Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg Nancy Jachec Oxford Art Journal, Vol

Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg

Nancy Jachec

Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2. (1998), pp. 123-132.

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http://www.jstor.org Sun Sep 2 10:21:33 2007 Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg

Nancy Jachec

The decline of organized leftism in the United States and the capitulation of the bulk of American leftists during the late 1930s and 1940s to what is now 1. See, for example, Alan Wald's recognized as a specifically postwar liberalism is a phenomenon familiar comprehensive The Yew York Intellectuals: the Rlse and Decllne of the Anti-Stohmst Left from the 1930s enough to require no further elucidation here.' Likewise, the motivation to the 1980s, (University of North Carolina behind their support for a liberalism now characterized by a pragmatic, Press: Chapel Hill, 1987). piecemeal approach toward social engineering and economic and political 2. George Lichtheim, Marxlsm: an H~stoncaland planning, and by a mistrust of scientific and technological advance as inevitably Cr~tlcalStudy, (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 19641, p. 220. moving toward social improvement, has also long been noted. For example, George Lichtheim pointed out more than thirty years ago that while liberalism 3. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of.Modern Art, translated by Arthur had always been concerned with privileging freedom, rationality, democracy, Goldhammer, (University of Chicago Press: and, above all, the rights of the individual - concerns which had been Chicago, 19831, p. 155; Christopher Lasch, The successively and more deeply troubled by two world wars - it was not a World of Yatlons, (Vintage Books: New York, 1973), p. 207; and Alan Wald, The Yew York matter of concern for Marxists until the rise of Fascism. In effect, Fascism Intellectuals, introduction. substantially eroded their confidence in the working class - now deemed a 4. See Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, mass - as a self-determining and responsible agent of social progress, for which translated by C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno they ultimately would find no practical substitute.* and Rolf Tiedemann, (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 19841, pp. 35, 55-63. For a Yet the migration to postwar liberalism which the rise of Fascism instigated brief reckoning of the similarities, and what are was, as some of the best scholarship has suggested, not immediate. Moreover, presented as essentially political differences liberalism went through a series of ideological realignments before its virtues between Greenberg's and Adorno's modernisms, see Peter Osborne, 'Adorno and began to dominate formerly leftist discussion, which was only the case by the Metaphysics of Modernism: The Problem of 1950.3 While this hard-bitten, 'realist' approach would characterize postwar a "Postmodern" Art', ed. Andrew Benjamin, liberal theory, exemplified by Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology (1961) and The Problems of Modernly, (Routledge: London, 1989), p. 36. Daniel Boorstin's The Genius ofAmerican Politics (1 953), and would find ardent support from former leftists during the height of the Cold War, not all of postwar liberalism's architects came, as did Bell and Boorstin, from outside of American leftist circles. Nor, as suggested by the comparatively late date of their work, would the arpuments of these non-leftist ideologists have been central to the ideological migration of the Left during the decade. The subtlety of this ideological shift and the identity of its originators has, arguably, been neglected in the histories of the period. Similarly, the art historical literature, which has accounted for the modernist artists and critics involved in the 'deradicalization' of the American Left, is also due for reconsideration. It will be argued here that the two were in fact intimately linked, with potentially important implications for the political development of modernist theory in the United States during the Cold War. For it was between the 1940s and the 1960s that what will be referred to as 'the modernist paradigm' was beginning to be conceptualized, most notably by the Frankfurt School theoretician Theodor Adorno and the American intellectual and art critic Clement Greenberg. This paradigm understood modernist art as experimental, autonomous and innovative, and conducted by the subjective yet rational indi~idual.~Yet its politics - whether or not the paradigm should be seen as an essentially leftist strategy for preserving radical values through political absention, or as an apolitical aesthetic - remains a matter of dispute. Consequently, given Adorno's institutional pedigree, his reputation as a radical

