Clement Greenberg

Johnson 1960's History has established itself as the final arbiter of the value of the life the artist lives and the art they produce. Having navigated the art scene for over forty years , I have observed that the current manifestation of History's evolution and the fear of not being part of it has been the cudgel that has been wielded by the arbiters of taste over the head of any poor fool who dares enter the arena of art.

Expressionism", and "Action Painting". These terms were first used to describe the New York School in the writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, who would go on to become the primary critics of Abstract Expressionist art. Greenberg and Rosenberg were both Jewish men writing about the New York art scene, with diametrically different views and a lifelong competitive rivalry; yet, they supported the movement with equal fervor. While Clement Greenberg's theories, as developed in his 1939 "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", revolutionized the conceptualization of modern art, influencing the art world in a significant, lasting way, Harold Rosenberg has contributed the most to discourse on Abstract Expressionism i . The movement, which emphasized the gestural mark of the artist as part of his individual expression, is hard to fit neatly into the narrow theories of Greenbergian formalism.

Today there is little serious interest in alchemy.  It seems part of a past that no longer has much to tell us heirs of the Enlightenment.  Even more than astrology it seems to have a place on the intellectually suspect fringes of our modern world.  This makes it difficult for us to recognize and do justice to the widespread interest in alchemy in the twentieth century.
Rooted in ancient and hermetic traditions presented under the veil of enigma, allegory and symbols, alchemy is a transformative practice predicated on the belief that Spirit is present in all that is in the universe. The goal of the ancient alchemist was to accomplish the Great Work, the realization of Spirit in matter, figured by the transformation of lead into gold.  On one level this effort was a proto-chemistry; on another, a psychological quest: as lead is transmuted into gold, so the soul is purified, dissolved and crystallized anew, to reveal Spirit.
These two metaphors for alchemy, as psychological change and as transformation of matter, are intimately linked in the painting of Jackson Pollock. I will focus here on one drawing from c. 1943, given as a gift to his first biographer, B. H. Friedman. Its symbolic images and numbers, and, rare in Pollock's work, sequence of words, provide crucial insight into Pollock's art: his symbolic figuration, his turn to abstraction, his quest for meaning which persists throughout his career. Understanding the import of the drawing takes us to two of Jung's texts on alchemy to which Pollock had access. Emotionally needy, he was in Jungian analysis between 1939-43 and open to the alchemical myth with its promise of integration and redemption. But as James Elkins demanded of the painter, he practices a pictorial alchemy, spiritualizing matter. Pollock does not simply illustrate Jung. In showing what Pollock made of his alchemical knowledge, I will have occasion to refer to the widespread cultural and artistic interest in alchemy in the 1930s and early 40s as well as the more immediate context of his own mythic works of 1942-43. Here we see Pollock in the laboratory, the alchemist painter, launching himself on a pictorial journey that revolutionized abstract painting. 
Challenging the commonly perceived rupture between Pollock's early symbolic imagery and his abstract work, alchemy lets us understand the early symbolic work as the very basis for Pollock's turn to abstraction in the poured paintings. Countering the material positivism of Clement Greenberg's aesthetic response to Pollock's abstraction, still dominant in the literature, alchemy allows us to appreciate Pollock's spiritual approach to matter. The transformative dynamism of destruction- creation worked out in symbolic imagery continues to animate the abstract poured paintings of 1947-50.

The exhaustion of Abstract Expressionism was a result of the compromise of its ideologies due to its inability to completely liberate itself from social constraints ... This constant to-and-fro, or as Nietzsche put it, the ‘transvaluation of all values’ , is what makes up the history of art.

