Know Your Critics: What Did Harold Rosenberg Do?
July 31, 2014
The critic Harold Rosenberg
Known for his support of “action painters”—his term for the Abstract Expressionists—Harold Rosenberg(1906-1978) was, along with Clement Greenberg, at the center of mid-century American art criticism. Together, these two critics developed the vocabulary and analytic tools to understand Abstract Expressionism, and to explain its advancements to the rest of the world. There was, however, a catch: they had differing views on why, exactly, this new art was important—and it was in large part their rivalry gave a sense of immediacy to their essays on the new American art. It also pushed them to be exceptionally prolific. Dogged antagonists, they published their essays in combat with one another, and released their anthologies in a syncopation of one-upmanship.
What follows is a rundown of Rosenberg’s theories, as well as how they clash with Greenberg's. Despite their arch-rivalry, it is important to remember they these men were part of a small, tightly-knit community. They saw one another socially—they even sent one another postcards. And it was Rosenberg who introduced Greenberg to the editor of the Partisan Review, the publication for which Greenberg would write his famous essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.”
What follows is a rundown of Rosenberg’s theories, as well as how they clash with Greenberg's. Despite their arch-rivalry, it is important to remember they these men were part of a small, tightly-knit community. They saw one another socially—they even sent one another postcards. And it was Rosenberg who introduced Greenberg to the editor of the Partisan Review, the publication for which Greenberg would write his famous essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.”
WHAT DID HE DO?
Like Clement Greenberg, Rosenberg began his career as a critic writing about politics and culture for small, intellectual, largely Jewish, Marxist-leaning publications like the Partisan Reviewand Commentary. It was in these magazines, as well as in Art News, that much of their critical debate played out.
Rosenberg’s major contribution to criticism was his identification of a new breed of “action painting” and his assertion of the “creative act” of the artist, ideas that he potently stated in his 1952 essay “The American Action Painters.” He wrote: “The new American painting is not ‘pure’ art, since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the aesthetic. The apples weren’t brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color. They had to do so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting.” The essay directly countered Clement Greenberg’s focus on the formal and technical aspects of painting (i.e. the “space and color” to which Rosenberg cheekily refers).
For Rosenberg, Abstract Expressionism was not a continuation of modernism, as Greenberg proposed—it was departure. “With the American, heir of the pioneer and the immigrant, the foundering of Art and Society was not experienced as a loss," he wrote. "On the contrary, the end of Art marked the beginning of an optimism regarding himself as an artist.” For artists, Rosenberg argued, freedom lay in the act of creating art itself: “The big moment came when it was decided to paint... just to PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political, aesthetic, moral.”
Moreover, if art was about doing, then “a painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of an artist,” he wrote. This directly countered Greenberg’s rejection of the biography in favor of analyzing the object. Rosenberg’s focus on action and the individual found a natural extension in his belief in the existential qualities of the new American painting, for “the act on the canvas springs from an attempt to resurrect the saving moment in his ‘story’ when the painter first felt himself released from Value—myth of the past self-recognition.”
Like Greenberg, Rosenberg’s theories applied almost exclusively to painting. Rosenberg reasoned that “Only the blank canvas... offered the opportunity for a doing that would not be seized.... Painting became the means of confronting in daily practice the problematic nature of modern individuality. In this way Action Painting restored a metaphysical point to art.” For Rosenberg, the existential held a central place in painting; for his arch-rival, however, the focus resided on painting’s surface, in its formal qualities.
Along with writing, Rosenberg curated on occasion. He notably co-organized a show of the Abstract Expressionists called "The Intrasubjectives" with Samuel M. Kootz at Kootz’s gallery in 1949. The show included: de Kooning, Wiliam Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Morris Graves, Hans Hofmann, Motherwell, Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Rothko, Mark Tobey, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Kootz selected the roster and show’s title (which came from Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset) but the exhibition’s artists and philosophic nods to subjectivity remained at the core of Rosenberg’s work thereafter, and were therefore synonymous with his byline.
While Rosenberg’s theories did not experience the same backlash as Greenberg’s, Rosenberg did not embrace the next wave of artistic movements like Pop or Minimalism. Rosenberg continued to publish and write for The New Yorker until his death in 1978; his last works included a book on Barnett Newman and an Whitney Museum retrospective of his colleague at The New Yorker, Saul Steinberg.