lG OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD ART JOURNAL 21.2 1998 121-132 intellectual endure^,^ while Greenberg is remembered in the scholarship on the subject almost exclusively as an art critic, and predominantly as a formalist one. This is in spite of the fact that Greenberg, in addition to his activities as an 5. The current consensus that Adorno remained art critic, was also a figure of no small importance within the American non- committed to radical theory in spite of its communist Left during the period in question. For, although he did publish art Inefficacy is clear, for example, in the contributions to the 'Debates in Contemporary criticism regularly in Partisan Review between 1938 and 1955 and in The Nation Culture' issue of Telos, (no. 62, Winter, 1984- during the 1940s, he was also a contributing editor of Partisan Review from 85). See, for example, Martin Jay, 'Hierarchy 1948 to 1952, as well as the associate editor of Commentary from its inception and the Humanities', p. 144; Albrecht Wellmer, 'Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation: in 1945 until 1957. And, while Partisan Review is well known to have given up Adorno's Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity', its interest in Trotskyism by the early 1940s and increasingly focused on pp. 104, 110 and Richard Wolin, 'Modernism cultural politics, Commentary was strictly devoted to politics and sociology from versus Postmodernism', p. 18. its outset. Commentary was never concerned with art; it was established by 6. Editor's preface, 'The Crisis of the Individual', Commentary, vol. 1, no. 2, the American Jewish Committee in order to examine the political and November 1945, p. 1. sociological origins of the Holocaust which, according to the editors, could be 7. For example, this conception of Greenberg as broadly defined as the misuse of the 'Enlightenment' values of scientism and 30 leftist - 60s liberal has been supported in rationality for the purpose of social engineering.6 On the strength of these John O'Brian's recent four volume collection of editorial activities, Greenberg should be considered as a political as much as an Greenberg's writings, and has been challenged - by Hilton Kramer, who defends Greenberg as art commentator. Consequently, there is a need to assess the possible remaining sceptical of capitalism and democracy importance of one for the other throughout this period of ideological during the Cold War period. Paul Hart has also examined Greenberg's engagement with realignment .7 Trotskyism during the late 1930s and early One of the possible reasons for Greenberg's enduring association with 1940s, yet does not address his politics of the formalist art criticism is the focus, in much of the scholarship, on his work 1950s and 1960s. See 'The Essential Legacy of from the 1960s, in particular the essay 'Modernist Painting' (1960-65). This Clement Greenberg from the Era of Stalin and Hitler', Olford Art Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, 1988, essay is usually discussed as Greenberg's unveiling of the 'modernist pp. 76-87. paradigm'. Michael Fried, for example, has paraphrased this overshadowing 8. Michael Fried, 'How Modernism Works: a phase of Greenberg's modernism as: 'at least partly in response to Response to T. J. Clark', reprinted in ed. sociopolitical developments, but once under way its evolution is autonomous Francis Frascina, Pollock and .4fter: the Cr~tlcal Debate, (Harper and Row: New York, 1985), and in the long run even predetermined'.8 It has also enabled Annette Cox to p. 70. assert that Greenberg actually purged all political references in his work by the 9. Annette Cox, 'The Facts of Culture: The mid-fifties, while privileging Abstract Expressionism as 'a reflection of the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg', Art-as- prosperity, pragmatism, and positivism of American cultural life'.9 Pohtlcs, (University of Michigan Press: Ann Pragmatism and positivism are largely apolitical concepts, in Cox's account. Arbor, 1982), pp. 142-3, 157. Most importantly, however, this essay has been reproduced in study texts as 10. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Editorial preface to 'Modemst Painting', Art In Theory exemplary of formalist modernism. It appears, for example, in that section of 1900-1990: An Anthology of Chang~ngIdeas, Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison's edited collection Modern Art and (Blackwell Publishers: London, 1992), pp. 685- Modernism: a Critical Antholou, in which the editors equate his work with that 6, 754. of Clive Bell and Roger Fry. More recently, its argument has been described in 11. See Hilton Kramer, 'Clement Greenberg and the Cold War', Yew Cr~ter~on,vol. 11, no. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood's Art in Theory 1900-1 990: An Anthology of 7, March 1993, pp. 610. Chandind Ideas (1992) as typifying the 'Modernist' critical position in English- 12. T. J. Clark, 'Clement Greenberg's Theory language scholarship in which, while the social and historical conditions of art of Art', reprinted in Frascina, Pollock and After, ~roductionare not altogether ignored, they are, however, 'relegated'. In p. 47. other words, formal concerns maintained a priority over, and an autonomy from, external and political ones.'' There have, however, been a few efforts to establish an ideological continuity between the 'leftist' Greenberg of the thirties and the seemingly politically detached Greenberg of the sixties." The most substantial comes from Tim Clark, who maintains that Greenberg's Marxism of the late 1930s was an identity to which he never relinquished his claim, but reasserted when he republished 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' in his anthology Art and Culture (1 96 1). Originally appearing in Partisan Review in 1939, that essay's 'mordant hostility to capitalism', according to Clark, was still sounding, almost verbatim, in 'Modernist Painting' twenty two years later.I2 Clark concedes that the Marxism of 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' 'is quite largely implicit; it is stated on

