A VEXED, TRANS-ATLANTIC RELATIONSHIP: GREENBERG AND THE BRITISH

A VEXED, TRANS-ATLANTIC RELATIONSHIP: GREENBERG AND THE BRITISH by JOHN A. WALKER (Copyright 2009) Photo of Greenberg on the cover of a recent biography: Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Art Czar: The Rise And Fall of Clement Greenberg, (MFA Publications, 2006). For a review by John A Walker see The Art Book, Vol 14, No 2 May 2007, pp. 50-52. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- James Faure Walker [British artist and writer]: 'Your relations with artists have sometimes been difficult.’ Clement Greenberg: 'Very difficult, artists are difficult.' (1) For several decades - from the 1940s to the 1970s - Clement Greenberg’s power and influence as a critic were unprecedented in the history of 20th century art. So persuasive was he that several artists were willing to follow his advice regarding the making and future direction of their art. He was even prepared to make changes to an artist's work after his or her death when he thought he could improve it. (This happened in the case of the American sculptor David Smith.) A biography of Greenberg (1909-94), by Florence Rubenfeld, was published in 1998 (2) and his relations with American art and artists are well documented, but less well known are his relations with British art, artists and critics. The British came into contact with Greenberg in three main ways: 1) via his writings, interviews, radio and television appearances; 2) via his visits to, and conversations with, artists in their homes and studios in Britain and talks given in British art schools; 3) via meetings with British artists and critics in New York and Bennington, Vermont. Writings … In April 1940, Horizon, the British cultural journal, reprinted Greenberg’s influential, theoretical essay 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' (1939), and in October 1947, the same journal published 'The present prospects of American painting and sculpture'. (3) As a result of the latter, British readers received advance notice of the new American painting that was to have such a potent effect in the following decade when exhibitions featuring the Abstract Expressionists reached London. Another British journal he wrote for during the years 1962 and '63 was Encounter, which was covertly funded by the CIA for anti-communist reasons. During the 1950s and ‘60s, Britons with access to art school libraries became familiar with Greenberg’s prolific output of reviews and essays in such magazines as Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Art International, Arts Magazine and Partisan Review. Beacon Press of Boston published a collection of Greenberg’s articles - Art and Culture: Critical Essays - in 1961 (paperback edition 1965). This text was stocked by most art school libraries and was much read by British art students, fine art tutors and art historians. Greenberg was notorious for the forthrightness of his value judgments based on intuitive aesthetic responses to works of art. He was also important in terms of supplying new ideas and terms to the discourse of art, for example 'American-Type Painting', 'Post-Painterly Abstraction' and 'Modernist Painting/Sculpture'. The latter were derived from Greenberg’s seminal essay 'Modernist Painting' which first appeared in 1960. (A number of Greenberg’s essays were more ambitious and substantial than those by other critics because they attempted an analysis of the fate of avant-garde and modern art in the era of industrial capitalism and because they were underpinned by a knowledge of Marx, philosophical ideas derived from Kant and by art-historiographic ideas such as those of Wölfflin’s.) Voice of America first broadcast ‘Modernist Painting’ as one of the Forum Lecture Series in May 1960 and since this radio station was listened to by several million Europeans, one may presume numerous Britons heard it. Greenberg's reductive interpretation of the trajectory of modern art was to influence the thinking of many British artists during the 1960s but it provoked negative reactions too. Most of Greenberg's art criticism focused upon American art and the work of leading European artists such as Cézanne, Matisse, Miró and Picasso, consequently there were far fewer commentaries on British art. (Since Greenberg believed there was a ‘mainstream' of modern art and that it ran through Paris before 1939 and through New York after 1945, it followed that Britain was bound to be viewed as a backwater.) Even so, during the late 1940s, he did review for The Nation a mixed show of British art and some one-person shows by British artists that took place in the United States. Although Greenberg was to express admiration for a few British artists - Ivon Hitchens and Anthony Caro, for instance – in general he held a dim view of Britain’s artistic achievements. Greenberg thought that, in comparison to the new American art, British art lacked potency and conviction; it was marred by anaemia, monotony, prettiness, by the primacy of good taste over boldness, richness and originality; furthermore, British painting was short on painterliness. One of his key critical distinctions was between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ artworks and artists. Leading figures in British art, such as Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, were both judged to be ‘minor’. British art critics and art historians fared little better. In 1950, David Sylvester was accused of a lack of critical competence. Five years later Herbert Read was also declared an ‘incompetent art critic’ and in 1957 he was criticized for having 'no taste'. Since Greenberg disliked Harold Rosenberg’s theory of Action painting, Lawrence Alloway was berated for endorsing and promulgating the theory in Britain during the 1950s. Alloway, for his part admired all things American and in 1961, he and his wife Sylvia Sleigh migrated to America for good. However, Alloway was a fan of American mass culture as well as its Action painting, consequently, in his 1958 essay 'The Arts and the Mass Media', Greenberg was faulted for his blanket condemnation of mass culture as kitsch in his famous 1939 essay. Two British writers who did meet with Greenberg's approval were Kenneth Clark and Patrick Heron. Interviews are a more informal means of accessing the ideas of major intellectuals. Over the decades a number of British critics interviewed Greenberg, namely, Trish Evans, Peter Fuller, Charles Harrison, Edward Lucie-Smith, James Faure Walker, and the art historian T.J. Clark. Barbara Reise, an American who came to live (and die) in London, also published a two-part, critical