What is the Grinberg Method?

Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) was the most important art critic in the United States in the second half of the 20th century, and one of the most important art critics in the entire West during this period. Greenberg was born in the Bronx, New York City on January 16, 1909. He is the eldest of three brothers in the family and his father is a grocery store owner. The 1940s were the most active period of Greenberg. From 1940 to 1942 he was the editor of the Partisan Review. From 42 to 49, he regularly wrote art reviews for Nation magazine.

Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) was the most important art critic in the United States in the second half of the 20th century, and one of the most important art critics in the entire West during this period. Greenberg was born in the Bronx, New York City on January 16, 1909. He is the eldest of three brothers in the family and his father is a grocery store owner. The 1940s were the most active period of Greenberg. From 1940 to 1942 he was the editor of the Partisan Review. From 42 to 49, he regularly wrote art reviews for Nation magazine.

Clement Greenberg

Text / Shen Yubing (Professor and Doctoral Supervisor of Zhejiang University)

He was said to be the main spokesman of American "Abstract Expressionism", and it was he who made Pollock, Rothko and other American or immigrant painters on the world stage. Since his main point represented the codification of modernist art theory, he became the watershed between modernism and postmodernism. Almost everyone who sympathized or supported modernism defended him, while at the same time, almost all postmodernists first pointed him at criticism. Author of "Art and Culture", "Simple Aesthetics", "Greenberg's Collected Works of Art Criticism" (volume 1-4), etc.

In 1914 they moved to Norfolk, Virginia. Six years later, the Greenbergs returned to New York, this time settling in Brooklyn, and his father became a manufacturer.

Greenberg graduated from a public high school and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Sarakus in 1930. He couldn't find a job after graduation, so he taught himself German, Italian, French and Latin. From 1933 he worked with his father in the textile wholesale business, but Clement resigned in 1935. The following year, Greenberg began working for the federal government, initially with the Civil Service Commission, and in 1937 he was transferred to the Appraiser's Division of the Customs Service in New York Harbor. The latter post gave him time to become a prose writer. In 1939, Greenberg published his first review article, which was a review of the drama " A Penny for the Poor " by the German drama master Brecht. Since then, he began a 50-year career in literary criticism.

In 1944, he accepted the position of executive editor of the Contemporary Jewish Record. When the magazine was acquired by Commentary, Grignard was appointed assistant editor, and he remained in that position until 1957.

Until 1941, Greenberg's criticism was limited to literature. In May of the same year, he published an article on Paul Klee in the National Magazine, and he has been involved in artistic criticism ever since. However, his artistic outlook and methodology have long matured in two theoretical articles. They are "The Avant Garde and Kitsch" (1939) and "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (1940) published in the "Party Review" a few years ago.

In the edgy and vulgar article, Greenberg claims that avant-garde or modernist art is a means of rejecting capitalist cultural and industrial products. He used Kitsch to describe this vulgar art of consumerism (by the German word Kitsch, which originally meant "junk", and later used to describe those sentimental, tear-dropping popular operas and other low-interest artworks, so there are translations It is "kitsch" or "kitsch art". But in Chinese, the word "kitsch" appears more with the name of Czech writer Kundera, with too much philosophical and political meaning given to it by Kundera Therefore, I directly translated Greenberg's Kitsch into "vulgar" or "vulgar art.") Avant-garde art, like modern philosophy, explores those conditions of our experience and understanding of the world. It does not simply provide information about the world, as do those methods that accurately depict the surface phenomena of the world.

"Avantgarde and Vulgarity" is also a response to the national art that destroyed and suppressed modernist art in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but replaced it with "Aryan art" or "socialist realism". Political motivations of the liberal left. But, as progressive intellectuals from all over the world were more or less inclined to the left, Greenberg's political care was not surprising. At the same time, the political care of modern intellectuals cannot be interpreted as a more mechanical argument that art should directly serve politics. Nothing is more absurd than this analogy! Since Baudelaire, outstanding modernists have insisted on a certain partisan stance. However, almost none of them would think that art directly assigned to politics would be good art. This is the proposition of the tension between political concern and artistic autonomy, which is why it is so important in understanding all modernist narratives and theories (about the partisan nature of modernism and the tension between autonomous art and realistic care) For details, see the humble work "What is Modernism?", Which contains Art Criticism in the 20th Century, China Academy of Art Press, 2003 edition, p. 3-51). Therefore, there is nothing farther than the naive idea that Greenberg's partisan stance determines that he is a politician of state policy! Because, the starting point of Greenberg's critical career and his final destination are both the insistence on the tension between the artist's social care and his aesthetic autonomy.