124 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 21.2 1998 Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg

occasion . . . but it remains to the reader to determine just how it works in the history and theory presented .'.I3 He nonetheless concludes that this: , . . . 13. Clark, 'Clement Greenberg's Theory of 'simply . . . was a Marxist culture - a hectic and shallow-rooted one . . . but Art', p. 48. one which deserved the name'. l4 14. Clark, 'Clement Greenberg's Theory of In defining the Marxist culture in the US at that time with which Greenberg Art', p. 49. was involved, however, Clark points to the work of American leftist 15. Harrison and Wood, .4rt in Theory, p. 686. intellectuals Dwight Macdonald and Edmund Wilson. Yet both Macdonald and 16. See Guilbaut, How Kew York Stole, p. 3; Wilson were already highly critical of Marxism-Leninism, which was grounded Lasch, The Agonj of the Amerlcan Left, (Knopf in the belief in scientific progress as inevitably ~roducinga communist utopia. Publishers: New York, 1969), p. 308; Wald, Xew York Intellectuah, p. 8. Their views can be seen as typical of the anti-dialectical arguments observable in the bulk of material published in the American liberal/independent leftist 17. Lasch, Agonj, p. 308 press, of which Partisan Revrew is the best known representative, and which 18. Richard H. Pells, The Liberal M~ndin a Comervatlve Age: Amer~canlntellectuair In the 1940s Commentary and Polltlcs would also perpetuate throughout the 1940s. The and 1950s, (Harper and Row: New York), 'Marxist culture' which Clark attempts to recuperate from the vagueness in p. 131. Greenberg's text was, then, not simply in a 'moment of doubt', but should be seen as a particular kind of revisionist Marxist culture, increasingly post- dialectical and increasingly concerned with the pres&\,ation of individual rights within democratic institutions. And dus interest in the primacy of the individual, it will be argued, enabled this revisionist Marxism to assume the characteristics of what will be referred to here as the postwar liberalism which Greenberg would embrace. What this suggests is that the transition which Greenberg's thought underwent throughout this period - one which cannot be ascertained by focusing on those 'key' essays, 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' (1938) and 'Modernist Painting' - followed the ideological reorientation of the Left of which he was a part. And if this is the case, what is also suggested is that the practices which Greenberg ascribed to the best of modernist painting were quintessentially political. Consequently, the formalist modernism with which he is credited, and which has shaped our reading of the criticism as well as the formal values of the art produced in the shadow of Greenberg's essay, may need to be seen not as a deliberate departure from an overtly radical critical modernism in favour of elitist detachment." Contrary to what Harrison and Wood have suggested, it should be seen as part of the values and methodology of contemporary liberal ideology in which any residual radicalism from Greenberg's socialist days, far from being lost, were in fact coopted within it. Toward this end, the evolution of Greenberg's modernism will be considered throughout the period in question, and in direct relation to the work of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who is widely acknowledged as one of the key ideologists to theorize the non-Communist Left's transition to liberalism.16 A Harvard political historian, Schlesinger, unlike Greenberg, was too young to have been a thirties Marxist; he was imbued with the American pragmatic tradition of Dewey and ~ames,'~and by the 1950s was an active member of the liberal political establishment as a speechwriter and adviser to Adlai Stevenson and later to John F. Kennedy." Yet in the previous decade, Schlesinger, unlike Bell or Boorstin, was a valued commentator on the future of socialism in the United States within the non-Communist Left. Indeed, he can even be seen as directly affiliated with Greenberg through organisational links, for Schlesinger, too, was a regular contributor to Partisan Review, and both he and Greenberg were members of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in the early 1950s. The premisses of the ACCF, of which Greenberg was an executive from April 1952 to October 1953, were firstly, the reworking of 1930s liberalism, deemed by this group to be too soft on communism, and secondly, the discrediting of the notion of ideology, whch