analysis of Greenberg and his followers in the London-based journal Studio International in May and June 1968. From Lucie-Smith's interview with Greenberg in Studio International (January 1968), readers discovered some of the American's negative views on British art: Moore was judged yet again to be a ‘minor’ sculptor; Francis Bacon was cited as an example of 'inspired safe taste'; and English deficiencies were identified as ‘neatness’ and 'patness’; much of the art criticism written by British writers was condemned as ‘utter crap'. Not all the targets of Greenberg's attacks ignored them. Bad tempered replies to Greenberg’s opinions were published and then Greenberg, rather than apologize, would respond in kind. Visits to England, Ireland and Scotland Greenberg made a number of trips to Europe to see examples of modern art, to undertake research and to meet artists and writers. His first occurred during April-June 1939. After the Second World War, he visited England, France, Italy, Switzerland during the summer of 1954 and he visited France, London and Cornwall in July 1959. In the following decade, he was in Britain during September 1963 and November 1965. Then, in 1967 and 1971, he visited Ireland to review the Rosc exhibitions held in Dublin. He came to London again in the mid-1970s and gave talks at the Royal College of Art and the Slade, and took part in a panel discussion at Art Net (a London exhibitions and events venue established by Peter Cook of Archigram fame). A difference of opinion with the British Pop artist Richard Hamilton occurred at Art Net. Greenberg also lectured in Edinburgh. Let us now consider some of these trips in more detail. In the early 1950s, Patrick Heron - the critic and painter - lived in the Holland Park district of London. It was there in the summer of 1954 that he was visited by Greenberg armed with a letter of introduction from the art dealer Charles Gimpel. The American, it turned out, was familiar with Heron's art criticism, which had been published in the British weekly The New Statesman (1947-50) and in the American journal Arts, and the two men quickly became friends (calling each other 'Clem’ and 'Pat'). Heron introduced Greenberg to the painters William Scott and Roger Hilton and, at his request, showed him the bombsites of the East End. However, Heron soon discovered that Greenberg was more interested in promoting the art of his homeland than in learning about British art. Their conversation was about Jackson Pollock - examples of whose work Heron had viewed the previous year when he visited the ICA's Opposing Forces exhibition - and the other New York artists whose paintings Heron had not yet seen. (During his 1954 European trip Greenberg visited the Venice Biennale where he saw a show of de Koonings that he considered put to shame the work of Ben Shahn in a neighbouring pavilion and indeed every other artist of a comparable age exhibiting in Venice.) Abstract Expressionism was to have a significant impact in Britain during the second half of the 1950s and Heron was one of the first critics to respond in print with praise and enthusiasm. However, there came a time when he was to rue his initial, generous response. In July 1959, Greenberg was sent to Europe by the French & Co Gallery of New York (he was a paid consultant) to search for promising European artists. After visiting France, he travelled to Cornwall where he spent several days with Heron. During this visit, he met the artists Sandra Blow, Roger Hilton, John Wells and Bryan Wynter. Heron had given up art criticism in order to devote more time to painting colourful abstracts. The artist and critic had much in common, because they were both formalists, yet there was a disagreement. Greenberg wanted Heron to make compositional changes, that is, to bunch forms in the centre of his canvas leaving empty space around them, instead of placing them in such a way as to call attention to the edges. Heron refused to follow this advice because by then, he objected to the simplicity and symmetry of so many American paintings and he advocated, as a necessary next step, the re-complication of the picture surface. Within a few years, Heron was to note, both American critics and painters had become edge-conscious. Naturally, Heron claimed credit for this change of mind. After his sojourn in Cornwall, Greenberg travelled to London where he met the dealers John Kasmin, Victor and Leslie Waddington and the critic and curator Lawrence Alloway. The latter inquired: 'What's happening in New York?' and Greenberg showed him slides of some stained, colour-field paintings. The following year Greenberg helped to arrange for canvases by Morris Louis to be dispatched to Alloway at the ICA for Louis's first London exhibition (May 1960). In 1959, Greenberg also visited the London studio of Anthony Caro, a figurative sculptor who was then seeking a new direction. In 1978 Caro recalled: Greenberg was totally involved. He more or less told me my art wasn't up to the mark ... He spent all day with me talking about art and at the end of the day he had said a lot things that I had not heard before. I had wanted him to see my work because I had never had a really good criticism of it, a really clear eye looking at it. A lot of what he said hit home, but he also left me with a great deal of hope. I had come to the end of a certain way of working; I didn't know where to go. He offered some sort of pointer. (4) Greenberg’s recollection of the meeting was as follows: I saw his stuff the first time in '59: it was quasi-expressionist, smallish figures, not monolithic figures. I said, is it good enough? And I didn't do some missionary work, but I said come over and look at David Smith. And when he came over he met Smith and he met Noland, and went back and switched. The first thing he did was 24 Hours [an abstract metal sculpture of 1960]. He gave it to me and I sold it to the Tate [in 1975]. From then on he was on his own. He didn't need to come back here to look at Smith or anybody else. (5) It was in November 1959 that Caro visited the United States and Mexico for three months with the financial help of a Ford/English-Speaking-Union travel grant. He met and talked with a number of American artists and critics including Smith, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and, of course, Greenberg. Smith, the sculptor championed by Greenberg, made constructions from welded metal some of which he coated with strong colours. Caro knew his work from photographs and saw a few pieces in New York but he claims it was not until October 1963, when he visited Smith's mountain retreat and workshop - Bolton