Rosenberg’s major contribution to criticism was his identification of a new breed of “action painting” and his assertion of the “creative act” of the artist, ideas that he potently stated in his 1952 essay “The American Action Painters.” He wrote: “The new American painting is not ‘pure’ art, since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the aesthetic. The apples weren’t brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color. They had to do so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting.” The essay directly countered Clement Greenberg’s focus on the formal and technical aspects of painting (i.e. the “space and color” to which Rosenberg cheekily refers).
For Rosenberg, Abstract Expressionism was not a continuation of modernism, as Greenberg proposed—it was departure. “With the American, heir of the pioneer and the immigrant, the foundering of Art and Society was not experienced as a loss," he wrote. "On the contrary, the end of Art marked the beginning of an optimism regarding himself as an artist.” For artists, Rosenberg argued, freedom lay in the act of creating art itself: “The big moment came when it was decided to paint... just to PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political, aesthetic, moral.”
Moreover, if art was about doing, then “a painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of an artist,” he wrote. This directly countered Greenberg’s rejection of the biography in favor of analyzing the object. Rosenberg’s focus on action and the individual found a natural extension in his belief in the existential qualities of the new American painting, for “the act on the canvas springs from an attempt to resurrect the saving moment in his ‘story’ when the painter first felt himself released from Value—myth of the past self-recognition.”
Like Greenberg, Rosenberg’s theories applied almost exclusively to painting. Rosenberg reasoned that “Only the blank canvas... offered the opportunity for a doing that would not be seized.... Painting became the means of confronting in daily practice the problematic nature of modern individuality. In this way Action Painting restored a metaphysical point to art.” For Rosenberg, the existential held a central place in painting; for his arch-rival, however, the focus resided on painting’s surface, in its formal qualities.
Along with writing, Rosenberg curated on occasion. He notably co-organized a show of the Abstract Expressionists called "The Intrasubjectives" with Samuel M. Kootz at Kootz’s gallery in 1949. The show included: de Kooning, Wiliam Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Morris Graves, Hans Hofmann, Motherwell, Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Rothko, Mark Tobey, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Kootz selected the roster and show’s title (which came from Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset) but the exhibition’s artists and philosophic nods to subjectivity remained at the core of Rosenberg’s work thereafter, and were therefore synonymous with his byline.
While Rosenberg’s theories did not experience the same backlash as Greenberg’s, Rosenberg did not embrace the next wave of artistic movements like Pop or Minimalism. Rosenberg continued to publish and write for The New Yorker until his death in 1978; his last works included a book on Barnett Newman and an Whitney Museum retrospective of his colleague at The New Yorker, Saul Steinberg.
BONUS FACTS
– Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife, briefly lived with Rosenberg and his wife, May Tabak, in the 1930s.
– He started a short-lived magazine with Robert Motherwell called Possibilities (1947-48).
– Rosenberg played pitcher in the famous 1954 art-world baseball game in East Hampton, and his team—which included Willem and Elaine de Kooning as well as Franz Kline—decided to play a joke on the other team’s star hitter, the artist Philip Pavia. As fabled Art News editor Thomas Hess recounted, the night before the game Kline and the de Koonings “bought two grapefruit and a coconut. They worked until two in the morning sandpapering them and painting them to look exactly like softballs, with all the essential seams, cracks, chiaroscuro, and even a trade label, ‘Pavia Sports Association.’ The next day, when the game was about halfway over, Harold Rosenberg came up to pitch. Pavia was at bat. Rosenberg pitched the first ball. Pavia swung, and it exploded in a great ball of grapefruit juice.”
– Rosenberg had an affair with Elaine de Kooning. Tongues would wag that Willem de Kooning’s painting got very good reviews from Rosenberg as a result.
– Rosenberg, Elaine de Kooning, and Thomas Hess were a regular trio at the Cedar Tavern, the Greenwich Village watering hole and think tank of many Abstract Expressionist. The three made a pact that any one of them was allowed to quote the other two—even if the quote was bogus—if it would win an argument outside of their trio.
– Elaine de Kooning was effusive, if slightly reserved, about Rosenberg’s abilities: “He was brilliant, just brilliant. He was a man of ideas. He was profoundly intelligent, and very funny. I mean, he knew almost everything. Everything except how to look at a painting. He would stand in front of a painting—Bill’s [Willem de Kooning] painting, Franz’s [Kline] painting, anybody’s painting—and talk about great ideas.... But it didn’t matter because he wrote those brilliant articles which made nothing absolutely clear and made everything about art totally fascinating.”