This paper takes up the philosophical problem of modernism as it arises with respect to dance. While the “of” in the phrase “philosophy of dance” is most often construed as an objective genitive—philosophical which takes dance as its object—the “of” can also be construed as a subjective genitive: philosophical reflection that belongs to dance itself. The paper seeks to clarify the conditions for the possibility of this kind of approach. In the first half of the paper, I characterize a standard approach to philosophy of dance that I take to be implicit in and shared by several attempts to adapt conceptions of modernism, which were developed in the first instance to explain changes in the visual arts, to dance. Once we make the standard approach explicit, I argue, it becomes clear that this approach fails to clarify any sense in which philosophical reflection might genuinely belong to dance that is art. The approach shows only that philosophical reflection is in some sense present in the work of choreographers such as Merce Cunningham or Yvonne Rainer. To say of a form of philosophical reflection that it belongs to dance, I argue, is to make a stronger and a more compelling claim: that there is a necessary relation between the aesthetic and the philosophical achievement of the work. In the second half of the paper, drawing on the conception of modernism developed by Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, I develop an alternative approach. Following them, I argue that modernism is the condition an art enters when it enters the condition of philosophy. I show that this approach is able to make sense of the following possibility: a reciprocal relation of mutual dependence obtains between the philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of some forms of dance. Through elaborating this idea, I show that the alternative approach affords a far more compelling point of departure for something deserving the title “philosophy of dance”.

The main aim of the article is to explore the conceptual genesis of Barnett Newman’s artistic  «sublime». To do this, ample attention is paid to a 1947 critical text in which Newman articulates in philosophical terms a polarity that will rest fundamental in his pictorial practice: that between the “transcendence of objects” and the “reality of transcendental experience”. Generated in Newman’s reflection in order to detach his own painting from the great abstract European tradition, the idea behind that dichotomy served as a laboratory for the well-known essay Sublime is Now (1948). The article attempts to make explicit the fundamental convergence of metaphysical and physical
instances in the artist’s personal notion of the sublime, which links to a radical rethinking of the relationship between subject and object in painting.

Around 1962, ‘formalism’ could indicate methodological purity in the realms of both art and science. With camps in both disciplines attempting to minimize human intervention in the realm of decision-making, ‘formalism’ could take on mechanical overtones, thereby linking art and science in profound ways.  This essay considers the ways in which the austere abstract paintings of Morris Louis from the years surrounding 1960 brings these dual formalisms into focus. When viewed through the criticism of Clement Greenberg and the near-unwavering faith President Kennedy’s administration placed in new technocratic ways of waging war, Morris's paintings can be seen as beatified expressions of a mechanical rationality that also brought the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Through deep engagement with Greenberg’s criticism and media archives, the essay forges links between Greenberg’s version of Louis and the dark sides of this rationality. The article concludes by locating ways to consider Louis’s paintings outside of the Greenbergian straitjacket – recapturing the strangeness and chaotic nature of the painter’s practice.

Clement Greenberg’s animosity to Herbert Read’s art criticism manifested itself in his review of Read’s 1956 'The Art of Sculpture'.  Focusing on this interchange and on the two critics’ priorities for modern sculpture, this article compares Read’s emphasis on touch and carving with Greenberg’s on sight and construction.  Both critics mobilized their theories of sculpture around artists who exemplified their views: for Read it was Henry Moore and for Greenberg David Smith.  I discuss the long-running debate between the critics and the ways in which nationalist aspirations underwrote their advocacy of these artists.

"Rosalind Krauss e il corpo nella fotografia surrealista: dall'informe all'identità di genere, verso un'arte femminista", di Andrea D'Ammando. Tra la fine degli anni Settanta e la metà degli anni Novanta, nell'ambito degli studi critici sul Surrealismo, si assiste a un recupero della centralità di Georges Bataille e del gruppo di surrealisti dissidenti riunitosi intorno alla rivista Documents. Alla riscoperta dell'assoluta importanza e originalità dell'impresa batailleana, divenuta ormai quasi un luogo comune tra chi si occupa del movimento surrealista (nonché della cultura francese degli anni Venti e Trenta del secolo scorso), ha contribuito in modo determinante il lavoro di Rosalind Krauss, che già nella prima metà degli anni Ottanta dedica alla fotografia surrealista-e, come si vedrà, al suo rapporto con il corpo-mostre e saggi destinati a esercitare una notevole influenza sulla critica successiva.