Landing farm in the Adirondacks, upstate New York - and saw about 80 works standing in a field that he was particularly struck by the sculpture's 'character, personal expressiveness, delicacy of touch ... immense sculptural intelligence!' (6) Greenberg hailed Caro’s dramatic change from modelled figuration to constructed abstraction as a 'breakthrough’ and the sculptor was dubbed ‘the Moses of British art'. Regarding the relationship between Caro and Smith, Greenberg wrote in 1965: He [Caro] is the only new sculptor whose sustained quality can bear comparison with Smith's ... Caro is also the first sculptor to digest Smith's ideas instead of merely borrowing them. Precisely by deriving from Smith he has been the better able to establish his own individuality. (7) Clearly, Greenberg regarded Caro as Smith's artistic heir, as the artist who would continue and develop Smith's type of constructed, metal sculpture. In 1963, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London mounted a survey of Caro’s work. Michael Fried, a young American critic who was one of Greenberg’s disciples, wrote the show’s catalogue essay. Fried duly paid homage to his mentor and gave a summary of Greenberg’s Modernist Painting theory. (Fried was later to teach at St Martin's School of Art in London.) Peter Fuller, the trenchant British art critic writing about this show over two decades later observed caustically: 'Caro’s work was nothing if not of its time: it reflected the superficial, synthetic, urban commercial, American values which dominated the 1960s.' (8) On another occasion, Fuller declared that Caro’s sculptures were merely 'illustrations' of Greenberg’s ideas. Caro’s growing international reputation was due in considerable measure to the sense of new possibilities and freedom he had gained from his exposure to America and contemporary American art, and the critical endorsement of Greenberg and Fried, plus the backing of the New York dealer André Emmerich. During the early 1960s Caro taught part-time at St Martin's, consequently his presence was a stimulus to a number of British art students and fellow members of staff. In September 1963, Greenberg was invited to London by Caro and the St Martin's' sculptors/tutors David Annesley, Michael Bolus, Philip King, Tim Scott and William Tucker who wanted to benefit from his expertise via a series of personal ‘crits’. Greenberg's airfare was raised by each of the sculptors contributing a share. When, shortly afterwards, the St Martin's sculpture course was threatened with closure, Greenberg was asked to write a letter of support to Frank Martin, Head of Sculpture. Greenberg did so and was fulsome in his praise. His letter, written in February 1964, was published in the St Martin's student magazine Going 1.(1964):8. Not all of Greenberg's relationships with British artists were as harmonious and productive as that between him and Caro. As already explained, Heron refused to take Greenberg’s advice and, as we shall see shortly, the relationship between Greenberg and John Latham was to prove abrasive. One of the British sculptors Greenberg visited in 1963 was Brian Wall, who was then a principal lecturer at the Central School of Art and Design. It seems Wall had constructed a flatbed, metal sculpture with a tall, vertical element of which he was proud. When Greenberg saw it, he suggested cutting it right down. Wall was so irritated by the advice that he offered Greenberg his metal-cutting torch and told him to complete the sculpture himself. While in London in 1963, Greenberg was the guest of Sheridan Blackwood, the fifth Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, who was the business partner of John Kasmin the art dealer. Kasmin had opened a gallery at 118 New Bond Street devoted to new, avant-garde British and American art in April 1963 with a show of the target-motif, stain-paintings of Kenneth Noland, the American artist Caro and Greenberg respected so much. Through Kasmin, Greenberg also visited the painter-brothers Bernard and Harold Cohen. The importance of such art world networks is obvious and Greenberg was an assiduous net worker, socializer and traveller. Bernard Cohen had been employed by Kasmin to stretch the canvases of Morris Louis for a September 1963 London show. Louis had died the previous year and Greenberg was one of those responsible for his estate. Bernard found that the Louis canvases contained two sets of edge marks: one set by Louis, the other by Greenberg. This incident revealed that Greenberg had taken 'cropping' decisions in respect of stain paintings executed on rolls of unstretched, unprimed canvas. During his studio visits, this was one of the issues he used to discuss with those artists who worked on canvas placed on the floor. Harold Cohen was familiar with American art and criticism having lived in New York from 1959 to ‘61 on a Harkness Fellowship. Since Harold was a tutor at the Slade School of Art, he invited Greenberg to give a talk to the student body. One of those in the audience was Terry Atkinson, a student from a Northern, working-class background, who was shortly to help form the group Fine Artz (and, later on, the group Art & Language). The future members of Fine Artz were sceptical of Greenberg’s theories because of their keen interest in American and British popular culture, rock ‘n' roll, and teenage fads and cults. They were reluctant, therefore, to accept Greenberg's positive/negative value distinction between avant-garde, high modernist fine art on the one hand and kitsch/mass culture on the other. In the 1990s Atkinson recalled: If modernism was a destiny for those who wished to be good artists, as the future members of Fine Artz thought they heard Clement Greenberg advocating as they sat in an unyielding row listening to its most famous partisan ... then Fine Artz would never be good artists. (9) He then added: It seems that high modernist theoreticians found it more and more difficult to maintain a workable distinction between popular culture and kitsch as the notion of the avant-garde itself became both more and more popular and more and more kitsch. Modernist theorists, Greenberg for example, did not lay out what an integrated and authentic community would be like because their notions of integration and authenticity were so deeply abstract. Bernard Cohen did not attend Greenberg’s lecture but he recalls three conversations with the critic (although Greenberg did most of the talking) over a period of a week or so. (10) Their meetings were mainly social in character and took place at Bernard's flat in Putney, at a dinner party hosted by critic John Russell, and at Dufferin's