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 …
Read More »Tag Archives: Clement Greenberg
The Canonisation of Surrealism in the United States part (1 of 2)
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 …
Read More »An Eclipsed Art Critic Shines Anew
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 …
Read More »Autonomies of Art
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, …
Read More »A Brush with John Berger, Hiroshima and the Kitchen Sink
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 …
Read More »New Lines in Chelsea?
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 …
Read More »Speakeasy
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, …
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