To be precise, Greenberg's artistic view is a dialectic of Marxist politics and Bauhaus aesthetics. Greenberg traces the origins of vulgar art to the social differentiation brought about by the Industrial Revolution, the rise of cultural popularization, and the birth of the cheap art market. He classified not only the official art of Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union, but also the bulk of the cultural and artistic products of American capitalism as vulgar art.

In Greenberg's view, the rejection of vulgar art, in turn, requires a firm defense of high art. But he had a special model of advanced art in his mind. Greenberg wrote this article during a rather chaotic art period in the United States, when there were four major art movements in the United States: "American-scene", social realists, social Cubist American Abstract Artists (Surrealism) and Surrealism (Surrealism, never took root in the United States, but because of the arrival of many European surrealist artists, it is also quite influential).

Greenberg has no interest in the first two; to him, they are basically vulgar arts that serve politics. He also looked down on Surrealism, which he believed was a step backward to the fictional concept of painting (a window to the imaginary world). In the 1940s, it was not clear whether the main channel of modernist painting would be surrealism or abstract. Greenberg's continuous and sometimes combative arguments played a key role in deviating from the former ideas to the latter.

Avant-garde and Vulgar represents Greenberg's early view of avant-garde art. He rarely used the term "Avant Garde" later. Instead, as his art criticism theory matured, he increasingly used "advanced art" and "important art" ( major art). Moreover, in the development of his later thoughts, the sharp opposition of "advanced and vulgar" also began to loosen. Greenberg later thought that what threatened avant-garde art was not vulgar art, but "middlebrow." In fact, in "Avantgarde and Vulgarity", one can already read the potential of this change. Because in Greenberg's analysis of the social background of the birth of vulgar art, there is already a recognition that modern vulgar art is just a continuation of folk art in traditional society. Just as there is folk culture and folk art in any traditional society, in a modern urban society, vulgar art has its existence rationality. Therefore, in the mature Greenberg's view, the challenge to avant-garde art no longer comes from vulgar art, but to mean art. What is Golden Mean? It is fake avant-garde art, no avant-garde art with no interest or low interest. In his mind, the typical mean art is pop art.

Therefore, in Greenberg, "avant-garde" refers more to an attitude, that is, an avant-garde attitude, an attitude against established artistic language and academia. This understanding also forms the basis of British and American general understanding of avant-garde art. This point makes Greenberg's avant-garde art theory very different from the avant-garde theory (or avant-garde theory) of German aesthetician Peter Bigger. [For details, see Beagle's "Avant-garde Theory", translated by Gao Jianping, Commercial Press, 2002 edition; and Shen Yubing's "Guide to Reading Classical Literature of Art Science · Art Volume" (Beijing Normal University Press, 2010 edition) Reviews of art theory. ]

Greenberg's early thought was heavily influenced by Karl Marx and Hans Hofmann. Grignard's research on Marxist theory made him interested in avant-garde art, because avant-garde art implies that abstraction is a revolutionary form, far from the popular taste of American narrative painting. But for Greenberg, the more important influence came from German artist and art educator Hans Huffman. From 1938 to 39, Greenberg attended Huffman's evening school. There, Huffman emphasized the formal quality of painting-the "push-pull relationship" of colors, lines, planes and various shapes on a flat canvas. He developed these ideas in his criticism in the 1940s and 1950s, forging them into a unique tool of criticism.

In the mid-1940s, Greenberg was the first abstract artist to support the New York School such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell. And David Smith. At the time, let's not say that the American public has not yet realized the significance of these avant-garde artists, and even the majority of American critics do not think that these New York artists are of any significance. Only a handful of critics support this group of artists, and Greenberg is the most determined of them. Readers should pay attention to this historical moment. When Greenberg supported American abstract expressionist artists, did the Cold War begin?

In December 1950, Greenberg joined the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, a division of the World Cultural Freedom Committee, headquartered in Paris. This historical fact has become the main source of the false words that later generations attacked him as the politician of American foreign policy. However, to date, there is no evidence that Greenberg's critical writing was directly assigned to the commission, or indirectly to the CIA, nor is there any evidence that as the most influential art institution in the United States at that time-New York Museum of Modern Art ( MOMA)-involved in the Cold War of the US government. So, what should Greenberg explain when he joins the American Council on Cultural Freedom? O'Brian, the editor of Greenberg's four-volume essay (he is neither an admirer of Greenberg nor a detractor of Greenberg, but a more objective and neutral scholar) believes that this A move can only be interpreted as a symbol of the general political turn of the left intellectuals in New York. These left intellectuals (who used to be fanatical Marxists) who were generally disappointed with communism, which appeared in Stalin's socialist model in reality, could only do so through symbolic acts of "stand-in" Demonstrate your defence of freedom.

