Art Criticism as Narrative Strategy: Clement Greenbergs Critical Encounter with Franz Kline

Daniel A. Siedell Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

This book is not intended as a completely faithful record of my activity as a critic. Not only has much been altered, but much more has been left out than put in. Clement Greenberg, Preface, Art and Culture, 1961

ew books have had a greater impact on post-war Anglo-American art theory, art criticism, and art history than Clement Greenbergs Art and Culture: Critical Essays. A collection of thirty-seven reviews dating from 1939 to the late fties and published in 1961, Art and Culture (hereafter A&C) offered a comprehensive and highly rened critical oeuvre to an expanding postwar art world eager to make use of an interpretive cosmology of modern art. It also revived Greenbergs reputation as a critic in the face of Harold Rosenbergs popularity in the late fties. It does so by retelling the story of his experience of modern art at mid-century through heavily revised reviews and essays that were written earlier in his career. A&C became the modern art textbook for a generation of art history graduate students who were also cutting their teeth as practicing critics for such publications as Artforum. This state of affairs has much to do with the historiographical construction, seminal to the professionalization of art criticism in the sixties, that Greenbergs art criticism was analytical (and thus sophisticated) while Rosenbergs was rhetorical (and thus journalistic and popular). This paper is concerned with exploring what certain of these revisions reveal about Greenbergs intentions as a critic at mid-century. But it will also direct attention to the development of the midcentury art world, the historiographical fate of certain mid-century artists, and nally, the nature and function of art criticism itself not what philosophers, art historians, and even art critics themselves claim criticism is or what art critics say they do, but how criticism is actually practiced. These
Daniel A. Siedell, Art Criticism as Narrative Strategy: Clement Greenbergs Critical Encounter with Franz Kline, Journal of Modern Literature, 26.3/4 (Spring 2003), pp. 4761. Indiana University Press, 2004.

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questions will be raised through a comparative analysis of Greenbergs initial review of Franz Klines 1951 solo exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery which appeared in Partisan Review in 1952 and a revised version which appeared in A&C. Although it is no secret that Greenberg radically revised these reviews and essays, the meaning and signicance of such revisions has yet to be fully explored. Perhaps commentators have taken at face value Greenbergs own explanation. I would not deny, Greenberg wrote in his Preface, being one of those critics who educate themselves in public, but I see no reason why all the haste and waste involved in my self-education should be preserved in a book. John OBrian, whose skillful compilation of Greenbergs writings in four volumes constitute an argument for the recovery and preservation of the full range of his criticism, simply notes: Most of the articles in that book were revised or substantially changed by Greenberg for republication.1 In an insightful and deeply inuential review of OBrians rst two volumes, critic Sidney Tillim observed:
Art and Culture now acquires a new dimension, an implication that makes it something much more than the monument to formalist criticism it has been taken to be. It is instead virtually an allegory of Greenbergs constant effort to achieve through critical practice both cultural integration and a particular kind of personal validation.2

In spite of Greenbergs supercially modest claim that he was merely sparing readers the haste and waste of his critical progress, I follow OBrian and Tillim in arguing that his revisions, his choice of revisions, and, in the case of Klines work, the specic revisions, offer important insights into mid-century cultural politics and the role that his art criticism played in shaping those politics.

I.
The inuence that Greenberg has exerted on art writing during the last thirty to forty years has been due, in large part, to his reputation as an object-based formalist critic. This approach became normative as modern and contemporary art and criticism made its way into the academy in the early sixties. It emerged as part of Greenberg and his followers attempt to counter the inuence of Harold Rosenbergs existentialist and anti-formalist criticism in the late fties, which reached its apex in Rosenbergs publication of The Tradition of the New (1959). In response to Rosenbergs popular belles lettres style, Greenberg exaggerated the importance of formalist analyses of art. But Greenbergs focus on the object was actually deceptive. This essay argues that Greenberg crafted critical contexts within which he appeared to be attending to the object itself but was, in fact, concerned primarily with the construction and maintenance of situational contexts through a narrative that he rened in A&C.3 This art critical narrative interpreted the history of Western art as

