Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art

Abstract

In the issue of Partisan Review for Fall 1939 appeared an article by Clement Greenberg entitled Avant-Garde and Kitsch. It was followed four issues later, in July-August 1940, by another wide-ranging essay on modern art, Towards a Newer Laocoon.1 These two articles, I believe, stake out the ground for Greenberg's later practice as a critic and set down the main lines of a theory and history of culture since 1850-since, shall we say, Courbet and Baudelaire. Greenberg reprinted AvantGarde and Kitsch, making no attempt to tone down its mordant hostility to capitalism, as the opening item of his collection of critical essays, Art and Culture, in 1961. Towards a Newer Laocoon was not reprinted, perhaps because the author felt that its arguments were made more effectively in some of his later, more particular pieces included inArt and Culture-the essays on Collage or Cezanne, for example, or the brief paragraphs on Abstract, Representational, and So Forth. I am not sure that the author was right to omit the piece: it is noble, lucid, and extraordinarily balanced, it seems to me, in its defense of abstract art and avant-garde culture; and certainly its arguments are taken up directly, sometimes almost verbatim, in the more famous theoretical study which appeared in Art and Literature (Spring 1965) with the balder title Modernist Painting.