Since the publication of French-speaking Canadian Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art , American abstract expressionist artists have Suffering from the hunger of the "cold warrior", as if the avant-garde artists who had been ignored for a long time, once again became the street mouse that everyone shouted and beat. However, even this Mr. Gulbert, who has a strong French cultural chauvinism, can still openly state in his book: "My intention is not to say that the avant-garde artists say Cheng has a clear political motive, nor is it intended to imply that their actions are the product of some kind of conspiracy. "(Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War , Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 3) Ironically, future generations would not be addicted if they did not falsify the originator's views into conspiracy theories.

At the end of the last century, Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of a large-scale investigation on the "CIA and the Cultural Cold War", interviewed Val as an assistant to the curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art from 1954 to 1961. Waldo Rasmussen (director since 1961). Rasmussen told the author:

There are a series of articles on the relationship between the International Exhibition Program of the Museum of Modern Art and cultural propaganda; some even suggest that the plan is related to the CIA. Since I happened to work there for a few years, I can say that this is completely false. The focus of the international project is on arts-it has nothing to do with politics, it has nothing to do with propaganda. In fact, it is extremely important for an American museum to avoid the hint of cultural propaganda; it is for this reason that it is not always advantageous to contact the U.S. Embassy or a U.S. government official because These exhibitions are intended to promote, but in fact they are not. (Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War , London, Granta Books, 1999, p. 268)

In the end, even Ms. Sanders, the author who tried hard to expose the material, had to admit: "There is no preliminary evidence that there was a formal agreement between the CIA and the Museum of Modern Art." for any formal agreement between the CIA and the Museum of Modern Art ", Ibid., p.264) However, the" hate school "(borrowing the term from Harold Bloom) around the world does not Will stop there. Miss Sanders said blatantly: "In fact, it is not necessary at all." But as the American scholar Irving Sandler pointed out: American abstraction to the world For expressionists and Greenberg's detractors, evidence is needed. (Another recent recent large-scale investigation to disprove the CIA's argument to promote American abstract expressionism was done by David Caute, see his The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003.)

So how does Greenberg himself respond to the claim that abstract expressionism is a weapon of the Cold War? He said:

There is a lot of such nonsense-saying that the State Department supports American art, that was part of the Cold War, and so on. Only after American art has been successful domestically and internationally, mainly in Paris, did the State Council say that we can now export such things. Until then, they were afraid to do so. [And when they do] The battle has already been won. (Robert Burstow, "On Art and Politics: A Recent Interview with Clement Greenberg," Frieze , September-October 1994, p. 33.)

So, like other prominent New York intellectuals of the 1950s, Greenberg has clear political concerns. However, the political concerns of an intellectual should not be confused with his political actions, let alone his speech is completely wiped out by his political inaccuracy. (In the simple bipolar opposition of "free world" and "totalitarianism"-the so-called Cold War thinking-is it correct to do the opposite?) China has a good tradition of scholarship, Do nt talk nonsense. However, in reality, people often write off their statements by revealing their political motivations (especially when such political motivations are different from their own political stance).

In the 1950s, when the New York School was recognized, the quality of Greenberg's criticism made him famous. He was invited to organize exhibitions and lecture at Black Mountain College, Yale University, Bennington College, Princeton University, and other places. Greenberg continued to deepen his thinking and continued to write art criticism. He combined the reference to modern art history with his analysis of the formal characteristics of paintings in a concise text, in such a way that the abstract works of the above artists are easy for art critics and to learn art Students understand. The biggest characteristic of his artistic criticism is his completely personal and passionate exposition of his artistic passion. In 1961, he published a critical essay, Art and Culture , which had a major impact on the next generation of critics.

