Volume 40, Number 17 · October 21, 1993
The Medium Inquisitor
By Robert Hughes
Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944 (1986)
edited by John O'Brian
University of Chicago Press, 270 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949 (1986)
edited by John O'Brian
University of Chicago Press, 353 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956
edited by John O'Brian
University of Chicago Press, 305 pp., $29.95
Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1959–1969
edited by John O'Brian
University of Chicago Press, 341 pp., $29.95
A phrase that has long echoed in discussions of American art was 'as Clem Greenberg said,…' but the difficulty, until now, has been to know what that was. Clement Greenberg, for a slew of reasons, was the most influential art critic in American history. (He is still alive at eighty-four, but he abandoned critical writing long ago and shows no sign of resuming it; thus the past tense.) He was also nearly the last, and by far the best-known, of the self-taught art critics; practically no one goes into this field today without an armor-plating of specialized degrees in art history, but such things were not considered necessary fifty years ago, when most American art criticism was written by poets, painters, polemicists, and enthusiastic amateurs.
Review, 6177 words
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