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Harold Rosenberg: Detail View. Noted for his dogmatic formalism, Clement Greenberg refused to engage purely speculative assertions about the content of paintings and sculptures and concentrated instead on discussing the details of depicted shape, color, and line. Only by attending to these formal matters, he argued, could a critic make ...
Figurative art, and the sorts of anecdotal subjects that were common of American painting. Rosenberg' emphasis on the creative act - at the expense of the formal aspects of an artwork - meant that abstraction was a less important quality for him than for Greenberg. However, that is not to say that his tastes were broader than his rival's - in ...
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- Apollo and Dionysus
- Diverging Viewpoints
- Similar Paths
- Tiring of The Dialectic
In The Birth of Tragedy, his youthful interpretation of Greek drama, written in 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that great classic art was predicated on the balance of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses—“Apollonian” after the sun god Apollo, with his “measured restraint, the freedom from the wilder emotions, that calm of the sculptor god”; and “Dion...
“Action” versus “detachment,” “liberation from value” versus an art “resting on rationality”—an exhibition now at The Jewish Museum in New York called “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976,” organized by Norman Kleeblatt, tracks these two critics and the ideals they represented through the artists they endorsed and t...
See these artists together today and you probably notice the similarities before you see the differences. In fact, before he introduced subject matter into his paintings in the 1950s, de Kooning was an abstractionist admired by Greenberg. When photographs and movies of Pollock’s drip dance emerged in the 1950s, observers took him to be the ultimate...
What eventually happened to the Greenberg-Rosenberg “family row” is indicative of the fate of culture in the latter half of the past century. It wasn't that one side won out; it was rather that art moved on. The Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic that at one point established the outer limits of art proved ill-equipped at containing and contending with...
Action Painting is predicated on the idea that the creative process involves a dialogue between the artist and the canvas. Just as the artist affects the canvas by making a mark on it, that mark in turn affects the artist and determines the trajectory of the next mark. As Rosenberg explained, "Each stroke had to be a decision and was answered ...
Greenberg’s intellectual nemesis and foil was American critic Harold Rosenberg. Greenberg attacked him, without naming him, in an essay on the “bad name” given art criticism by critics who viewed art in “lifeworld,” rather than formal, terms. In fact, Rosenberg, a dialectician and existentialist, famously described the canvas as “an ...
And his stress on the expressive and thematic content of their art ultimately made his writing more popular - at least in the 1950s - than the formalist criticism of his rival, Clement Greenberg. Originally a contributor to fringe, leftist magazines such as The Partisan Review , Rosenberg went on to the influential post of art critic for The New Yorker .
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that will do more than repeat the beliefs of the historical actors under the guise of historical analysis. It is common knowledge within the academic community to observe that Greenberg's art criticism has triumphed over Rosenberg's. However, it must be recognized that this was so not because of the inherent quality of