– Even Greenberg appreciated Rosenberg’s illuminations (on occasion). As “Clem” wrote to his friend Harold Lazarus, “Rosenberg’s piece [“On the Fall of Paris”] was badly & dishonestly written & yet was good. Good in spite of the things that made me grit my teeth, in spite of the rotten pretentiousness that came through and the utter lack of feeling for the language” (January 6, 1941).
– Rosenberg had wanted to be a tango dancer but couldn’t pursue it after an illness left him with a bad leg.
– He started a short-lived magazine with Robert Motherwell called Possibilities (1947-48).
– Rosenberg played pitcher in the famous 1954 art-world baseball game in East Hampton, and his team—which included Willem and Elaine de Kooning as well as Franz Kline—decided to play a joke on the other team’s star hitter, the artist Philip Pavia. As fabled Art News editor Thomas Hess recounted, the night before the game Kline and the de Koonings “bought two grapefruit and a coconut. They worked until two in the morning sandpapering them and painting them to look exactly like softballs, with all the essential seams, cracks, chiaroscuro, and even a trade label, ‘Pavia Sports Association.’ The next day, when the game was about halfway over, Harold Rosenberg came up to pitch. Pavia was at bat. Rosenberg pitched the first ball. Pavia swung, and it exploded in a great ball of grapefruit juice.”
– Rosenberg had an affair with Elaine de Kooning. Tongues would wag that Willem de Kooning’s painting got very good reviews from Rosenberg as a result.
– Rosenberg, Elaine de Kooning, and Thomas Hess were a regular trio at the Cedar Tavern, the Greenwich Village watering hole and think tank of many Abstract Expressionist. The three made a pact that any one of them was allowed to quote the other two—even if the quote was bogus—if it would win an argument outside of their trio.
– Elaine de Kooning was effusive, if slightly reserved, about Rosenberg’s abilities: “He was brilliant, just brilliant. He was a man of ideas. He was profoundly intelligent, and very funny. I mean, he knew almost everything. Everything except how to look at a painting. He would stand in front of a painting—Bill’s [Willem de Kooning] painting, Franz’s [Kline] painting, anybody’s painting—and talk about great ideas.... But it didn’t matter because he wrote those brilliant articles which made nothing absolutely clear and made everything about art totally fascinating.”
– Even Greenberg appreciated Rosenberg’s illuminations (on occasion). As “Clem” wrote to his friend Harold Lazarus, “Rosenberg’s piece [“On the Fall of Paris”] was badly & dishonestly written & yet was good. Good in spite of the things that made me grit my teeth, in spite of the rotten pretentiousness that came through and the utter lack of feeling for the language” (January 6, 1941).
– Rosenberg had wanted to be a tango dancer but couldn’t pursue it after an illness left him with a bad leg.
“On the Fall of Paris” (Partisan Review,1940)
– “The American Action Painters” (Art News, 1952)
– The Tradition of the New (1959)
– The Anxious Object (1964)
– The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks(1972)
– Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (1975)
– “The American Action Painters” (Art News, 1952)
– The Tradition of the New (1959)
– The Anxious Object (1964)
– The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks(1972)
– Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (1975)
Know Your Critics: What Did Clement Greenberg Do?
July 21, 2014
The critic Clement Greenberg
Possibly the most renowned art critic in American history, Clement Greenberg(1904-1994) held sway for years in the postwar period over not only the popular perception of contemporary art being made in this country but also how the artists themselves thought about it and brought it into being in their studios. While his reign eventually came to an end, with opinion turning against his dogmatic edicts, his ideas—which he published in the pages of the Partisan Review, theNation, and Commentary—remain a critical touchstone for anyone trying to grasp the Abstract Expressionists, the Washington Color School painters, and others who were engaged in formalist, "non-objective" art, as abstraction was called back then. What follows is a précis on Greenberg's key accomplishments.
WHAT DID HE DO?
Greenberg admiring an especially flat painting by Kenneth Noland
Greenberg admiring an especially flat painting by Kenneth Noland
As a prolific critic, Clement Greenberg developed his theories on the page—as he put it, “I would not deny being one of those critics who educate themselves in public.” Greenberg’s intensely influential focus was on the notion of “formal purity.” Through his praise of Hans Hofmann in the Nation in 1945, Greenberg described his own critical priorities: “I find the same quality in Hofmann’s painting that I find in his words—both are completely relevant. His painting is all painting; none of it is publicity, mode or literature. It deals with the crucial problems of contemporary painting on its highest level in the most radical and uncompromising way, asserting that painting exists first of all in its medium and must there resolve itself before going on to do anything else.”
