At the height of his influence as an art critic, Greenberg was in “Sullivanian” psychotherapy, the same cult I was later exposed to as a child.
Clement Greenberg
Posted inArt
Hey, Nobody’s Perfect!
I’ve never read something by one of my peers and thought ‘s/he’s mistaken!’ Although I have often disagreed. Whose mistake is that? It’s not the writer’s.
Posted inArt
‘Women of Abstract Expressionism’ Challenges the Canon But Is Only the Beginning
DENVER — The story goes like this. It is 1950. Virginia born painter Judith Godwin learns that dancer and choreographer Martha Graham will be in the region and all Godwin can think about is her desire for Graham to perform in Staunton at the all women’s school she attended, Mary Baldwin College.
Posted inArt
From Michelangelo to Marden, Seven Fierce Fistfights from Art History
WASHINGTON, DC — In her ongoing series Le ‘NEW’ Monocle, Shana Lutker creates stage sets and performances based on the circumstances and philosophical undertones of fistfights instigated by Surrealists in Paris in the 1920s.
Posted inArt
Painting as Super Model
Yve-Alain Bois’s book Painting as Model was written twenty odd years ago and continues to be an important text, providing conceptual fodder for many contemporary art practices.
Posted inArt
Airplane Art Through the Ages
This World Cup, the Brazilian national soccer team has been taking its characteristic flair to new heights. It has been flying to its games in a Boeing 737 painted by identical twin street artists Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, better known as Os Gêmeos.
Posted inNews
‘Partisan Review’ Digitizes 70-Year Archive
The archives of Partisan Review, the totemic 20th-century journal of politics and the arts, have finally been fully digitized.
Posted inArt
Art and the Politics of Acceptance: A Conversation With Peter Selz
Peter Selz — prolific curator, art historian, and an instrumental figure in the scholarship on modern art — hardly bears introduction.
Posted inArt
Some Thoughts on Clement Greenberg and His Legacy
In his introductory essay to Vitamin P, a survey of contemporary painting first published by Phaidon in 2002, the poet and critic Barry Schwabsky takes pains to point out the variety of stylistic positions available to a contemporary painter. In doing so, Schwabsky suggests that there is no single identifying characteristic that would disqualify a contemporary painting from critical consideration today. This state of openness was not always the case. In my opinion, however, the receptivity that Schwabsky claims for painting is not actually an accurate characterization of the current situation, where success is generally judged by an artist’s standing in the marketplace.
Posted inOpinion
Clement Greenberg in Tweetable Form
The fad for fake art personas has passed. They were soo 2010, though they lingered into 2011. Perhaps tired of the fakery, someone has decided to rekindle the words of the maestro of Modernism into 140 characters or less, @Clem_Greenberg.
Posted inArt
The Uses of Dismemberment: MoMA’s Exquisite Corpses
Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, as discussed in last week’s post, was assembled out of discarded body parts — an exhumed limb here, a torso there — with everything “awkwardly sewn into a corporeal pastiche.”
Posted inArt
Looking Beyond Pollock’s Drip Paintings
Abstract Expressionist New York shines a bright and bold light on Jackson Pollock. Although the selection on view is obviously not as extensive as MoMA’s major retrospective in 1998-99, the show is still a rare and precious opportunity to see many of Pollock’s paintings under one roof.
His paintings are often crudely divided into two categories. On the hand, there are the mighty drip paintings — where splatters and splotches of paint dance across the picture plane. Then, there is everything else.
