Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1541403 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-18
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.03 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In her first book, arts journalist Rubenfeld demonstrates that it is possible to delve into aesthetic precepts while giving an absorbing account of a life. As she notes, the death of American art critic Clement Greenberg in 1994 was treated as a nonevent by the New York art world. That was not the case with his life. Born in 1909 to Polish Jewish immigrants, Greenberg joined the heady mix of New York modernists who felt that the arts could change society. An English graduate from Syracuse University with no formal background in visual art, Greenberg championed the cause of American post-WWII vanguard art, often leaving a trail of enmity and even, in the case of David Smith's estate, near scandal in his wake. His personal life was no less turbulent, largely because he aligned himself with Newtonian psychiatrists who reduced marriage to a series of "musical beds." What distinguishes this book is Rubenfeld's combination of prodigious research (much of it in the form of interviews with art world personalities) and her clear explanation of the intellectual trends Greenberg espoused or that grew up in reaction to him?all of which she does without the deadening gigantism of some biographies. Deftly written in an evenhanded tone, this is both a chronicle of one man's highs and lows, and an intriguing behind-the-scenes look at the art world. It will appeal to anyone interested in 20th-century art or simply in a good story, convincingly told.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Rubenfeld's is the first major biography of Clement Greenberg, the art critic everyone loves to hate, and it is superb on all counts. Greenberg was a bully who meddled in the lives and with the work of the artists he championed, who used his fists as readily as his pen, and who outraged the art establishment with his lack of credentials, "godlike arrogance," "unethical behavior," and enormous influence, but he possessed a keen eye, a passion for bold and original art, and a gift for extraordinarily influential critical writing. Rubenfeld deftly analyzes Greenberg's conflicted attitudes toward his own Jewishness and pro-Marxist politics, and interweaves personal, intellectual, and aesthetic strands into her chronicle of his abrupt leap from editor at the Partisan Review to oracle of the New York art world, when he declared abstract expressionism this kingdom's lingua franca and Jackson Pollock its king. Greenberg blazed a path not only for "radically new art" but also for a completely new way of seeing. His landmark essays do embody criticism at its most presumptuous but also at its most exalted and heroic. Art mattered then, and Greenberg made sure people knew why. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
A sympathetic biography of the controversial critic who championed the abstract expressionist school as early as 1944, when he anointed Jackson Pollock and a few others as the ``future of American painting.'' The bristly Greenberg, who died in 1994, began writing literary and art criticism and essays in the '30s, while working for the US Customs Service in New York. His classic manifesto ``Avante-Garde and Kitsch,'' published in the Partisan Review in 1939, distinguished high art from popular middle-class diversions, arguing that it was the function of the avant-garde not to experiment but to find a path along which culture can keep moving. In his celebration of artists like Willem de Kooning, Pollock, Morris Louis, and David Smith (and in his sweeping denunciation of Pop art), Greenberg, who in later years wrote for the Nation and Commentary, developed a reputation as a fighter, his power and influence earning him vocal enemies. Rubenfeld, a former East Coast editor for the New Art Examiner, notes the influence on Greenberg's criticism of T.S. Eliot, a sometime Partisan Review contributor, from whom Greenberg may have drawn in formulating his ideas on modern art and its relation to earlier traditions. Usefully locating Greenberg in the context of American art-world politics and letters, and making a persuasive case for his importance, she makes no apologies for the critic, who could be both brilliant and devastating in his opinions, even of his friends' work. His personal life as presented here was a series of fractured relationships. But as Rubenfeld notes, when he committed critically to an artist's work, he committed personally as well, forging close social ties with many of the painters and sculptors whose work he was drawn to, though these positions of influence sometimes led to inevitable questions of conflict of interest. A clear and honest summary of the life of one of the most pugnacious, influential, and original critics of modern art. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.