critique of Enlightenment practices, but a critique of modernist practices themselves, for, as

Greenberg said: ‘Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized’.37 Which, for modernist art, meant the using of art ‘to call attention to art’.38 Thirdly, that the ‘individual basis’ Jachec speaks of referred to modernist art as a whole (and not, therefore, of a period of modernism conveniently coinciding with

Schlesinger’s liberalism). That is:

It should be understood that self-criticism in Modernist art has never been carried on in any but a spontaneous and largely subliminal way… Much is heard about programs in connection with Modernist art, but there has actually been far less of the programmatic in Modernist than in Renaissance or Academic painting… The 384

immediate aims of the Modernists were, and remain, personal before anything else, and the truth and success of their works remain personal before anything else.39

Fourthly, modernism (contemporary or otherwise) was not ‘a science in its own right’, and nor could it be, for, as Greenberg said:

From the point of view of art in itself, its convergence with science happens to be a mere accident, and neither art nor science really gives or assures the other of anything more than it ever did. What their convergence does show, however, is the profound degree to which Modernist art belongs to the same specific cultural tendency as modern science, and this is of the highest significance as a historical fact.40 385

Notes

1 Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’, 128 2 Greenberg, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, 123 3 Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’, 128 4 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ‘The Future of Socialism: III: The Perspective Now’, Partisan Review, Vol. XIV, No. 3, 1947, 241 5 Idem. 6 Ibid., 242 7 Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’, 128 8 Idem. 9 Greenberg, ‘The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture’, 166 10 Ibid., 167 11 Ibid., 168 12 Ibid., 129 13 Idem. 14 Idem. 15 Ibid., 130 16 Greenberg, ‘The Decline of Cubism’, 212 17 Ibid., 212 18 Ibid., 213 19 Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’, 130 20 Idem. 21 Greenberg, ‘“American-Type” Painting’, 225, 233 22 Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’, 130 23 Greenberg, ‘“American-Type” Painting’, 226-227 24 Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’, 130 25 Greenberg, ‘“American-Type” Painting’, 228 26 Idem. 27 Ibid., 233 28 Ibid., 231 29 AGK, 17 30 Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’, 131 31 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 89 32 Ibid, 87 33 Greenberg, ‘“American-Type” Painting’, 234-235 34 Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg’, 132 35 Idem. 36 Idem. 37 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 85 38 Ibid., 86 39 Ibid., 91 40 Idem.