1. Introduction, Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism, Perceptions and Judgments, 19391944, vol. 1, ed. J. OBrian (University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. xvii. 2. Sidney Tillim, Criticism and Culture, or Greenbergs Doubt, Art in America (May 1987), p. 127. The two main focuses of Tillims review fall outside the pale of the present essay; rst, he argues that OBrians collected essays amounts to a Marxist attempt to re-Marxify him through his earlier writing and second, he explores Greenbergs ambivalent relationship to his Jewish identity and its presence in A&C. 3. For analyses of the narrative structures of art historical writing, see David Carrier, Artwriting (University of Mass. Press, 1987) and Principles of Art History Writing (Penn State University Press, 1991). See also James Elkins, Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (Penn State University Press, 1998).

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the modernist transformation of arts formal means into its expressive subject. Combined with the fact that it gave pride of place to art in the U.S., Greenbergs narrative provided the broad historical and theoretical contours within which an emerging professional class in New York of modern and contemporary art critics could go about the business of lling in their interpretations.4 The primary agenda for Greenberg was not the interpretation of art or the search for aesthetic quality (despite his and his followers rhetoric to the contrary).5 Rather, his agenda was the construction and maintenance of an efficient narrative that not only could give meaning to artists and works of art but, perhaps more importantly, give meaning to postwar U.S. high culture and the role of the academic art critic in it. A&C is thus the culmination of Greenbergs art criticism qua narrative, a narrative that he continually, obsessively, and quite ingeniously crafted and rened for nearly a decade as he edited and selected reviews for A&C. Furthermore, Greenbergs career after 1961 can be interpreted as a series of footnotes to and glosses on A&C. That this narrative has become so useful to scores of art writers to engage in object-based formalist art interpretation should not blind the scholarly community to the fact that Greenbergs own criticism at mid-century was focused less on the object than on the narrative. This was the story in which art and artists played a wide range of leading, supporting, and bit parts, as they performed roles in a ctional drama in which a ctional narrator (Greenberg) intuits their aesthetic meaning. This narrative device is revealed clearly in an analysis of Greenbergs critical engagement with one of the New York Schools more perplexing artists, Franz Kline.

II.
According to Foster, Franz Kline has suffered the unusual historiographical fate of being half mythied.6 Almost without exception, Kline has been recognized as one of the important artists who were part of the New York School at mid-century. But in spite of his reputation as part of this school or movement, Klines work, on its own, has proved problematic for most interpreters. The Kline of Abstract Expressionism appears much easier to interpret than the Kline who stands alone. And in fact, since his rst solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1950 Klines work has posed a formidable challenge to the critical community. One critic wrote, Franz Kline, housepainting a huge irregular grate or a gure like a sloppy g on staring white, achieves a malignant shock that is over almost before it starts.7 Another wrote, Assuredly these paintings hit the eye and arrest the attention, as any explosive spectacle will. But after the initial shock, engendered by stark largeness, one realizes that nothing remains to engage the mind or the emotions.8 In a review of Klines third solo show at the Egan Gallery, critic Hubert Crehen admitted that, I use the term pictorial statement to suggest the idea that it is an open question whether Klines 13 large canvases intend to conform to the ordinary beholders expectation of what a painting should look like.9 And two

4. See Stephen C. Foster, The Critics of Abstract Expressionism (UMI Press, 1980), pp. 7583. 5. Greenbergs commentators often make the mistake (one encouraged by Greenberg himself) of re-reading his early essays and reviews in the light of his more clear (re: post-A&C dogmatic) statements. Contra this view, see Foster, Clement Greenberg: Formalism in the 40s and 50s, Art Journal (Fall 1975), pp. 2024, and Susan Noyes Platt, Clement Greenberg in the 1930s: A New Perspective on His Criticism, Art Criticism (1989), pp. 4764. 6. Stephen C. Foster, Franz Kline: Art and the Structure of Identity (Electa, 1994), p. 16. 7. Manny Farber, Art, The Nation (Nov. 11, 1950), p. 445. 8. J.F., Fifty-Seventh Street in Review, Art Digest (Nov. 1, 1950), p. 20. 9. Hubert Crehen, Inclining to Exultation, Art Digest (May 1, 1954), p. 15.