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 21.2 1998 125 the ACCF perceived as anti-democratic. In fact, Greenberg and Schlesinger even fell out during the anti-communist witch-hunts, Greenberg being dissatisfied with Schlesinger's reticence concerning the ACCF's endorsement - - 19. Alan Wald, Yew York Intellectuals, of the persecution of American communist^.'^ Yet this labelling of Schlesinger pp. 270-9. as part of the 'left wing' of the ACCF demonstrates not only how elastic the 20. See Anthony Giddens, Posltlv~smand definition of leftism in the United States was at that time, but its increasing Socrologv, (Heinemann Educational: London, 1974), pp. 2-22, which explains the debates compatability with developments in contemporary liberal ideology. For within the discipline concerning the extent to Schlesinger had only recently published his postwar liberal manifesto The C'ital which moral theory encroaches within Centre (1949). Yet many of the ideas in it had already appeared in essay form in positivism. See also Leszek Kolakowski, Pontrvrst Phrlosophy, translated by Norbert Guterman, Partisan Rer,iew in the late 1940s, of which Greenberg would no doubt have - (Anchor Books: New York, 1972), pp. 199-- been aware, even, we shall see, acquiring a vocabulary from Schlesinger's 205. work. This vocabulary, to which Schlesinger's idea of 'Counter-Enlight- 2 1. This is clear, for example, in the serles enment' - a critical, irrational, pessimistic, and above all, cultural leveling of 'The Cris~sof the Individual', published by Commentay magazine from 1945 to 1947. It liberalism's optimism in its prewar, progressivist manifestation - would shape included contributions from intellectuals whose Greenberg's expectations for modern art as the embodiment of postwar liberal politics ranged from the dialecticism of the methodology in the shape of what Schlesinger referred to as the 'new Frankfurt School and the leftist pragmatism of radicalism'. This new radicalism, to give a working definition, espoused an John Dewey to the liberalism of Reinhold Niebuhr. In spite of their ideological diversity, essentially positivistic approach toward social engineering and economic and the contributors unanin~ouslyagreed with the political planning; it was, in other words, pragmatic, piecemeal, and editors that what was needed to combat the welcoming of scientific and technological advance, but without seeing these spread of scientific social engineering was the preservation of individual agency. advances as necessarily moving toward social improvement. In short, while 22. Clement Greenberg, 'Avant-Garde and adhering to Enlightenment methodology, new radicalism was critical of Kitsch', reprinted in John O'Brian, Clemenc Enlightenment optimism; it is this critical feature which can be seen as the Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Crincrsm, vol. 1: crucial distinction between it and the postwar liberalism endorsed by the Perceptions and Judgments 1939-1933, (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1986), p. 7. liberal ideologists untouched by the debates within the Left. The use of the term positihism is, in this context, a loose one, often 23. Greenberg, 'Avant-Gardr and Kitsch', pp. 7-8. referring to logical empiricism - which, technically speaking, is not a positivist philosophy - and certainly to logical positivism. Yet both these terms embraced rationality and scientific method on a limited scale, as the least refutable means of gaining knowledge and determining action on the basis of it.20These terms were used more or less interchangeably during the 1940s, their boundaries still being a matter of dispute. Yet both the Counter- Enlightenment and positivism, in at least Schlesinger and Greenberg's understanding of them, can be seen to contradict any confidence in the idea that scientific advancement was inevitably for social good, an optimism which was believed to have guided, since the Enlightenment, capitalist and later socialist democracy. This idea, for a broad range of liberal and leftist intellectuals, extending from the dialecticism of the Frankfurt School to arch liberals such as Reinhold Niebuhr, was now disproved by the rise of t~talitarianism.~'Consequently, it is no exaggeration to say that all inquiries from the Left on the future of socialism in the totalitarian age focused upon the moral credibility of the Enlightenment, and upon the Left's shaken confidence in both rationality and the compatibility of scientific and social progress. That the Enlightenment's legacy of instrumental reason was already an issue for Greenberg while writing 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' is clear in the text. Noting that the 'birth of the avant-garde coincided chronologically - and geographically too - with the first bold development of scientific revolutionary thought in Europe1," these Enlightenment breakthroughs also begat both capitalism and Marxism in response to it. The collisions between them formed the ideological struggle which Greenberg at that time saw the avant-garde as habitually transcending, preferring what he called the 'absolute' - formal concerns - to ideology and its representat~on.23For, with capitalism in decline, as witnessed by international economic depression, it was not the

126 OXFOR13 ART JOURNAL 21.2 1998 Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg

responsibility of art to represent a socialist culture, but simply to preserve culture for the inevitable socialism which would issue from the collapse of

24. Greenberg, 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch', capitalism; consequently, no formal programme was required of it. p. 12. At this point Greenberg was still clinging to a dialectical conception of 2 5. Greenberg, 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch', history in which the visual arts did not really have a role. Yet the inevitability p. 12. of socialist culture was now being called into question by the emergence of 26. Clement Greenberg, 'An Inquiry on totalitarianism, and Greenberg- believed that academic, representational styles Dialectical Materialism', qn, July-August were being subsumed into what he saw as the service of the regimes of 1942, repr~ntedin O'Bnan, vol. 1, pp. 108-9 Germany, Italy and Russia. For, as he explained, kitsch required 'a fully 27. Clement Greenberg, 'Abstract Art',The Yotion, April 15, 1944, reprinted in O'Brian, matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions and perfected self- vol. I, p. 201. consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends'.24 Consequently, 28. Greenberg, 'Abstract Art', p. 203 any established art could be kitsch, and the situation now demanded that the 29. Greenberg, 'Abstract Art', p. 202 avant-garde keep ahead of it. By virtue of its spontaneous formal innovation, 30. Clement Greenberg, 'Letter to the Editor and its lack of any systematic, foreseeable progression, it would be able to of the ,\brlon', 27 April 1946, reprinted in resist appropriation as kitsch, and thus would perform an essentially political, O'Brian, Clement Greenberg. Collected Essajs and but not an ideological f~nction.'~ Crir~r~im;rol. 2. Arrogant Purpose 1945.1939, (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1986), Greenberg's efforts to distance himself from ideology, with its scientific p. 67. socialist associations, would accelerate in the early 1940s. By 1942, he publicly disavowed scientific socialism, and within two years - around the same time he would help launch Commentarl/ - he would begin to use modernism as a political cr~tlqueof the Enlightenment and ideology, and rely on positivism to do so.L6For example, in the essay 'Abstract Art' of 1944 for The Natlon, he no longer described abstract art as transcending ideological struggle. Instead he described it historically, as within a broader cultural 'counter-revolution' to the Enlightenment dating back to the 1870s, when the latter was already showing evidence of rampant imperialism and exploitation. This 'counter- revolution' - what he was soon to describe as the 'Counter-Enlightenment' - accompanied the emergence of what he called a 'positivistic world-view'. For Greenberg, the modernist counter-revolution was, like his understanding of positivism, the realization:

that the earth could no longer afford to Western man, or his economy, indefinite space in which to expand; that verified facts were the only certainties: that each of the activities of culture could be exercised with assurance only within its own province and only when that province had been strictly defined. The age of specialization and of limited intellectual and spiritual objectives sets in . . . ''