In the early 1960s, Greenberg also published one of his most influential dissertations, "Modernist Painting." This article outlines a formalist theory. Among them, the painter's overwhelming attention to the formal elements of painting (especially the flatness of the picture) became a common thread in his interpretation of modern art history. From Edouard Manet to the contemporary paintings of the New York School in the 1940s and 1950s, Greenberg traces a clue to the continuous stripping of thematic materials, illusions and painting spaces. Due to the inherent logic of their medium, painters rejected narrative and replaced it with the unique quality of painting. Among them, his definition of modernism is considered to be one of the clearest arguments about modernist theory to date:

The essence of modernism is to criticize the discipline itself in a way that is unique to a discipline, not to subvert it, but to more firmly establish its scope of competence. Kant used logic to determine the boundaries of logic. Although he withdrew quite a lot from the old jurisdiction of logic, it still has a stronger foundation within the scope that still belongs to logic. (C. Greenberg, Modernist Painting, in C. Harrison & P. Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 19001990 : An Anthology of Changing Ideas , Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1992.p.755.)

Greenberg believes that this self-critical nature of modernism originates from but is different from the critique of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment opened a precedent for criticizing various human affairs with the powerful ideological weapon of human reason. Every human activity is required to be laid on a rational basis. By the same token, art must implement this self-certification:

Every art has to implement this self-certification. What needs to be displayed is not only something unique and irreducible in general art, but also something unique and irreducible in every particular art. Each art has to determine its own effects through its own practices and works. It is true that in doing so, each art will reduce its range of capabilities, but at the same time, it will also make what is held in this range more reliable. ( Ibid. )

The uniqueness of Greenberg lies not only in the general sense of modernism (mainly a way of thinking), the principle of self-criticism in the Enlightenment, but also in the special sense of modernist art and each specific The media characteristics of art are linked:

The unique and appropriate range of competence of each art is exactly consistent with everything unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism then becomes to exclude from the special effects of each art any effects that may be borrowed from or obtained through other art media. Therefore, each art will become "pure" and find its quality standards and guarantee of its independence in its "purity". "Purity" means self-definition, and the self-critical career in art becomes a strong self-definition career. ( Ibid. )

In connection with the unique art category of painting, Greenberg further pointed out that the uniqueness of its medium lies precisely in its limitations:

Realism and naturalism art cover up the art medium, using art to cover up art; modernism uses art to remind art. The limitations that make up the painting mediumthe flat surface, the shape of the substrate, and the nature of the paintare treated as negative factors by the old masters and can only be implicitly or indirectly recognized. In modernist works, these same limitations are seen as positive and publicly acknowledged. Manet's paintings became the first modernist works due to his bold and forthright announcement of the flatness of the painting. Inspired by Manet, Impressionist painters gave up the background and translucent colors of their paintings and exposed the naked facts to the audience: the colors they used were composed of pigments extruded from paint tubes or paint boxes. Cezanne gave up fidelity or correctness in order to make his sketch or composition more clearly fit the rectangular shape of the canvas. ( Ibid. , Pp.755-756)

Among all these limiting factors, the biggest feature of painting is its "planarity". Therefore, in Greenberg's view, a history of modernist painting is a history of continuous flatness:

However, it is the unavoidable flatness pressure on the surface of painting that is more fundamental than anything else in the method by which modernist painting art criticizes and defines itself. Because only flatness is a unique and exclusive feature of painting art. The closed shape of painting is a limiting condition or specification that is shared with stage art; color is a specification or means that is shared not only with theater but also with sculpture. Since flatness is the only condition that painting has never been shared with any other art, modernist painting has evolved towards flatness rather than in any other direction. ( Ibid. , P. 756)

These constitute the main arguments of Modernist Painting. With the rise of Pop Art in the 1960s, Greenberg's formalist approach no longer worked. Pop art was founded on naked conceptual wisdom (not on the artist's feelings or inspiration), and also originated from "lower art", which became the antithesis of Greenberg's formalist theory. In response to Pop Art, Greenberg held a "Post Painterly Abstraction" exhibition in 1964. In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, he extended his theoretical principles, thinking that showing openness, sharpness of shaped lines, and bright and even monotone paintings is the art he once outlined in the article "Modernist Painting" The Natural Evolution of the History of Forms.