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years later, reviewing Klines rst solo show at the Sidney Janis Gallery, Leo Steinberg admitted: What these canvases are I dont exactly know obviously not pictures in any inherited sense, for they are not autonomous systems that invite sustained contemplation. . . . That they sacrice many traditional values to the impact of a rst encounter is self-evident.10 What appears to be characteristic of the criticism emerging from Klines solo shows from 1950 to 1956 is that the critics lack sufficient categories to make proper use of the work. This early review literature is important because it reveals that for a considerable period of time, Klines black and white paintings were not easily or comfortably received in the critical community in the context of any number of existing or emerging narratives. Compared to the rest of the early review literature, Clement Greenbergs rst encounter with Klines black and white painting is rather typical. Reviewing Klines second solo show at Egan Gallery, Greenberg writes,
Another important new painter is Franz Kline, who has just had his second show at Egans. He at least got a better reception from his fellow-artists than Newman did, even if the official and collecting art world is still wary of him (and it would speak little for him if it were not). Klines large canvases, with their blurtings of black calligraphy on white and gray grounds, are tautness quintessential. He has stripped his art in order to make sure of it not so much for the public as for himself. He presents only the salient points of his emotion. Three or four of the pictures in his two shows already serve to place him securely in the foreground of contemporary abstract painting, but one has the feeling that this gifted and accomplished artist still suppresses too much of his power. Perhaps, on the other hand, that is exactly the feeling one should have.11

Like other critics responding to these early exhibitions at Egan where Kline had, for the rst time, exhibited his large-scale black and white canvases, Greenberg wasted little time responding to the paintings themselves. Like other critics, Greenberg saw Klines work to be evidence that something else was at stake. In reviewing one of these early exhibitions, Emily Genauer even took the opportunity to comment on the contemporary state of the New York avant-garde in general, an avant-garde that, to her mind, had abandoned conventional modern assumptions about the work of art.12 It should be obvious that very little of Greenbergs review focuses on the art itself. He observes that the blurtings of black calligraphy on white and grey grounds are tautness quintessential and he explains, he [Kline] has stripped his art in order to make sure of it. Neither of these phrases seems particularly object-based and the kind of analysis Hilton Kramer has in mind as an antidote to the vague poetic rhetoric characteristic of Harold Rosenbergs criticism that he and other formalists despised.13 Despite the fact that Greenberg says that three or four of Klines paintings from his rst two solo shows are enough to demonstrate his importance for the new American painting, Greenberg does not identify which ones they are and how and why they reveal the artists importance.

10. Leo Steinberg, Month in Review, Arts Magazine (April 1956), p. 43. 11. Clement Greenberg, Art Chronicle: Feeling is All, Partisan Review (Jan.Feb. 1952), p. 101. Reproduced without revisions in OBrian, ed. Vol. 3, p. 104. 12. Emily Genauer, Critic Deplores New Art of Nothingness, The New York Herald Tribune (March 11, 1956), p. 10. 13. Hilton Kramer, A Critic on the Side of History: Notes on Clement Greenberg, Arts Magazine (October 1962), pp. 60.