Yet, of all possible types of modernist practices, it was abstraction which best exemplified modern art's ongoing assessment of the limits of rationality and its practical applications. Freed from the object, abstract art could exhaust the possibilities of its media on its own terms, on a limited, experimental basis. And this practice, which Greenberg referred to as a positivist practice, now informed 'the best philosophical and political intelligence of the time',28 and had reached its fullest and most innovative form in the hands of the Cubists. They, however, had had a failure of nerve, retreating to the represented object after having achieved their wholly abstract canvases in 19 11-1 9 12 .29 Consequently, modernism's failure to sustain a critique of the Enlightenment meant that a successor to the Cubists, and the critique they had abandoned, had yet to be found. At this time Greenberg was still publicly identifying himself as a socialist, and would do so until 1946.~'Consequently, given his retreat from it in 1947, it is useful to consider Schlesinger's contribution to the Partisan Review symposium 'The Future of Socialism' in March of that year with an eye to its influence on Greenberg's essay 'The Present Prospects of American Painting

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 21.2 1998 127 Nancy Jachec and Sculpture', which would be published in October in the British magazine Horizon. For dus symposium brought Schlesinger's perspectives together with those of four seasoned leftists - former Marxist Sidney Hook, former 31. Editorial note, 'The Future of Socialism 1', communist Granville Hicks, British independent socialist George Orwell, and Partisan Review, vol. 14, no. 1, January-February - 1947, p. 25. Left Oppositionist and former Trotskyist Victor Serge - to consider how socialism should be redefined in order to have any credibility in the totalitarian 32. See Orwell, 'Toward European Unity', 31 Partisan Rev~ew,vol. 14, no. 4, July-August era. Yet Orwell's description of the socialist in the postwar period as a 1947, p. 351. Orwell, it should be noted, saw doctor 'treating an all but hopeless case' captured the mood of the symposium, Western Europe alone as holding out the the contributors unanimously supporting the protection of democratic remote possibility for the survival of socialism at that time, since both the United States and the institutions as the basis for a post-Marxian socialism, accommodating leftist Soviet Union were dominated by a mass culture values within them. 32 and a mass mentality. It was here that Schlesinger first introduced the concept of 'Counter- 33. Arthur M.Schlesinger, Jr., 'The Future of Enlightenment' as an ideology which could appeal to both liberals and leftists Socialism: the Perspective Now,' Part~sanReview, by grounding it in the critical faculties of the individual. Yet, keen to present vol. 14, no. 3, March 1947, p. 235. the 'Counter-Enlightenment' as foremost a means of dissent, Schlesinger took 34. Schlesinger, 'Future of Socialism', p. 241. care to distinguish its support for democracy from that of 'the official liberalism of the Enlightenment' on the strength of its permission of individual critical awareness. Arguing that if 1930s liberalism had been grounded in 'science, bourgeois complacency, and a belief in progress (. . .), tolerance, free inquiry, and technology, operating in the framework of human perfectibility', he also insisted that the cautionary work of 'Counter- Enlightenment' thinkers such as Freud, Kierkegaard, Sorel, Nietzsche should have forwarned its proponents. - of 'practical men' like Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini; such men had used the technological benefits issuing from the thinking of the Age of Reason for the exploitation of the masses rather than for the social good which had been foreseen by American pragmatists of the previous decade, such as ~ewey.~~With the confidence in the inevitability of social progress now undermined, political decision-making should be left to politicians, with artists and intellectuals restricting their activities to the provision of the critical awareness and ethical conscience which would protect democracy from revolution:

Someone must serve as the custodian of honesty and clarity in a turbulent and stricken society. Someone must restore a serious sense of the value of facts, the integrity of reason, of devotion to truth . . . As capitalism crumbles through the world, we know that any path which can preserve peace and freedom is narrow and hazardous . . . One false step may plunge the world into atomic war or deliver it into totalitarian darkness . . . when no one provides intellectual leadership within the frame of gradualism, then the professional revolutionist will fill the vacuum 34