Il presente contributo intende reinterpretare la nozione di performativo nell'ambito dei tentativi di ontologia dell'arte del modernismo americano di metà Novecento. Vorrebbe anzitutto sottolineare il ruolo anticipatore di certa critica d'arte-si pensi nella fattispecie a Clement Greenberg ma soprattutto a Harold Rosenberg-nel riconoscere il portato teorico del concetto e la sua incidenza nell'evoluzione del fatto artistico contemporaneo. Si analizzeranno nello specifico gli aspetti che coinvolgono il versante della performance nella concezione di opera d'arte modernista, ora secondo Rosenberg (per cui è conseguenza inevitabile della pittura d'azione cristallizzata in un 'quadro-arena'), ora secondo Greenberg (che lo tratteggia in negativo come svalutazione dell'autodeterminazione del quadro che si fa 'quadro-medium'). Si proseguirà poi verificando gli effetti del passaggio del performativo dal quadro all'ambiente e all'evento puro, prendendo a esempio la teoria dell'happening e della non-arte di Allan Kaprow, e la si confronterà con le precedenti. I risultati di tale ricognizione condurranno all'ipotesi che il performativo rappresenti, allo stesso tempo, una soglia della teoria dell'immagine modernista e una svolta verso il postmodernismo.

In the present essay, I aim to reinterpret the notion of performing in respect of modernist ontologies of art, with a particular focus on American art criticism in the mid-Twentieth century. Firstly, I will address to art critics such as Clement Greenberg but especially Harold Rosenberg, as forerunners in acknowledging theoretical importance to the very concept of performing, and in pointing out its leading role in the development of contemporary art.I will analyse the implications of the work of art as a performance in Rosenberg’s formulation of “Action Painting” as the “arena” of artistic creation, and in Greenberg’s conception of modernist painting as autonomous and self-determined. I will proceed in verifying the impact of this “performative turn” from the painting to the evironment and the pure event, taking for example Allan Kaprow’s  theory of happening and nonart. I will compare it with Rosenberg and Greenberg’s  achievements. As a result, I will suggest that performing could be seen, at the same time, as a threshold of modernism and as a shift toward postmodernism.

In the present study I aim to examine the condition of the fictional artist in Goncourt brothers’ "Manette Salomon" (1867) in the framework of the most recent studies on modernism in French literature. Also, I will reinterpret the goncourtian art novel through modernist art theory, with a particular focus on Clement Greenberg’s ontology of modernist painting. Firstly, I will suggest that the Goncourts, using a ‘pictorialist writing’, have contributed to expand Kris and Kurz’s concept of legend, myth, and magic in the image of the artist, reframing it by the lens of modernism. Then, I will provide an overview of the main aesthetological problems raised by the novel, by making a genealogy of the so-called art criticism based upon mediality in the 19th century and comparing it with its further developments in the 20th century. Finally, I will investigate the characteristics of the goncourtian fictional painters by analysing some of the ‘virtual paintings’ featured in the book, as a means of figuring out the theory of image advanced by the authors; I will hypothesize that it can be clearly referred to as proto-modernist.

Twenty-three years after his death, Clement Greenberg is still someone to be taken into account in the world of contemporary art criticism, especially when we speak of Modernism. One cannot minimize the importance of his theory, usually re-ferred to as formalist, or the influence it has had on the generations of artists from the 1930s to the present day. It is also a fact that, on one hand, there are multiple defend-ers and followers of his theory, but on the other hand, he also generates strong criti-cism and meets several attempts to challenge his aesthetic principles. The goal of this dissertation is to analyze the implications of Greenberg’s theory in the course of mod-ern art, basically in painting but also in sculpture, using a corpus of texts written by Greenberg since the end of the 1930s to the 1980s, explaining the dissensions between Greenberg and the other art critics. This will encompass the course of Modernist art from Impressionism to Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, and then polemizing the commentary that major names in art criticism, such as Michael Fried, Leo Stein-berg, and Rosalind Krauss made to the work of Greenberg. Consequently, it is argued that the journey made across 80 years of painting and sculpture by Greenberg demon-strates how the vision of one man became as important and critical as that of the art-ists themselves.