Greenberg coined the term "Post-Painterly Abstraction" to distinguish between abstract expressionism or painted abstraction (press: Greenberg's "post-painted" term from Wolfe Lin's Malerisch [painting]. Waller used it to refer to the characteristics of painting as opposed to "line drawing" to define Baroque art that is different from classical art. Therefore, at Walle, classical painting in the Renaissance was a line Painted, but Baroque paintings are painted. See Clement Greenberg, "Post-painterly Abstraction", in Clement Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, vol 4, ed., John O'Brian, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press , 1993; also participated in Wolflin: "Artistic Style", translated by Pan Yaochang, Renmin University of China Press, 2004 edition). The term post-painting abstract is used by a large number of abstract artists who oppose the first-generation abstract expressionism which emphasized the abstract trend of gestures. The dominant trend in post-painting abstraction is called hard-edged painters, such as Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella. They explored the relationship between highly regular shapes and the boundaries of the picture, the shapes depicted on the canvas surface, and the true shape of the canvas base. The term is also used to refer to color-field painters, such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis. They directly used Bingxian pigments to explore the texture and visual effects of large areas of pure color blocks on an unpainted canvas. However, the boundaries of these movements are blurred, and some artists, such as Kenneth Noland, share many of the characteristics of both movements. Post-painting abstraction is generally regarded as a continuation of modernist self-criticism dialectics (however, it also stimulates dissent, especially see Michael Fred: "The Reductionist Critique of Greenberg's Modernist Painting", Shen Yubing, And Shen Yubing: "Art Theory and Criticism after Greenberg", both contained in "Journal of Zhejiang University (Humanities and Social Sciences Edition), 2010 No. 2).

Greenberg's personal taste led him to reject pop art in the 1960s, because pop art is a trend that is clearly influenced by vulgar culture. After Pop Art, Greenberg's influence began to decline. However, throughout the 1960s, Greenberg still had a strong influence among younger critics, such as Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss. After the 1970s, Greenberg basically withdrew from the art criticism world and summed up the philosophical basis of his art criticism career, that is, his aesthetics. His teaching and writing in his later years made him one of the most important aestheticians in the late 20th century.

Even for his challengers, Greenberg remained the most important critic of his time. Everyone agrees that he articulated a clear and concise approach to art, which has been popular for half a century. Greenberg's influence was so great that for contemporary critics, his elaboration ultimately defined the entire modernist art movement. In Tom Wolfe's 1975 book The Painted Word , he called Greenberg the "king of the three mountains of culture". The so-called "Three Hills of Culture" refers to Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Stein, the three critics who have the greatest influence on the American art world. Leo Steinberg.

When the post-modernist trend of the 1980s and 1990s prevailed, Greenberg was vilified by many people. However, after the 21st century, people have increasingly realized the importance of Greenberg. American scholar Michael J. Lewis, who is neither a Greenberg admirer nor a Greenberg detractor; in this article, I rarely quote Greenberg admirers for the sake of balance. Our words) used to portray the portraits of Greenberg in the eyes of "Clemblashes": "He is a person who promotes American art and makes it a tool of American foreign policy, unscrupulously speaking with the so-called CIA The co-funded tour exhibition of American paintings in Europe is also a person who brings the temperament of the McCarthyists into his aesthetic judgment, and cannot tolerate dissent, strengthening the suffocating consensus. Art, Politics & Clement Greenberg ", Commentary , June 1998)

However, as Lewis said, the real reason for Greenberg's enduring importance is based on the fact that the art world today is still haunted by his ideas and discipline. The current famous saying is that art should have a clear and direct political use; the distinction between vulgar and elegant art is meaningless; the subject matter and narrative content are more important than technique or form. As for the concept of a coherent and logical path that is embedded in the style of each type of art, it has been abandoned and turned into a carnival that welcomes local, temporary, personal, and arbitrary things. "But," Lewis further stated,

The result is not an increase in cultural vitality at an earlier stage, but a distinct and catastrophic decline. So, if American art school students are still applying Greenberg's theory-they really are-it's because having a landmark on the turbulent sea without any foothold is always awful. Comfortable, even if in theory it is a hateful thing. As a foil, or even as a secret ideal, certain things that Greenberg supports-seriousness, a high degree of intellectual integrity, and a perfect fondness for form-may accompany us for some time, if we are enough Lucky words. ( Ibid. )

bibliography:

1. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays , Boston: Beacon Press, 1961; Art and Culture, translated by Shen Yubing, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2009 edition.

2. Clement Greenberg, Late Writings , edited by Robert C. Morgan, St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

3 Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

4. Clement Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., Ed., John O'Brian, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986 -1993.

5. Donald Kuspit, Clement Greenberg: Art Critic, University of Wisconsin Press, 1979.

6. Shen Yubing: Greenberg: Modernism and Complaints, Art Criticism in the 20th Century, Hangzhou: China Academy of Art Press, 2003 edition, pp. 153-178.

(Originally included "Rong Baozhai (Contemporary Art Edition)", Issue 3, 2010)