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Ironically, his interpretation is no less imprecise and vague than those of the New York school artists themselves whose reputation for not talking about the object itself is well known, if little understood.14 The critic Robert Goldwater lamented this peculiar situation in an article in 1959:
The assumption was that everyone knew what every one else meant, but it was never put to the test; no one ever pointed to an object and said, see, thats what Im talking about (and like or dont like). Communication was always entirely verbal. For artists, whose rst (if not nal) concern is with the visible and the tangible, this custom assumed the proportions of an enormous hole at the center.15

There is nothing in the visual analysis of the art itself, if his review of Kline qualies as visual analysis, that differentiates Greenbergs criticism from the other critics who engaged Klines work in the fties. This, however, dees the accepted wisdom about the prescience of Greenbergs eye. Greenberg gives the reader very little in the way of formal analysis, despite such well-chosen phrases as three or four paintings that give the impression that Greenberg is actually looking at and responding to the objects themselves. Greenberg does however distinguish himself from his fellows in one important area. In spite of his vagueness regarding the meaning and signicance of Klines specic paintings, he is very precise about Klines participation in an emerging if yet illdened narrative of modern U.S. art. It is precisely the important role that narrative played in Greenbergs art criticism that made it so inuential, a narrative structure no less rhetorical or poetic than Rosenbergs. Recognition of the narrative structure of Greenbergs art criticism, however, requires one to ascertain the compelling plotline, which is the primary intention for crafting a narrative. Moreover, it is important to recognize that all the characters in a narrative achieve and sustain meaning and signicance only within the narrative for which they were created. This is not to say that Greenbergs Kline is a ction, a complete and utter fabrication. But given the narrative quality of Greenbergs art criticism, certain characteristics about Klines work and his intentions are privileged at the expense of others. Kline, in short, is certainly Greenbergs Kline. It is therefore a risky interpretive business to isolate a character in the narrative, such as Kline, without carrying over the narrative function within which such a character is intended to serve. For Greenbergs Kline is designed to play a specic role in the A&C narrative. Consequently, Greenbergs Kline achieves meaning and signicance only as he and his art are capable of playing carefully prescribed roles in this narrative. And for Greenberg, it is the role of an artist who failed to fulll his potential. Donald E. Polkinghorne has argued that narrative is a meaning structure that organizes events and human actions into a whole, thereby attributing signicance to individual actions and events according to their effect on the whole.16 Despite the breakdown of the authority of Greenbergian modernism as a meta-narrative, it remains authoritative in the interpretation of the meaning and signicance of specic artists, including Kline, not because of Greenbergs eye but because of

14. See Michel Leja, The Formation of an Avant-Garde in New York, in Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (Yale University Press, 1993) and Ann Gibson, Abstract Expressionisms Evasion of Language, Art Journal (Fall 1988), pp. 20814. 15. Robert Goldwater, Everyone Knew What Everyone Else Meant(1959), in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 4647. 16. Donald E. Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (SUNY Press, 1988), p. 6.