Passados vinte e três anos da sua morte, Clement Greenberg continua a ser um nome a ter em conta na crítica de arte contemporânea, nomeadamente quando falamos de Modernismo. Não se pode escamotear a importância da sua teoria, geralmente apelidada de formalista, nem a influência que a mesma teve em gerações de artistas, desde os anos 30 do século XX até aos nossos dias. Também é um facto que, se por um lado, encontramos múltiplos defensores e até discípulos, por outro gerou fortes críticas e tentativas várias de desconstrução dos seus princípios artísticos. Partindo da leitura de um corpus de textos de Greenberg escritos desde o final da década de 30 até à década de 80 do século XX, procura-se, ao longo desta dissertação, analisar as implicações da teoria de Greenberg no percurso da arte moderna, essencialmente na pintura mas também na escultura, explicitando as dissensões entre Greenberg e outros críticos de arte. Mostrar-se-á, assim, o percurso da arte modernista desde o Impressionismo até Jasper Johns e Robert Rauschenberg, polemizando as referências que nomes maiores da crítica de arte, como sejam Michael Fried, Leo Steinberg e Rosalind Krauss, fazem à obra de Greenberg. No final, pretende-se que o percurso feito ao longo de cerca de 80 anos de pintura e escultura demonstre como a visão de um só homem se revelou tão importante e fundamental quanto a dos artistas.

This essay focuses on the logic of the aesthetic argument used in the eighteenth century as a conceptual tool for formulating the modern concept of “(fine) art(s).” The essay also examines the main developments in the history of the art of modernity which were initiated from the way the “nature” of art was conceived in early modern aesthetics. The author claims that the formulation of the “aesthetic nature” of art led to the process of the gradual disappearance of all of the formal elements that had previously characterized the visual arts; the result was “emptiness” or “nothingness” as art. The author
refers to this process in terms of “vanishing acts” that allow for the formulation of an aesthetics of absence in connection to twentieth-century art (complementing the Ästhetik der Absenz, formulated in German art theory). The author also briefly addresses the consequences that these processes have for
the way contemporary art, and art world operate.

Abstraction." For the small catalog, Greenberg wrote an essay of the same name, introducing the artists and the ideas he believed to be behind their work. Not only did the exhibition help Greenberg solidify a canon of Modernist painters and an aesthetic which he favoured, he also developed the term "post-painterly abstraction" to define these artists in their milieu.

Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) fue uno de los críticos más importantes del siglo XX. Es el autor de una de las teorías de la modernidad más influyentes en el campo de las artes visuales. Sus textos jugaron un papel clave en la migración de la vanguardia de París a Nueva York. Fue el primer intérprete y defensor de un artista clave en aquella época; Jackson Pollock. Antes de eso, en la década de los treinta, formó parte de un grupo de intelectuales judíos neoyorkinos que se aglutinaron en torno a las páginas de la revista izquierdista Partisan Review y propusieron un intenso debate sobre las relaciones entre arte y política, en el periodo comprendido entre el “crack” de 1929 y el estallido de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Su famoso ensayo “Vanguardia y kitsch” (1939), que se contextualiza y analiza pormenorizadamente en el siguiente artículo, fue una de las contribuciones más relevantes y valiosas a ese debate.

Palabras clave: Greenberg, vanguardia, kitsch, marxismo, Realismo Social, Trotsky, Brecht.


