Tag Archives: Clement Greenberg

by Sandra Zalman in USA Historicizing Dada and Surrealism As Barr contemplated his retirement as Director of Collections at MoMA, he chose a young art historian, William Rubin, who was then working on a major study of Dada and Surrealism, to be his successor. In 1966, Rubin was hired as a guest curator for the exhibition Dada, Surrealism and Their …

by Sandra Zalman (reprinted with permission) Sandra Zalman is Associate Professor and Program Director of Art History at the University of Houston, where she teaches classes on modern and contemporary art, museums, and curatorial issues Her book Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism, won the 2016 SECAC Award for Excellence in Research and Publication   In a pointed assessment …

SUMMARY: The quintessential art critic of the 1940s was Clement Greenberg, but In later years his dogmatism came under fire. Two volumes of his finest essays, “Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944” and ‘Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949,” edited by John O’Brian (University of Chicago Press, $27.50 each), should help to restore his reputation. Invigorating is the best way to describe the early writings …

Never before published in print, a lecture given by Clement Greenberg in Mountain Lake, Virginia in October 1980. Art and life. Art and life as lived can be seen as one and inseparable only when art is experienced sheerly as a phenomenon among other phenomena. Art experienced as art, art experienced aesthetically, “properly,” art experienced at what’s called aesthetic distance, …

Meeting John Berger was not a problem; we lived in the same street in Hampstead. So one day I went across the street to show him some drawings of mine. We were exactly the same age, and it was in the year 1954. Nine years earlier the H-bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima: ten years later, Berger initiated the Kitchen …

On a recent visit to Manhattan, I looked in on a half-dozen Chelsea galleries. It seems that there is a mini-trend regarding the use of line as a dominant element in the works of four of the artists whose work I saw: Walter Darby Bannard at Berry Campbell, Jeff Elrod at Luhring Augustine, Charles Hewitt at Jim Kempner Fine Arts, and Oscar Murillo at David Zwirner. All …

In early February, Gloria Steinem commented to Bill Maher about Hillary Clinton’s problem getting support from younger women. Young women, she said, ask, “Where are the boys?” Of course, Steinem took a big hit for saying that but,if Maher had asked about Clinton’s problem getting support from younger men, it would have been equally relevant to answer the same way, …