Schlesinger did not broach the problem of how, if artists and intellectuals were to protect socialist values from the beleaguered capitalist system and the threat of totalitarianism, their warnings could be translated into defensive action. Yet, in spite of this omission, we can see Greenberg acquiring the muscularity of Schlesinger's tone, and even his lexicon, in his essay The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture', which suggests that Greenberg too was willing to overlook this crucial question concerning the future of radical political practice. For in this essay the convergence between Greenberg's 'leftist' positivism and Schlesinger's new radical dunking becomes clear. 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. Yet Pollock's was a particular kind of

128 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 21.2 1998 Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg

rationality, mediated by a Nietzschean conception of subjectively grounded will, which enabled him to respond to this situation from a position of individual awareness, tempered by rational control. Such 'modern men' - 35. Clement Greenberg, 'The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture', 'men of the world', as Greenberg described them, who were 'not too much Iionron, VO~.16, no. 93-94, October 1947, amazed by experience, not too much at loss in the face of current events, [and] p. 28. not at all overpowered by their own feelings' - were to infuse their courage 36. Clement Greenberg, 'The Decline of and insight into public consci~usness.~~For him, Pollock's modernism - he Cubism', O'Brian, vol. 2, p. 212. had achieved his first classic 'drip' painting that year - was not a self-contained 37. Greenberg, 'Decline of Cubism', pp. 21 3- 14. process of formal reduction, but an individual, yet consciously restrained response to the current political situation which entrusted practical action to professional politicians. The political aspect of this subjectively grounded rationality was clarified in Greenberg's essay of the following year, 'The Decline of Cubism', in which it now acquired overtly anti-Marxist overtones. For if in 'Abstract Art' he had only claimed a connection between abstraction and social critique, he now recast this relationship as a clear association between Cubism and Marxism in particular, for the purpose of renouncing them both. Noting that while the quality of the merely decorative, ideology-free School of Paris painters such as Matisse were unaffected by the Occupation, Greenberg argued that Cubist art, a product of Enlightenment thought, was rapidly degenerating:

At first glance we realize that we are faced with the debacle of the age of 'experiment', of the [. . .] Cubist mission and its hope, coincident with that of Marxism and the whole matured tradition of the Enlightenment, of humanising 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 [. .

For Cubism had embodied the 'optimism, boldness, and self-confidence of the highest stage of industrial capitalism' which should have been the prelude to communist utopia. Yet two world wars and the emergence of totalitarianism had destroyed this confidence that, through- scientific advancement, 'the world would inevitably go on improving . . . there was no risk of getting anything inferior or more dangerous than what one already had'.'7 The ideological premiss ascribed to Cubism having collapsed, what \\-as needed, in his assessment, was a modernism which could combine individual experience with Cubism's rationality. Again, he found this combination in the work of Jackson Pollock, and now in Arshile Gorky's, too. Referring to Gorky and Pollock's reliance on Cubist space as a rational framework for their gestural innovations, Greenberg noted that while Cubism 'was still important for the formation of new art', these subsequent 'humanist' interventions formed what Schlesinger had recently called a 'Counter-Enlightenment' critique of the optimism of the Enlightenment. But this was not without paradox. For if Pollock and Gorky's art can be read as an ideological metaphor - combining Cubism's Marxism with the individual agency of free gesture - this gesture was still contained within the Cubist and thus within the rationalism of the Enlightenment itself. -id, " Consequently, as far as the logic of Greenberg's argument is concerned, gestural abstraction's critique of Cubism, like the new radicalism's critique of Marxism, can be seen as strengthening Enlightenment values and, by analogy, the institutions representing them, rather than undermining them by pushing past Cubism's formal barriers. What Greenberg ascribed to Pollock and Gorky's innovations were, in essence, piecemeal additions to as opposed to a revolutionizing of the modernist tradition which Cubism represented. Greenberg's debt to Schlesinger's work would extend into the 1950s, and