“Avant-Garde and Kitsch in the Universe of Totalitarianism”

Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) was one of the most important critics in the 20th Century. He is the author of one of the most influential theories of modernity in the visual arts. His texts played a relevant role in the migration of the Avant-Garde from Paris to New York. He was the first interpreter and apologist of a key artist in his time; Jackson Pollock. Before, in the 1930s, he was part of a group of jewish intellectuals in New York City which gathered around the pages of the leftist magazine Partisan Review, proposing an intense discussion regarding the relations between art and politics, in the period in between the 1929 crack, and the begining of the Second World War. His famous essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), which is contextualized and analyzed into detail in the following paper, was one of the most important and worthy contributions to this debate.

Key words: Greenberg, Avant-Garde, Kitsch, marxism, Social Realism, Trotsky, Brecht.

Heterogen teorijski diskurs Rozalind Kraus ocrtao je „epistemološki prelom“ unutar njujorške intelektualne, kulturno-političke, teorijske, kritičke i umetničke scene krajem šezdesetih i početkom sedamdesetih godi- na prošlog veka. Kulturni derivati i paradigme njenih teorijskih polazišta višestruko su prisutni u savremenom internacionalnom (hegemonom) svetu umetnosti, bez kojih, osim ostalih, zasigurno, ovaj mnogostruki diskurs umetnosti ne bi bio čitljiv. s obzirom na heterogenost teorijskih elaboracija ove autorke, nije bilo lako trasirati, markirati, razlučiti, prikazati i interpretirati njena osnovna teorijska načela, polazišta, probleme i njihov značaj u kontekstu formiranja neo- i postavangardne kulturne njujorške scene, te implikacije povezane s njenim uticajem na evropski kulturni kontekst i obratno. Pošavši upravo od tih „konfliktnih zona“, cilj nam nije bio da taksativno informišemo o njenom teorijskom radu, niti da istorijski predstavimo tok teorijskog rada Rozalind Kraus. zato, ovaj tekst ne prati tradicionalnu logiku istorijskog metanarativa umetnosti, karakterističnu za klasičan evropocentrični oblik konstruisanja znanja o umetnosti (L'épistémè), već je strukturisan oko koliko teorijskih problema, pri čemu je fokus stavljen na modalitete recepcije i primene francuskog strukturalizma i poststrukturalizma na tradicionalni modernistički i visokomodernistički, dominantni, internacionalni metajezik umetnosti. Drugim rečima, ono što ova studija nudi jeste jedna moguća optika za promišljanje i recepciju heuristike, odnosno „metoda“ kojima je Rozalind Kraus uspela da određeni set istorijski validnih pojmova dotadašnjeg sveta umetnosti dekonstruiše i pokaže naličje njihovih ideoloških tamnica.

... therThe Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg Elissa Auther at Google Indexer on September 5, 2010 ... Page 3. The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg ...

«1922/2022 -Total Modernism. Continuity, Discontinuity and the Experimental Turn».

Convegno, Centro Studi Arti della Modernità, Torino, 18-20 maggio 2022

Titolo dell'intervento: Camilla Balbi (IULM, Milano), Marcello Sessa (Università di Pisa), "Un astrattismo mancato? Carl Einstein e Clement
Greenberg rileggono Kandinsky".

Clement  Greenberg’s  international  reputation  is  partly  due  to  the  success  of  one  of  his  first  and  most  perceptive  essays,  Avant-Garde  and  Kitsch,  published  in  the  Fall  1939  issue  of  “Partisan  Review”.  Despite  its  unsurpassed  importance,  the  arti-cle  still  requires  a  broader  comprehension  of  its  origins:  according  to  Greenberg’s  per-sonal  papers,  the  essay’s  main  concepts  began  to  take  form  during  the  Winter  1939,  when  the  author  was  involved  in  the  drafting  of  a  new  essay  on  Bertolt  Brecht,  still  unpublished today, at that time submitted to the “Partisan Review”’s editorial board but rejected. A second document enables to trace back Avant-Garde and Kitsch’s roots even further:  according  to  a  letter  by  Greenberg,  one  of  the  editors,  Dwight  Macdonald,  plagiarized  the  rejected  script  as  his  last  essay,  Soviet  Society  and  Its  Cinema,  clearly  seemed  to  prove.  The  varied  topics  articulated  in  the  letter,  as  well  as  in  the  draft  on  Brecht,  would  be  at  the  basis  of  Avant-Garde  and  Kitsch,  becoming  crucial  and  early  components of the editorial process of the well-known essay.

