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writings |
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a series of writings on
various topics related to art, aesthetics and art history derived from
research, lectures delivered during my university teaching career – plus the
occasional new [stray] thought. |
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CLEMENT
GREENBERG |
Greenberg’s essay written for
the Partisan Review - As relevant today as when originally written in
1938 Perhaps
the most important art critic of the Twentieth Century, Clement Greenberg served
as the editor of Partisan Review and as art critic for The Nation.
The author of many influential essays, he drew a sharp distinction between
the deliberate difficulty and contentious innovations of contemporary art and
the degraded yet accessible products of mass culture, most particularly in
the piece "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" published here. Greenberg
championed Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting for their inspired
marriage of content to form, and was influential in the careers of a number
of major artists, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Kenneth Noland,
as well as Barnett Newman, David Smith, Jules Olitski, and Friedel Dzubas. Laboring to explain the aesthetics of these new movements, he coined the phrase “post-painterly abstraction,” where "painterly" is defined as the blurry and imprecise. He emphasized the pure formal elements of abstract painting, such as its flat space, monumental scale, and patches of undiluted color. |
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