Critic and Creep

ART CZAR: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg.

By Alice Goldfarb Marquis. MFA Publications. 321 pp. $35

This is the second biog­raphy of Clement Greenberg, king­maker to that group of artists now known as Abstract Ex­pres­sionists, to appear since his death in 1994. And Alice Goldfarb Marquis, like the earlier biographer, Florence Rubenfeld, can’t help noticing that Greenberg was a terrible, terrible man. He socked people at cocktail parties, ne­glected his wives and children, whinged through an abbreviated tour of military duty, tormented his comfortably middle-class parents, scorned low-class “Jews that wear jewelry,” bullied and manipulated his friends. He was a selfish, lying, cheating, arrogant, lazy, misogynistic SOB. In his 1998 New Yorker review of the Rubenfeld biography, art critic Adam Gopnik seized upon the moment when character became destiny: During a visit to the countryside, five-year-old Clement pursued an unsuspecting tame goose and clubbed it to death with a shovel.  “Anyone familiar with the varieties of popular biography,” wrote Gopnik, “can sense the future as it approaches: the slow escalation in targets, the growing taste for blood, the rise to bigger and uglier assaults, the sordid end. The die is cast; the boy will become an art critic.”

Of course: Art criticism isn’t for mensches. Yet as Marquis wends her way toward Greenberg’s “sordid end,” a reader may begin to feel, if not admiration, at least a measure of interest. Greenberg treated himself with the same cruelty he meted out to others—drank with a vengeance, chain-smoked, drugged himself to sleep every night, alternately promoted and subverted his career all the way to his grave. If not exactly loyal, he proved perversely stubborn: Having anointed Jackson Pollock and Kenneth Noland as the only true heirs to Impressionism, he stuck to his bet in an age of critical opportunism. He revised his work obsessively, read serious books, and, deeply and continually, relished ideas. In a harrowing kind of way, he was fun.

Greenberg was born in 1909 in New York City. Literature was his first love. He majored in English at Syracuse University, then mostly lolly­gagged around his parents’ house in Brooklyn, reading and sleeping, until his aggrieved father sent him out west to supervise the family necktie business. Greenberg’s sojourn lasted only long enough for him to marry, knock up, and abandon his first wife, after which he fled back to New York, to hole up with “that herd of independent minds,” as Lionel Trilling called the intellectuals of his day, in Greenwich Village. Sur­rounded by his betters in the field he loved most, literary criticism, Greenberg found the visual arts wide open for interpretation. Writing about art for The Nation and Partisan Review in the 1940s and ’50s, Greenberg filled a critical void. His take-no-prisoners tone easily upstaged the gee-whiz art appreciation of Life and Time.

Greenberg’s relationships with Pollock, Noland, Helen Frankenthaler (his love interest for several years), David Smith, Morris Louis, and other Modernists weren’t so much appreciative as dictatorial. Clem separated the “good” paintings from the “bad” ones, steered the artist in a given direction, then mounted a critical offensive, telling the viewing public what it needed to know. Along the way he inspired Tom Wolfe’s facetious guide to abstract art, The Painted Word (1975).

As a student at Bennington College, I witnessed the critic’s power one afternoon in 1975. Greenberg was visiting Ken Noland in nearby Shaftsbury, Vermont (dating one of Noland’s friends gave me guest credentials). The entourages of painter and critic waited in suspenseful silence as Greenberg entered Noland’s studio and began examining the target paintings. “What if you turned these around?” Greenberg finally demanded, meaning, what if the squares were turned into diamonds? A studio assistant hopped to; Greenberg nodded. A few months later, a show of diamond-shaped Nolands appeared on 57th Street.

Marquis, author of The Art Biz: The Covert World of Collectors, Dealers, Auction Houses, Museums, and Critics (1991) and Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare (2002), writes engagingly, making a reasonable case for Greenberg’s enduring importance, a dozen years after his death. He didn’t “rise and fall” so much as rise and fade away, obscured and eventually buried under Pop Art (which he despised), Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel, the vile careerism of the 1980s, and whatever’s come next. Now that we’ve begun to look back on the 1950s and ’60s as a time of high seriousness—it’s all relative—Greenberg’s star will likely rise again.

—Ann Loftin