In the short lived periodical Possibilities 1947-48, co-edited by Motherwell and Rosenberg, the issue being negotiated was artistic freedom and community at the close of World War II and the commencement of the Cold War.  In its very openness it served as a site from which, and in response to which, the post-war art critical establishment was generated. Its editorial policy was self-consciously a "collage" of approaches to artistic freedom, as Ann Gibson has noted.  Both an existential/nihilistic and what I want to call a mythopoetic/sacralized aesthetics coexisted.  The full complexity of this collage is important to resuscitate, as the voice of the mythopoeic, as it had earlier been espoused by the Surrealists and the Art of this Century circle and advanced in Possibilities especially by Andrea Caffi, Paul Goodman, Lionel Abel, and Jackson Pollock, was shortly to be muted, in what Motherwell later called, as noted by Martica Sawin, a conspiracy of silence.  The positivist Greenberg quickly made known his resistance to the mythopoeic position of Possibilities; Rosenberg's existential position consolidated in 1949; the mythopoeic position, with its interest in art as a mediation of the individual and a larger collectivity, was submerged.  This essay re-examines the case of Possibilities as one of the last presentations, with its strengths and flaws, of such a mythopoeic aesthetics.  Its silencing is explored by focusing on the case of Jackson Pollock: on the six paintings reproduced in Possibilities, on his artistic statement "My Painting," and on the way it was misunderstood.

W hen the critic Clement Greenberg set about compiling the collection of his writings that would be published as Art and Culture (1961), it is well known that he made several strategic edits. Among these revisions were a few additional lines about an amateur artist named Janet Sobel in "American Type Painting," Greenberg's major essay on the New York School. Originally published in 1955, when the essay appeared again in 1961, the enhanced paragraph read:

The present article focuses on the first draft of Clement Greenberg’s essay “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” published in Partisan Review in July–August 1940, and on various documents relating to it, such as Greenberg’s personal correspondence and his notebook, preserved at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. This original draft, with its lucid arguments and pragmatic prose, deals with a variety of issues, including abstract painting’s role in society and the relationship between perception, psychology, and art. Because of the editors’ dissatisfaction with this essay, Greenberg was forced to rewrite it, and, as he complained to a friend, his “Laocoon” was not only cut but also distorted. An analysis of the draft’s main thesis, as well as of the other related documents, reveals important insight into Greenberg’s intellectual formation.

The aim of this investigation is to consider the extent to which the processes and material stuff of painting remain central to its identity and meaning. Within writing that supports painting, the role played by the medium of paint is too often sidestepped—sidestepped within writings that take as their starting point the interdisciplinary assumption that the message owes little of consequence to the medium through which it becomes disclosed. The retreat from medium specificity, in the 1970s – a move largely made in opposition to the hegemonic force of Greenbergian formalism and the expanded field ushered in by studio practices, as well as an embrace of the text (promoted through theory) – dislocated image from that from which the image is constituted. To a significant extent, particularly in the most vibrant approaches to the medium, the iconographic possibilities of a painting came to be situated in opposition to the characteristics of the painted object.

This project addresses how the reduction of painting to linguistic schemas has rendered the material object of painting redundant. The conception of painting as image – free of material baggage and operable through language alone – serves to disguise the temporal nature of the manner by which a painting is constructed. A painting’s surface is built incrementally and, in its stillness, offers clues to what it has been—perhaps the only clues to what it is. I will redress this in two ways. First, through a body of studio practice I will demonstrate the indispensability of spatiotemporal concerns in respect of the processes and object of painting. My painting is reliant on responsiveness to methods of making, and I will foreground the image’s construction, staging it as an imbrication of language and material in time.