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 21.2 1998 129 reflect the increasing liberalization of whatever leftist interests Schlesinger may have demonstrated in his essay for 'The Future of Socialism'. The changes in Schlesinger's views from 1947 were soon to become evident in his book of 38. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Pol~ticsoj 1949, The V~talCentre that, ith subsequent editions appearing in 1950, 1962, Freedom, (William Heinemann: London, 1950), 1970, and again in 1988, demonstrates its importance as liberal manifesto. Of pp. 37, 141. most interest for this argument *as the development of his notion of the 39. Schlesinger, Polrtics $Freedom, p. I41 Counter-Enlightenment as now overtly reinforcing, instead of critically 40. Clement Greenberg, 'After Abstract challenging, liberal democracy. Rather than warning the polity of the dangers Expressionism', pp. 768-9; 'The "Crisis" of Abstract Art', p. 180; both reprinted in ed. of totalitarian ideology, the responsibility of 'creative individuals' - artists and John O'Brian, Clement Greenberg: The Collected intellectuals - *as now to accommodate individuals to liberal democratic Essays and Cr~t~c~sm,voi. -I, Modermsm w~tha institutions as well to protect them from developing a mass mentality by Vengeance 1957-1969, (University of Chicago Press: London, 1993). creating a 'genuine cultural pluralism'. Yet this new role was determined by 41. Clement Greenberg, 'American-Type the Left's reconciliation with liberal democracy: Painting', reprinted in ed. John O'Brian, Clement Greenbeq: The Collected Essays and The democratic left today has committed itself to the limited state - European socialists, Cr~t~asm:voi. 3, ,4#rmat1ons and R+ah 1950- retreating precipitately from the abyss of totalitarianism, as well as American New Dealers, 1956, (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, advancing cautiously out of the jungle of private enterprise . . . Somewhere between the abyss 19931, pp. 217-18. and the jungle the new radicalism will work out a sensible economic policy. There will certainly 42. Greenberg, 'American-Type Painting', be changes in the structure of the economy. But these changes will be brought about in a way pp. 220-1. which will not disrupt the fabric of custom, law and mutual confidence upon which personal rights depend, nor will they liquidate the basis of future resistance. The trans~tionmust be 43. Greenberg, 'American-Type Painting', piecemed. It must be parliamentary. It must respect civil liberties and due process of law. Only p. 235. in this way can it preserve free so~iety.~'

There was, however, another side to the creative individual's responsibilities, and to his or her protecting 'free society'. As mediators between the public and the state, Schlesinger also assigned them the task of turning conflict into a 'source of creativity', and in this way alleviating discontent and safeguarding democracy from any real opposition.39 Schlesinger did not, however, specify the artistic practices which would do this best. Yet if the parallels between the overall function of the artist which he described and Greenberg's gestural abstractionist as 'modern man' had been clear enough, Greenberg himself was, in the next few years, to doubt the appropriateness of gestural painting toward this end. For, as the 1950s wore on, the logic of his own argument regarding the relationship between modernism and kitsch eventually compelled him to reject gestural abstraction as it, in his assessment, was degenerating into kitsch in the hands of second- generation practitioners.40 This decline, he argued, was due to the Cubist orientation of gestural painting, an orientation which prohibited any progression beyond it. Thus, in the essay 'American-Type Painting' (1955), while praising Pollock and de Kooning for their mastery, and in Pollock's case, for the expansion of the Cubist tradition, Greenberg noted that both remained late Cubists through their inability to free themselves from the grid.41Even worse, 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. These 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, the classicism of chiaroscuro, and the rationality which imbued both classicism and the grid.42 What Greenberg needed, then, was a new avant-garde practice which could fulfill modernism's aesthetic resistance to kitsch, yet also remain in accordance with Schlesinger's new radi~alism.~'And it was his replacement of gestural abstraction with the post-cubist colour field painting of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still that demonstrated his efforts toward this end.

130 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 21.2 1998 Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg

For, having a European pedigree all its own - he could trace colour field technique back to Monet and late Turner - Greenberg's subsequent essays could expand upon the suitability of colour field painting as modernism's freshest resistance to 'a society bent in principle on rationalising everything' ;e 45. Greenberg, 'After Abstract Expressionism', yet such painting also conformed to a set of aesthetic principles which, he pp. 121, 125--6. argued, would bring contemporary modernism back into step with the 'infra- 46. Greenberg, 'After Abstract Expressionism', logic' spanning the history of modernist art. For if Western art since the p. 131. sixteenth century was characterised by alternations between the painterly and 47. Greenberg, 'Bfter Abstract Expressionism', the non-painterly, as Greenberg asserted seven years later in 'After Abstract p. 132. Expressionism' (1962), and if gesture painting had terminated in mannerism 48. Greenberg, 'The "Crisis" of Abstract Art', or 'homeless representation' - the application of painterly technique to O'Rrian, vol. 4, p. 180. representational ends, evidenced by the 'narrowness' of Jasper Johns' and the 49. Clement Greenberg, 'Modernist Painting', O'Brian, vol. 4, pp. 88-9. stylistic netherworld of neither abstraction nor representation of Diebenkorn and de Kooning - colour field painting not only provided a way out of these 50. Greenberg, 'Modernist Painting', p. 85. essentially late Cubist practices, it shouldered the Counter-Enlightenment's primary task.45 Greenberg argued that the 'aim of the self-criticism [of modernist art], which is entirely. empirical- and not at all an affair of theory, is to determine the irreducible working essence of art and the separate arts'. This, to him, was both flatness and its delimitation. Yet crucially, these empirical features were explored on an individual basis. The great strength of colour field painting, and all subsequent Counter-Enlightenment modernisms, would be their resistance to imitation:

lnspiration alone belongs altogether to the individual; everything else, including skill, can now be acquired by any one. Inspiration remains the only factor in the creation of a successful work of art that cannot be copied or imitated.46