If Greenberg’s mode of coming up with his theories was an improvisitory work in progress, his bets on artists were at times visionary. His first mention of Jackson Pollock—almost thefirst mention of the artist in print—was in a 1943 review forThe Nation: “There is both surprise and fulfillment in Jackson Pollock’s not so abstract abstractions. He is the first painter I know of to have got something positive from the muddiness of color that so profoundly characterizes a great deal of American painting.” While he critiqued Pollock’s larger paintings as the artist taking “orders he can’t fill,” Greenberg did find the smaller work “much more conclusive… among the strongest abstract paintings I have yet seen by an American."
As Pollock developed from his early abstractions to the “drip” paintings for which he is known, his work fell more into Greenberg’s ideal—painting about space and color and, above all, about painting itself. Greenberg argued in his 1948 essay “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” that “the dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility.”
For Greenberg, the new artistic expression followed Hans Hoffman’s “dissolution of the subject”—and thus moved away from the recent, still subject-bound European movements like Surrealism or even Cubism. Nonetheless, Greenberg maintained that this advancement from subject matter towards the flatness of the picture plane was part of a continuum—an evolution that began with Manet, who he held created the first "Modernist pictures," and saw its flowering in Abstract Expressionism. In fact, he felt that flatness was "more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism," because, he explained, "flatness alone [is] unique and exclusive to pictorial art.")
But Greenberg did not want that evolution to reverse. When Pollock started to move away from drip painting, and de Kooning showed his less-than-totally-abstract Women series at the Sidney Janis Gallery, Greenberg was not pleased. He soon moved away to champion a new group of artists who were emerging in the nation's capital, the Washington Color Field painters—a group including Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Morris Louis who achieved what the critic considered highly admirable flatness by pouring thin paint directly into the weave of their canvases.
As time went on, Greenberg's orthodoxy when it came to his bans on figuration and multidimensional texture in painting became ripe for a backlash among artists seeking non-Greenberg-ian ideals. Enter Rauschenberg and Johns.
BONUS FACTS
A day at the beach with (from left) Jackson Pollock, Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, and Lee Krasner
A day at the beach with (from left) Jackson Pollock, Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, and Lee Krasner
– Greenberg and Helen Frankenthaler, 24 years his junior, were romantically involved from 1950 to 1955 and remained close until the critic's death.
– He curated on occasion, notably a show called “Talent 1950” with Meyer Schapiro at the Samuel Kootz gallery that featured figures like Franz Kline, Elaine de Kooning, and Larry Rivers alongside the now-forgotten Esteban Vicente, Al Leslie, and Manny Farber.
– Greenberg had enemies. But he also had a decades-long correspondence with his college friend Harold Lazarus. The letters, posthumously anthologized by Greenberg’s widow, pulse with humanity. From “Clem” to Harold: “Yes, the honors pile. But I want gossip, sexual intrigue, back-biting and hair undoing. I want women, confidences, confessions & broken hearts. Dissipation, indiscretions, glitter, dash, sparkle, sin” (September 25, 1940). On art writing: “Everyone dislikes technical criticism of painting; and there’s no other decent kind. What’s wanted is horseshit. And the horseshit is so easy to write brilliantly, but I shan’t” (September 25, 1940).
– In 1966, the English artist John Latham held an event called "Still and Chew" at which he invited attendees to chew pages of Greenberg’s Art and Culture. Fermented and distilled, the masticated book was then returned to the St. Martin’s School of Art library. MoMA acquired the vials in 1969.
– Greenberg also moonlighted as a poet.
MAJOR WORKS
– “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (Partisan Review, 1939)
– “Towards a New Laocoon” (Partisan Review, 1940)
– “Abstract Art” (The Nation, 1944)
– “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” (Partisan Review, 1948)
– “American Type Painting” (Partisan Review, 1955)– “Modernist Painting” (Voice of America lecture, 1961)
– “After Abstract Expressionism” (Art International, 1962)
– Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961
– “Towards a New Laocoon” (Partisan Review, 1940)
– “Abstract Art” (The Nation, 1944)
– “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” (Partisan Review, 1948)
– “American Type Painting” (Partisan Review, 1955)– “Modernist Painting” (Voice of America lecture, 1961)
– “After Abstract Expressionism” (Art International, 1962)
– Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961
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