Secondly, I will engage in a written inquiry comprising of five chapters. In Chapter 1, I attest to my concerns as a painter. Chapter 2 embarks on an investigation into the notion of a medium within the post-medium condition. Chapter 3 will consider the positioning of painting: examining philosophical omissions and historiographical oversights, which have, together, contributed to misunderstandings. Chapter 4 seeks, through the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Hölderlin, to negotiate a new ontological model for the medium of painting, and Chapter 5 re-considers my recent practice – and position on medium – through the lens of the aforementioned inquiry.

The context for this work is the realm in which painting’s ontological status is questioned—targeting the nodal point where there is recourse to consider the extent to which the meaning of a painting is dependent on the specificity of its material conditions. To that end, I argue that Heidegger’s notion of truth (and of equipmentality) – developed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and the Hölderlin Lectures – offers the possibility of replacing the redundancy of the medium with a notion of regeneration, against the backdrop of the endism that haunts painting.

This previously unpublished transcript of an undated and incomplete handwritten essay on surrealist doyen André Breton by American art critic Clement Greenberg is illuminating in terms of the otherwise somewhat oblique connection between politics and avant-garde art for the younger Greenberg, the precise nature of whose professed Marxism has long been contested. It was composed in response to Breton’s “Political Position of Surrealism” (1935). In his text, Greenberg argues that Breton is correct in his claim that radical artists should not let questions of politics distract them from autonomous work. However, unlike Breton, he does not contend that this is the case because such artists will be vindicated by future audiences and should, accordingly, work in defiance of a mass audience. Rather, Greenberg argues that no other mode of working opens up new fields of aesthetic experience while bemoaning the state of affairs where such art is inaccessible to the working class, ultimately c...

At the time of his death in 1965 at the age of 59, American sculptor David Smith was widely recognized as one of the greatest sculptors of his generation. By then, he had been honoured with a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and had represented the United States at Documenta and major biennales at Venice (on two occasions) and São Paolo. Countless studies have analyzed Smith’s career and artistic development, but very little has been written on the published criticism of his work or its larger impact on our understanding of this artist. In this dissertation I examine the historiographic reception of his sculpture from 1938, the year of his first solo exhibition, until 1971 when Rosalind Krauss published Terminal Iron Works, the first monograph on Smith. I trace this reception from the early focus on Smith’s biography and working methods (the biographical paradigm), to the later interest in formal analysis (the formalist paradigm). I further analyze this criticism in the context of artistic developments in the 1940s and 1950s, namely Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture. In the process, I draw out common themes, tropes and narratives that appear in the criticism on Smith and the Abstract Expressionists. To do so, I engage in a close textual analysis of the exhibition reviews, magazine and newspaper articles, and catalogue essays published during this period. I demonstrate that this reception is culturally, socially, and ideologically informed. References to Smith’s biography, working methods, materials, and exceptionalism all point to the aims, desires and interests of the writers, but also to the influence of social and cultural factors. Ultimately, I intend to provide a revisionist history of Smith’s work that draws out the mythology that this reception contributed to—a mythology that continues to shape our understanding of mid-twentieth-century American art.

This paper discusses Roger Scruton's theory of kitsch and investigates it relation to totalitarianism, through the figure of stupidity as discussed by Robert Musil. This threefold relationship, Scruton conceptualizes as a "spiritual disease". It is rendered possible through a distortion of the relation of modern communities to transcendence and redeemed through a restoration of the idea of beauty.