address for martinis. On each occasion Bernard found that Greenberg presented a different persona - he could be domineering one moment and charming the next. Bernard had read Art and Culture and been most impressed by Greenberg’s essay on collage. The rest of the book, he thought, was marred by arbitrary judgments of taste. In 1963, Bernard was using a spray gun to paint large abstracts in a linear - doodle or Art Nouveau-type - manner. They were not flat enough for Greenberg who also complained about what he called 'the Anglo-Saxon space box'. Greenberg admired Pollock because he had used unstretched canvas and worked out from the centre to discover the four edges, unlike those artists who preferred canvases stretched over wooden supports and who, therefore, treated 'that damn rectangle' as a given. In addition, he complained about the British penchant for 'idiosyncrasy'. In February 1967, Bernard travelled to New York to mount a one-man show of minimalist, almost all-white paintings at the Betty Parsons Gallery. During his stay, he visited Greenberg’s apartment for drinks and was shown some 'atrocious' life drawings that Greenberg and Jules Olitski had made but the critic refused to see or review Bernard's exhibition. Greenberg struck Bernard as an intellectual bully who was prescriptive in his relations with artists. Bernard became friendly with a number of American artists - Rothko, Newman, Johns and Larry Poons, for example - and he visited the United States and taught there several times. He admired the Abstract Expressionists and American society for the greater sense of liberty and the opportunities it offered compared to Britain. Nevertheless, Greenberg, he considers, was the antithesis of such American values. Bernard rejected Greenberg's ideas because they made no sense to him and he asserts that the critic had no influence on the direction of his painting. Greenberg was in Britain again during November 1965 to chair the jury for the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition. The two other members of the jury were Heron and John Russell. The top prize-winner that year was Michael Tyzack, with a painting called Alesso 'B', an abstract in red, blue and green with a centralized, symmetrical, wedge-shaped form with wavy edges. The second and third prizes were also awarded to abstract painters. Fierce arguments took place during the selection process but, given the jury's composition, it was hardly surprising that formalist abstraction swept the board. In December 1967, Greenberg was invited by the Arts Council of Ireland to see Irish artists and to review the first Rosc, an international exhibition of contemporary art that was to be held in Dublin every four years. (His review appeared in Artforum in April 1968.) He spent ten days in Ireland imbibing its visual culture and he visited the Rosc show twice. Most of the work on display struck him as 'dismal'. In the main, he praised American artists but he did mention several British artists - Bacon, Davie, Nicholson and Pasmore - in passing. One of his longest comments was about two exhibits by John Latham: And Latham’s bas-relief construction of 1965, Manningtree, was the first thing of his I had ever seen that transcended mere tastefulness; as if to atone, his other piece in Rosc, a clutch of books in drooping canvas, managed to be in bad taste without exactly failing to be tasteful. (11) As we shall discover shortly, Greenberg’s emphasis on taste and his dismissive attitude provoked a violent response from Latham. British Artists and Critics in America, 1950s and ‘60s From the late 1950s onwards, air travel across the Atlantic became cheaper and easier. Increasingly, British artists, critics and art students chose to visit America because by then it was evident that New York had replaced Paris as the world's art capital. When Britons arrived in New York many of them were welcomed by Greenberg who, like a tourist guide, escorted them round selected galleries. He also invited them to his apartment for drinks and introduced them to American artists. During the early 1960s, Greenberg was promoting the Washington Color School and American Post-Painterly Abstraction; consequently, it was the work of the artists constituting these tendencies that he preferred to show British visitors. It was natural too that Greenberg was more friendly with British abstract artists rather than with British Pop artists who also passed through, or who worked in New York because, of course, he was convinced that abstraction was historically inevitable and he was not interested in the mass culture iconography of Pop art and dismissed Pop as 'Novelty Art'. (Rubenfeld reports, however, that Greenberg enjoyed such popular culture as baseball, the movies, jazz and dancing.) Caro’s crucial trips to America have already been described. Alloway visited New York in May 1958 where he visited the studios of some of the Abstract Expressionists, and talked to Lee Krasner and Harold Rosenberg. He also spent several evenings chatting with Greenberg. Alloway appears to have switched his allegiance from Rosenberg’s theories to Greenberg’s because he returned to London convinced that Abstract Expressionism was an art of control and order, not one of accident and chance. Richard Smith, a painter whose work straddled the divide between abstraction and Pop, spent two years working in New York from 1959 to ’61 on a Harkness Scholarship. While there he encountered Greenberg and through him Noland. Heron paid his first visit to New York in April 1960 to attend the opening of his first, American, solo show held at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery. He and his wife Delia met up with Greenberg who took them to see a Morris Louis show the critic had arranged at French & Co. He also showed Heron some of Noland's target paintings and some abstracts by Olitski. It was the first time Heron had seen any works by these three American painters. Later on, Heron had other exhibitions in New York. Greenberg responded to one of these by telling Heron: ‘it wasn't much.’ Bertha Schaefer also gave Terry Frost a one-man show in 1960. He spent three weeks in New York staying with Larry Rivers. In 1981, he recalled: Greenberg was marvellous to me, and he showed me the David Smiths and Pollocks he had and he showed me Nolands and Olitskis, and talked to me at length about art. He came to the show I was having there. I met Motherwell and Frankenthaler also. (12) During the late 1950s John Latham began making reliefs from scorched and mutilated second-hand books, wire, spray-paint and other materials. (13) The inclusion of his large relief Shem in the Museum of Modern Art's The Art of Assemblage (1961) show, curated by William C. Seitz, prompted Latham to cross the Atlantic for the first time. He spent three months in New York in the autumn of 1961. Kasmin, his British dealer, rented a suite at the famous Chelsea Hotel and an informal exhibition was held there. A fellow resident at the hotel with whom Latham became acquainted was Noland and it was through him that Latham met Greenberg. This brief contact was to become highly significant later in the decade. Seitz’s book/catalogue for The Art of Assemblage made no mention of Greenberg or his theory of Modernist Painting but Seitz's exhibition surely represented an alternative to Greenberg’s purist aesthetic - the idea that each medium had to purify itself of all external references and everything it shared with other media - because Assemblage was, by definition, impure and hybrid. This was one of the reasons why Latham came to oppose Greenberg's ideas. John Hoyland is another British abstract painter who, like Heron, adores intense colours. With the aid of a Peter Stuyvesant Foundation bursary, Hoyland paid his first visit to New York in 1964. He and Paul Huxley (who also had a Stuyvesant travel grant) were given a conducted tour of the Emmerich and Kootz galleries by Greenberg to view paintings by Louis, Noland and Hans Hofmann. Hoyland expressed doubts about the quality of the Nolands and was instructed by Greenberg to 'look again'. However, the British artist was much taken with Hofmann, an artist he had never heard of before. During the 1950s and ‘60s, Greenberg developed a close association with the staff and students of the art faculty of Bennington College in the hills of Vermont. (The students - over 300 - were all young, impressionable females, so the male staff - called by Alan Solomon 'The Green Mountain Boys' (14) - had a splendid time.) Greenberg’s influence was so great that, according to Rubenfeld, art insiders knew Bennington as ‘Clemsville’. David Smith and Noland lived nearby and Paul Feeley and Olitski taught there. British artists who taught and worked there because of Greenberg’s influence included: Caro, Phillip King, Isaac Witkin and Peter Stroud, plus the critic Alloway and his painter wife Sylvia Sleigh. From time-to-time Greenberg visited Bennington and took part in studio ‘crits'. Frank Bowling, a black, figurative painter, was born in 1936 in Guyana (then a British colony), South America, and came to England in 1950 to finish his schooling. After leaving the Royal College of Art, Bowling had some success in terms of grants, exhibitions, prizes and critical acclaim. Nevertheless, having been omitted from the Whitechapel’s painting exhibition The New Generation: 1964, he concluded that the British art world was neglecting him because of endemic racism and because his imagery was political rather than Pop. Seeing no future for himself in Britain he decided, in 1966, to settle in the United States. The American critic Frank O'Hara also advised him to do so. Bowling was to live in New York for a decade. From 1967 to '71 he struggled with the issues raised by black consciousness, but in the end he concluded that making 'good' art was more important to him than making 'Black art‘. He also decided that modernism was his creed, declared he was 'a formalist' and began to be influenced by the stain painting of the American Post-Painterly Abstractionists. In London Bowling had known Latham and initially he was, like Latham, anti-Greenberg. When Bowling and Greenberg first met there was antagonism, but after a visit to Bowling's studio Greenberg relented. Bowling read Greenberg’s writings and found that he agreed with the Modernist Painting theory. Curiously, Bowling has credited Greenberg with enabling him to see that modernism - the modern, international, ideological framework for making art - belonged to him as well as white artists born in Europe or North America. Alan Gouk’s 1972 meetings with Greenberg in New York will be described shortly. Anti-Greenberg, 1966-74 As Heron became familiar with the work Post-Painterly Abstractionists, he began to have reservations about its originality and quality. He also became increasingly disturbed by the ‘ruthless promotional techniques' underpinning the international success enjoyed by American artists and he came to resent the nationalistic boasting of Greenberg and his followers. Since many Britons are (or were) modest, reticent beings who are embarrassed to blow their own trumpets, Heron had to steel himself to make his critical thoughts about the Americans public. At the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in July 1965, during a discussion about Morris Louis and Post-Painterly Abstraction, he dared to do so by attacking Greenberg and by claiming that he (Heron) had invented vertical-stripe painting in 1957, that is, well before Louis. There was uproar and Heron was howled down. As he later argued, it seemed as if the British art world had become completely cowed and brainwashed by American hype, so much so that questioning the chronological priority of American art was inconceivable. Heron maintained that the extravagant claims made by the Americans - and reiterated by compliant British critics such as Alloway and Paul Overy - had resulted in a very one-sided account that failed to credit the innovations of his generation of British artists. Younger artists were thus kept in the dark about the latter's achievements, especially since the walls of the Tate Gallery were being dominated by recent American art rather than by recent British art. Examining the history of the interaction between British and American art, Heron was driven to the conclusion that certain British artists had, via exhibitions held in New York, influenced American ones rather than vice versa. Heron's controversial views were developed in print in a trio of articles published in Studio International over the period 1966-70. Some years later, in October 1974, The Guardian daily newspaper printed three, full-page, illustrated articles by Heron charging the Americans with cultural imperialism. Greenberg later told Peter Fuller that this analysis was 'preposterous!' and that Heron was being 'paranoid’. Another British artist who was to become critical of the ideas and judgments of Greenberg was John Latham. The latter's most notorious assault on a book was his Still and Chew event of 1966-67, which involved the partial destruction and distillation of Greenberg's Art and Culture. This anthology was much read by art school staff and students in the 1960s, especially those at St Martin's where Latham taught