Clement Greenberg was born in the Bronx in 1909, the child of
Jewish immigrants from Polish Lithuania. He attended Syracuse
University, spent three years sleeping late, reading, and
frequenting museums, and then toured the country as a traveling
salesman for a necktie business owned by his father. By 1935 he was
back in New York working at a routine civil service job. One could
hardly have predicted that from these inauspicious beginnings would
emerge one of the century's premier cultural critics. In 1939 he
wrote "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", the landmark essay that catapulted
him from anonymity to the center of a stellar group of
intellectuals known as the Partisan Review crowd - Saul Bellow,
Irving Howe, Meyer Schapiro, and Lionel Trilling, among others. The
subject of Greenberg's essay was modern society examined through
popular culture and painterly abstraction. It was his uncanny
response to the form abstraction was going to take in advanced
American painting that placed him - with no formal training in art
history - at the apex of the art world for the next fifty years.
Greenberg's independent opinions and combative style soon made him
enemies. Greenberg criticized the taste of the Museum of Modern
Art, while he sang the praises of artists such as Jackson Pollock,
Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and David Smith when few in the
art world took them seriously. By the end of the forties, when his
ideas began appearing in Life, Time, and Newsweek, the
establishment was compelled to react. Florence Rubenfeld traces the
rise and fall of this impassioned and provocative critic, telling
his story, in part, through his words and the words of the dazzling
array of personalities who surroundedhim. She provides a new
assessment of his profound contribution to art criticism, insights
into his influences and identity, and an engaging social history of
an infamous postwar milieu, peopled by brilliant intellectuals and
ground-breaking artists. Clement Greenberg: A Life is an
authoritative account of a remarkable man and the vibrant New York
art world he helped to define.
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