Going by the titles of his books, Deleuze has proposed two philosophical concepts for styles from art history: expressionism and baroque. It is true that he discusses many other notions from the history of style, but these are the only ones that are truly made to 'exist in themselves'. Or might there be a third, buried like a wedge between its two neighboring concepts? Although the notion of mannerism recurs in several of Deleuze's writings, it is never developed in any systematic way. Even in The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque mannerism stays entirely subordinate to 'its working relation with the baroque'. It is only in his last course at Vincennes, in which he draws a parallel between Michelangelo and Leibniz, that Deleuze wonders whether we possess 'the means to give a certain philosophical consistency to the concept of mannerism', which in addition he labels 'the most evident, the most certain theme of our investigations this year'. My aim is to render mannerism separable again from the baroque. This will be done by putting attempts in art history and art criticism to give a definition of mannerism in interference with a close-reading of key passages in Deleuze's work, especially from The Fold and Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation. From the concept of the ' developed in the latter, I will distillate an initial concept of mannerism as an art that proceeds by way of diagrammatic deformation. Subsequently, I will compare this concept to Deleuze's concept of the Baroque (the 'fold taken to infinity') and argue that, while the baroque pushes the anti-classical and revolutionary 'catastrophe' of mannerism to the extreme, it simultaneously and paradoxically forms a conservative and restorative reaction to it. It is by exploring mannerism's 'very particular relations' with the baroque, finally, that we can also discover in mannerism a precursor to 20 th century modernism and in Deleuze's modernist allegiance several neo-mannerist tendencies.

Este estudio  tiene por objetivo interpretar el sentido de debates, obras y proyectos artísticos que tuvieron lugar en Brasil y Estados Unidos durante las décadas que siguieron a 1945. La Primera Parte, centrada en la década de 1950, presenta el ciclo de la abstracción artística, tanto en su versión geométrica (brasilera) como en su versión informalista (estadunidense). Hemos comparado estos casos siguiendo la pista de las teorías del modernismo de Clement Greenberg y de Mário Pedrosa, con énfasis en la noción de abstracción que se deriva de ellas. En lo que refiere a la producción artística, hemos destacado el informalismo practicado por Jackson Pollock y las contradicciones de la prosa juvenil de Haroldo de Campos. Hemos argumentado que, tanto el movimiento brasilero como el estadunidense, pueden ser entendidos como manifestaciones desiguales de lo que Fredric Jameson llamó modernismo tardío. En la Segunda Parte, centrada en la década de 1960, se presenta un segundo momento histórico-artístico, que denominamos aquí semi-abstracción o abstracción expandida, provocado por la crisis del ciclo anterior: un momento en el que, tanto en Brasil como en Estados Unidos, artistas formados en el movimiento abstracto de los años 50 reorientaron sus proyectos hacia la vida cotidiana. Para estudiarlo, hemos seleccionado y comentado tres proyectos de carácter serial: los Silkscreen Paintings de Robert Rauschenberg [1962-64]; los primeros Bólides de Hélio Oiticica [1963-65]; y Galáxias de Haroldo de Campos [1963-1976]. El hilo conductor de esta tesis ha sido la pregunta por el origen y por los desdoblamientos de un importante principio artístico del período pos-1945: un manejo informalista o abierto, elaborado desde concepciones y sensibilidades abstractas. Hemos perseguido este manejo informalista desde su formalización original en la obra de Pollock hasta sus desdoblamientos en la nueva prosa de Haroldo de Campos (Galáxias). En su nivel más general, esta tesis fue pensada y proyectada como una posible plataforma para estudios de literatura comparada en las Américas, del período pos-1945, con foco en estéticas constructivo-modernistas.

Louise Nevelson’s work is today all too often treated as marginal and idiosyncratic. Yet her art remains vital to the broader study of American modernism, for it targeted the modernist myth of autonomy at multiple levels. Adopting strategies from gothic literature, Nevelson exposed what modernism had repressed: the fear that its claims for autonomy are critically unstable. In the dark space of her home, she confronted modernist art with this gothic fear, revealing how the specter of domesticity haunts its theory and practice.