part-time. The book became a prime target because Latham considered its title pretentious, and because Greenberg's emphasis on space and form conflicted with his own emphasis on time and event. John Latham, ‘Still and Chew/Art and Culture’, 1966-67. Right hand image: mixed media, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photos courtesy of the Latham Estate. In addition, Greenberg had earlier sent Latham a postcard in which he dismissed the artist’s book reliefs as ‘patly Cubist'. When Greenberg had chaired the jury for the 1965 John Moores Liverpool Exhibition, a work submitted by Latham had been rejected. Since the critic looked down on most contemporary British art because he considered it was in ‘too good taste', Latham decided to invert the comment in order to discover if Greenberg ‘tasted good'. The Still and Chew event was held in August 1966 at Latham's home in Holland Park. Barry Flanagan, then a sculpture student at St Martin's, helped to organize it. Guests chewed pages torn from a copy of Art and Culture borrowed from the art school's library. About one-third of the book received this treatment. When well chewed, the soggy pages were spat out into a flask. Afterwards Latham performed alchemical-like transformations in order to distil the book's essence into a liquid contained in a small glass phial. Months later, in May 1967, an overdue notice marked ‘very urgent' arrived from the art school's librarian. Latham labelled the phial and returned it. Because of this action, he was dismissed from his teaching post. Subsequently, he gathered the objects and documents associated with the event and placed them in a black leather case. This assemblage - now called Art and Culture - was acquired by New York's MoMA in 1970 and came to be regarded by certain critics as a key example of Conceptual art. The willingness of MoMA to buy this assemblage indicated that the American curators had a sense of humour and that they regarded Greenberg and Latham as significant figures. Greenberg and British, abstract painting during the 1970s Greenberg visited Ireland, Scotland and England several times during the 1970s. After seeing the Rosc ’71 exhibition in Dublin, Greenberg reviewed it for Art International. His verdict was: ‘even worse in terms of art qua art than the first Rosc was.’ (15) However, somewhat surprisingly, abstract paintings by the British artists Bridget Riley and John Walker were singled out for praise. In the 1970s a number of younger, British, abstract painters emerged who were indebted to the kind of American abstract painting championed by Greenberg. According to Alan Gouk, one of a number of painters and sculptors who exhibited at the Stockwell Depot studios in South London, the ambition of these painters was to ‘reconcile the physicality and directness of attack of Abstract Expressionism with the colour painting which followed it'. (16) Although a painter (and a writer on art), Gouk had organized a forum on sculpture for the Advanced Course at St Martin's since 1967. Inevitably, he heard Caro praise Greenberg and was prompted to acquire a copy of Art and Culture. When the critic gave a seminar at Goldsmiths’ College in 1968, a contingent from St Martin's went to listen. This was Gouk’s first sight of Greenberg the man. (17) He claims that Greenberg was often a poor public speaker unless he was reading from a prepared script, but that he was usually able to deal with questioners in a summary fashion. However, this time Greenberg blushed and was disconcerted when two left-wing students in the audience attacked him for being a bourgeois art critic and mystifier. Greenberg responded by explaining that his disillusionment with communism dated from the 1930s when he learnt about Stalinism. In 1972, at the insistence of Caro, Gouk took a large (8’ x 12’), rolled-up canvas across the Atlantic hoping for a helpful response from Greenberg. Caro's experience of America had been so exciting and empowering that he was keen for other British artists to follow in his footsteps but Gouk found that the mood in America had changed since Caro’s time, that there was now a chauvinistic and anti-European atmosphere. Greenberg was now in his sixties and Gouk gained the impression that he was reluctant to view new art. However, Gouk was invited round to Greenberg's apartment for drinks and to meet American artists such as Larry Poons and Friedel Dzubas, and several young, female, art-history students from Toledo. They all went out for a Chinese meal and dropped in on Michael Steiner's studio and then went dancing. Two other British painters - John McLean and Jennifer Durrant - were in New York at the same time as Gouk and they too met Greenberg. Eventually, Greenberg agreed to look at Gouk’s large abstract, which was on display at Noland's studio in the Bowery. The critic remarked on the dark, close-valued colour scheme and suggested he carry on in the same way but with different hues. He advised Gouk: ‘There's no need to adjust each touch of colour to all the others the way Cézanne used to do, just lay your colours side by side and see how far you can go with it.' When Greenberg was in London during the mid-1970s, he was persuaded by Caro to visit the Stockwell Depot studios two or three times. Greenberg thought the painters and sculptors he saw there were ‘damn serious - the painters very much American-influenced, and making no bones about it'. (18) Gouk reports that Greenberg's ‘crits’ were generally brisk and business-like. It seems he preferred not to engage in a discussion with artists about their intentions. He would point a lot and say things like: ‘That's the one, go with that ... When I last saw your work, you were warm. Now you are hot.’ He would also make more specific suggestions for adjustments in terms of composition or design. In 1977, Gouk claimed that the value of Greenbergian modernism was as 'an antidote to surrealism, the literary romanticism of artists like Newman and Rothko, the turgidity of abstract expressionism in decline.' (19) After acknowledging that Greenberg had made some serious errors of judgment, Gouk opined that, nonetheless: ... he's probably the only non-painter that you can learn from. Since meeting him, my whole conception of what painting can be has changed. His influence is of that kind. He makes you confront yourself, your own identity, what you're capable of, and quite simple things about what really matters in painting come to the fore. He has an imagination for design, a ‘less is more’ approach. Simple aesthetic qualities are crucial, and clears away the fog for me. (20) Also in 1977, Greenberg was asked by Duncan Macmillan, curator of the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, to write a catalogue introduction for the exhibition Four Abstract Painters (November-December 1977), that is, Douglas Abercrombie, Alan Gouk, John McLean and Fred Pollock. (21) In a preface, Macmillan made the dubious claim that Greenberg had answered the criticism that the work of such painters was 'formalist' or 'merely visual' by arguing that ‘visual art should be visual first of all'. In a brief introduction, Greenberg cited the artists' debt to North American, colour-field painting but he also maintained that they were not merely slaves to this influence and had developed beyond it. Although Scottish, they had managed to do this while ‘exiled’ in a foreign city, that is, London. His explanation was a nationalistic one: Scotsmen possessed a mysterious ingredient called ‘character' (Gouk, in fact, had been born in Ireland and his mother was of Irish ancestry.) Greenberg had nothing specific to say about any of the paintings on display - because he had not seen most of them (his limited acquaintance with the artists' work was based on his earlier visits to Stockwell Depot) - however, he did express admiration for the artists' ‘distinctive resoluteness' and ‘the level of their quality’ (but without specifying what level that was). Reading the catalogue today, one gains the impression that the formalist critic had been imported from America in order to bolster formalist painters who felt embattled and neglected in the South of England because, during the second half of the 1970s, several British critics were demanding and supporting art with a social purpose. Gouk read the introduction in advance of publication and was so dissatisfied with its superficiality, inaccuracies and patronizing tone that he wrote to Greenberg in America sending him photographs of paintings and more background information in the hope of a revision. Greenberg replied that it was too late to change the text and that, in any case, catalogue introductions were not particularly important. This letter reveals the imperious way he treated artists and his preference for those who accepted his authority in silence. He wrote to Gouk: ‘I say please shut up.’ Accompanied by Caro, Greenberg arrived in Edinburgh to give a talk at the David Hume Tower. Gouk recalls a poorly delivered, impromptu statement the gist of which was that New York was the world's art centre and that Scottish curators should acquire more works by the American artists who lived there. To Gouk’s surprise, the critic said almost nothing about the four abstract artists whose show he had, in fact, yet to see. At the social events associated with the talk and exhibition, Gouk tried to speak to Greenberg but was kept at bay by the critic's entourage and his latest ‘girlfriend', the Irishwoman Nuala O'Faolain. (22) The latter seemed to be acting as a chaperon-cum-bodyguard. Another clash between Greenberg and Gouk occurred in 1983 because of observations the painter made about the critic in articles about Heron's work published in Artscribe the previous year. (23) Gouk had accused Greenberg of inaccuracies and plagiarism. A critical exchange of letters followed. (24) This was to be Gouk’s last contact with Greenberg. In 1998, recalling their encounters, Gouk claimed that he had never managed to establish a friendly, personal relationship with the American critic and that during the 1970s he (Gouk) had been trying to emancipate himself from Greenberg’s influence and the impact of American painting because he wanted to be original rather than derivative. Therefore, despite his continued respect for Greenberg’s achievements, Gouk’s feelings towards him are ambiguous. Contesting Greenberg’s Ideas during the 1970s and 1980s For younger, theoretically-minded, British artists such as Victor Burgin, John Stezaker and the Art & Language group, who became dissatisfied with the degree-zero character of the American-dominated movement Minimalism - which seemed to be the logical consequence of Greenberg’s reductionism - battling against Greenberg's ideas was a recurrent feature of life in the early ’70s. (Rubenfeld describes the 1970s as an era of ‘Clembashing'.) Greenberg's judgments and theories needed to be countered and overthrown in order to make way for Conceptual art and for art with socio-political content and functions. (One cannot imagine Greenberg having anything positive to say about the Feminist art and Community murals that were produced during the 1970s.) Eventually, because of this struggle, Greenberg’s influence on British artists and art students waned, but his ideas and writings continued to be chewed over in the realm of higher education. Indeed, he is still discussed in art history courses about art criticism and modernism. During the 1970s, the discipline of art history in Europe and North America underwent a radical overhaul. Art appreciation and connoisseurship were challenged by feminism, materialist explanations of economic determinants and a stress on social and political history. Professor T.J. Clark, an ex-Situationist and expert on Courbet and Manet, was the British art historian most closely associated with the emergence of the latter. Eventually, Clark left the University of Leeds to teach in the United States. In March 1981, Clark delivered a conference paper at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, exploring the differences between his position and that of ‘comrade' Greenberg. (25) Greenberg was present and participated in the discussion that followed. Rubenfeld reports: ‘When he [Clark] had finished, Clem stood to clarify a point, a position Clark had wrongly attributed to him. Despite the years of debauchery [i.e. drink, drugs and womanising], he remained a formidable presence.’ (26) The argument between the two men was about the question of modernist art’s autonomy: what links (if any) were there between such art and morality/politics/society? Greenberg insisted that aesthetic experience took place in a realm of its own and that aesthetic value was an ultimate value. Exasperated, Clark was eventually driven to remark: ‘unfortunately ... you have become a spokesman for a kind of devastating artistic self-satisfaction and laziness.’ Despite this harsh judgment, Greenberg ended by saying that he appreciated Clark’s paper and felt complimented by it. Clearly, he was flattered by the close attention he was receiving from a new generation of scholars. Greenberg was considered so important by British artists and art historians employed by the Open University (OU) - some of whom were members of Art & Language - that he was featured in the OU’s distance-learning course 'Modern Art and Modernism' (1983), which began with Manet and ended with Pollock. Four of Greenberg's essays, including 'Modernist Painting', were reprinted in the course's set book. (27) Furthermore, Clark interviewed Greenberg for two OU television programmes. One concerned Pollock and the other art criticism. Although more theoretically-minded and historically-informed than most art critics, Greenberg had been for many years a journalist/reviewer. His non-academic, pragmatic approach to new art - his reliance on his eye, his taste, and his strong faith in the correctness of his critical judgments - meant that the television ‘interview' with Clark about art criticism provided little illumination. Throughout the exchange, Greenberg chain-smoked and sipped gin or vodka while Clark tormented him with theoretical and over-complicated questions. Irritated by Clark’s verbosity, Greenberg was finally driven to exclaim: ‘Oh, you young ones!’ As an ex-editor of several magazines, his advice was: ‘cut, cut, cut.’ The interview was a confused collision between two very different individuals and two, incompatible systems of thought and approaches to the critical understanding of art. To viewers in Britain, it was clear that Greenberg was now a historical monument whose influence over British art and artists had finally evaporated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notes (1) James Faure Walker, 'Clement Greenberg’ (interview), Artscribe, No. 10 (January 1978), pp. 15-21. (2) Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, (New York: Scribner, 1998). This is a fascinating and detailed account but, aside from mentions of Caro and Alloway, there is little about Greenberg’s relations with the British. (3) For Greenberg’s writings up until the late 1960s see: John O'Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 Vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986-93). (4) P. Fuller, ‘An interview with Anthony Caro’, (1978), Beyond the Crisis in Art, (London: Writers & Readers, 1980), p. 197. (5) Linda Saunders (ed.), ‘Clement Greenberg with Peter Fuller', Modern Painters, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Winter 1991), p. 25. (6) Fuller, ‘An interview with Anthony Caro’, p. 198. (7) G. Greenberg, ‘Anthony Caro' (1965), in Anthony Caro, by R. Whelan and others, (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 88. (8) P. Fuller, ‘The Visual Arts', in Modern Britain: The Cambridge Cultural History of Britain: Vol 9 Modern Britain, Ed. Boris Ford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 139. (9) T. Atkinson, ‘Rudely Prevailed Upon', Mekons United, (Lakeland, Florida: Polk Museum of Art and Touch and Go Records, Inc/Chicago: Quarterstick Records/London: ... ellipsis, 1996), p. 39 (10) I am grateful to Professor Bernard Cohen of the Slade School of Art for granting me an interview during March 1998. (11) C. Greenberg, ‘Poetry of Vision', Artforum, Vol. 6 (April 1968), reprinted in Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays, Vol. 4, pp. 282-88. (12) Peter Davies, ‘Notes on the St Ives School' (Interview with Frost and others), Art Monthly, No. 48 (July-August 1981), p. 7. (13) For more on Latham, see: John A. Walker, John Latham - the Incidental Person - His Art and Ideas, (London: Middlesex University Press, 1995). (14) A. Solomon, ‘The Green Mountain Boys', Vogue (1966), reprinted in, The Green Mountain Boys: Caro, Feeley, Noland and Olitski in the 1960s, (New York: André Emmerich Gallery, 1998). 6-page leaflet. (15) C. Greenberg, ‘Rosc '71', Art International, Vol. 16, No. 2 (20 February 1972), pp. 12-17. (16) A. Gouk, ‘Stockwell: A Viewpoint on the Paintings', Artscribe, No. 20 (November 1979), pp. 16-18. See also: Terence Maloon, ‘Painting and Sculpture at the Stockwell Depot', Artscribe, No 9 (November 1977), pp. 44-5. (17) I am grateful to Alan Gouk for an interview given in April 1998 about his various contacts with Greenberg. (18) James Faure Walker, ‘Clement Greenberg’ (interview), pp. 15-21. (19) ‘Alan Gouk, Richard James, John McLean, Fred Pollock in conversation with Ben Jones', Artscribe, No. 5 (February 1977), p. 10. (20) Ibid. p. 11. (21) D. Macmillan and C. Greenberg, Four Abstract Painters, (Edinburgh: Fruit Market Gallery/Scottish Arts Council, 1977). (22) N. O'Faolain's affair with Greenberg is described in her autobiography Are You Somebody? The Life and Times of Nuala O'Faolain, (London: Sceptre, 1997). (23) See: A. Gouk, ‘Patrick Heron, I', Artscribe, No.34 (March 1982), pp. 40-57. ‘Patrick Heron, II', Artscribe, No. 35 (June 1982), pp. 32-43 (24) Greenberg's letter was published in Artscribe, No. 41 (June 1983), p. 67 and Gouk’s reply in Artscribe, No. 43 (October 1983), pp. 61-2. (25) T.J. Clark, ‘More on the Differences between Comrade Greenberg and Ourselves', Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, Eds B. Buchloh, S. Guilbaut and D. Solkin, (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), pp. 169-93. Greenberg delivered a short paper entitled ‘To Cope with Decadence', pp. 161-68. (26) Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, p. 305. (27) Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, (London: Harper & Row, 1982). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John A Walker is a British painter and art historian. This article was first published in the American journal Art Criticism edited by Donald Kuspit: ‘A Vexed trans-Atlantic relationship: Greenberg and the British’, Art Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2001), pp. 44-61. Postscript: After my article was finished I came across a profile of Greenberg by the British art journalist and Ruskin scholar Tim Hilton, one time deputy editor of Studio International, published in the book Telling Lives from W.B Yeats to Bruce Chatwin, (ed) Alistair Horne (London: Macmillan, 2000) [also published in New Criterion Feb 2007]. Hilton also penned an obituary of Greenberg for The Independent (May 11th 1994). Hilton describes the critic as ‘uncle Clem’ and recalls they used to meet regularly for ‘tutorials’ in the bar of the Dorchester Hotel whenever Greenberg was in London. They also met in New York and their friendship seems to have been a long and deep one. Hilton greatly admires Greenberg’s writing: he describes Art and Culture as ‘the best single work of modern art criticism’. Naturally, he is very contemptuous of Latham’s response to the book and deplores what he terms the ‘vendetta‘ against Greenberg in Britain. The memoir does not really say much about Greenberg’s influence on British artists or his influence, if any, on Hilton’s own writings.