Whilst acknowledging that this quality was not exclusive to colour field painting - both Newrnan and Mondrian, for example, possessed it - works such as Newman's were distinguished by the sophistication of their conception which frustrated imitato~-s.~'This was not a claim which gesture painting could make, as he confirmed two years later in 'The "Crisis" of Abstract Art'. Looking back to gesture painting's Cubist innovations as 'the great and original achievement of the first generation', he lamented that 'this achievement degenerated into a blatant formula . . . in the hands of those who came later' .48 Yet the politics of Greenberg's repeated condemnation of Cubism and its progeny as both reactionary and susceptible to kitsch, of his claims for post- Cubist modernism as the inheritor of a larger, and distinctly Western modernist project, and above all, the importance of its practice by uniquely inspired individuals, were most clear in 'Modernist Painting'. This is unsurprising, given that this text was originally written in 1960 as a lecture for the Volce of America. Consequently, Greenberg would have been particularly attentive to its political slant. In this essay he redefined modernism from a system of successive formal innovations to a piecemeal, experimental practice. Yet the latter was just as far-reaching, and equally selective, in what it embraced. Its methodology originated with the Enlightenment, and its values of colour and flatness as opposed to sculpture and design were already evident, in Greenberg's assessment, in David and Ingres' most successful portraits.49 Yet this tendency of Western civilization to 'question its own foundations' did not have any subversive motive. Rather, the 'essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but . . . to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence'

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 21.2 1998 131 Yet contemporary modernism was not simply a rescucitation of Enlight- enment culture which, for the past two decades, Greenberg and his peers had considered compromised by the misuse of its own methodology; rather, it was 51, Painting,, pp, 90-1, a science in its own right. With limited objectives, this modernism was now a 85. rational investigation as to the nature and contingencies of painting's own 52. Paul Crow-ther, 'Greenberg's Kant and the medium by tinkering with size, texture, and scale on a spontaneous and non- Problem of Modernist Painting', BntlshJournal oJ programmatic basis. Greenberg explained: 'lesthet~cs,vol. 25, no. 4, Autumn 1985, pp. 317-18, 323. 53. Crowther, 'Greenberg's Kant', p. 318. The selfcriticism of Modernism grows out of, but is not the same thing as, the criticism of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment criticized from the outside, the way criticism in its accepted 54. Greenberg, 'Modernist Painting', p. 92 sense does: Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being ~riticised.~'

As the critique of Enlightenment practices through no less than the Enlightenment's own means, Greenberg's modernism tried to maintain Enlightenment methodology. Yet, importantly, Greenberg stressed that this critique was done on an individual basis. Consequently, his modernism could embrace a plurality of styles, which situated it comfortably within postwar liberal theory. For the creative individual was, in Schlesinger's- account, the factor determining the success or failure of Western democracy in the totalitarian age, its ability to support a plurality of individual initiatives and views against the inevitable massification which would overtake a nation lacking vitality, enterprise and independent thought. Yet 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'. Paul Crowther has already shown how Greenberg- misinterpreted Kant's critical method at the expense of its logic in order to accommodate the notion of the inspired indi~idual.'~And, while Crowther was concerned with Greenberg's use of philosophy, his analysis also provides support for this essay's argument concerning how Greenberg reconciled an essentially empirical account of contemporary modernist art practice with postwar liberal theory. For, put simply, Greenberg's notion of aesthetic value remained grounded in inspiration, which is, as Crowther puts it, 'an intellectual response, which makes our response to it interested, as opposed to Kant's disintere~tedness'.~~Yet, as a 'new radical', we can see that it was ideologically necessary for Greenberg to do so. By eliding 'disinterested', empirical modernist practices with individual insight, he could maintain that originally radical project he had assigned modernist artists in 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch'. Consequently, Clark is right to see a certain continuity in Greenberg's political outlook between 1939 and 1965. For modernist artists, in Greenberg's paradigm, still had the responsibility of keeping culture moving ahead of kitsch. But they were no longer, however, waiting for the inevitable collapse of capitalism, and can even be construed as propagating postwar liberalism by embodying its methodology in their own practices. Now a science in its own right - and ensconced within its own discipline - contemporary modernism had wilfully, in Greenberg's assessment, broken its alliance with socialism. In its interests and in its practices, the only revolutions it engaged with were within its own borders:

I want to repeat that Modernist art does not offer theoretical demonstrations . . . it happens to convert theoretical possibilities into empirical ones, in doing which it tests many theories about art for their relevance to the actual practice and actual experience of art. In this respect alone can Modernism be considered sub~ersive.~~

132 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 2 1.2 1998 http://www.jstor.org

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7 Review: The Essential Legacy of Clement Greenberg from the Era of Stalin and Hitler Reviewed Work(s): Clement Greenberg, the Collected Essays and Art Criticism by John O'Brian; Clement Greenberg Paul Hart Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1. (1988), pp. 76-87. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0142-6540%281988%2911%3A1%3C76%3ATELOCG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I

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