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the narrative structure of his criticism, which has gone largely unanalyzed by both Greenbergs admirers and critics.17 Greenbergs rst encounter with Klines work can be divided into ve phrases that serve as narrative guideposts for his Model Reader, who is a possible reader who is able to deal interpretatively with the expressions in the same way as the author deals generatively with them.18 First, Greenberg mentions that the official art world is wary of him, which puts Kline within the context of the avant-garde tradition. This avant-garde tradition stands apart from consumer culture as embodied by the vulgar and commercialized establishment art world, articulated in his classic and deeply formative essay, Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939).19 Greenberg goes on to claim that Kline is stripping his art down, which brings his paintings in line with his view of Modernist self-critique as articulated in his article The New Laocoon (1940). By stripping his art down, Greenberg is imposing an intention on Klines artistic activities, an intention that participates in Greenbergs narrative of the history of Modernism as the history of each artistic medium having its aesthetic qualities and limitations explored and exploited.20 Read and interpreted in isolation, Greenbergs observation that Kline presents only the salient points of his emotion is virtually meaningless. However, within the broader context of Greenbergs narrative structure, it directs the Model Reader to the standard of the Modernist paradigm by echoing the literary criticism of T.S. Eliot. Eliot argued that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.21 Eliot and his New Critical contemporaries were vehemently anti-Romantic, and Greenbergs own views were decidedly anti-Surrealistic and anti-expressionistic. For Eliot, no excess emotion was tolerated in literature; all emotion required a necessary and sufficient form. For Greenberg, whose admiration for Eliot was great and who was deeply inuenced by the poets Tradition and the Individual Talent (1917), the authority of literary criticism, especially of the New Critical variety, was an attractive and well respected model for his own notion of art criticism and for the role of the art critic. Greenberg signals this inuence by including a piece on T.S. Eliot in A&C. Greenberg however does affirm that Klines work is meaningful (i.e., functional within his larger narrative of the development of the avant-garde) as he declares him to be securely in the foreground of contemporary abstract painters. But he also, quite cannily (and perhaps revealing his intuitive ability to narrate), offers a caveat, a foreshadowing element: Kline must develop to remain in the narrative. Greenberg observes that he still suppresses too much of his power. What does this mean? Perhaps, among other things, it means that Klines ultimate importance lies in his future development as traced by the critical community, a development that alerts Greenbergs Model Reader to the possibility that he may not remain in the vanguard of contemporary American

17. That Greenbergs criticism relies heavily on a narrative structure was observed in some manner soon after the publication of A&C. In what remains one of the more insightful analyses of Clement Greenberg, critic Hilton Kramers review of A&C in 1962 reects on how much the book relies upon a specic but covert historical consciousness. Kramer observes that, for Greenberg, critical judgments, if they are to carry the authority and force of something more than a merely personal taste, must be made in the name of history (A Critic on the Side of History, p. 61.). Kramer continues, history is thus invoked as a brake against the vagaries of private enthusiasms (p. 61). Kramer also hints, however, that history is merely a rhetorical device, implying that Greenbergs criticism is more literary than historical. 18. The term Model Reader comes from Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 7. 19. Originally published in Partisan Review (Fall 1939), pp. 3449. Revised version reprinted in A&C, pp. 321. 20. Towards a Newer Laocoon, Partisan Review (Fall 1940), pp. 296310. Reprinted in OBrian, vol. 1, pp. 2338. 21. Tradition and the Individual Talent (1917), in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. H. Adams (1971; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 764.

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painting. By the narrator suspending his judgment of Klines work, Greenberg introduces an element of dramatic suspense: will Kline succeed or fail? Almost nine years after the publication of his initial critical review of Franz Kline in Partisan Review, Greenberg signicantly revises it for republication in A&C. Interestingly, although he did acknowledge in his Preface the fact that many of these essays and reviews were edited (including the date of the revision), Greenberg apparently did not regard the changes he made to this review to be signicant enough to warrant specic notice. However, these changes were signicant: they offer a revealing perspective on the modus operandi of this centurys most inuential art writer. Although the structure of his review remains intact, Greenberg makes several subtle but signicant additions.
Klines large canvases, with their blurted black and white calligraphy, have the kind of self evident tautness which has become identied with modernist painting since Czanne. He, too, has stripped his art down, in order to be sure of it but for his own sake, not for the sake of the public. His originality lies in the way in which he maintains a Cubist contact with the edges of his canvas while opening up a seemingly un-Cubist or post-Cubist ambiguity of plane and depth elsewhere. Though presenting signs and marks oating free on a clear and expanding eld, his pictures actually repeat and in fact, succeed most when they do so most the solid, one-piece Cubist rectangle with its emphatic enclosing shape. Three or four of the paintings Kline has shown already place him securely in the foreground of contemporary abstract art, yet I have the impression that the powers of this gifted and accomplished artist are still a little inhibited. But perhaps this is precisely what one should feel [emphasis mine].22

In this revised review, which in A&C actually functions as a pericope,23 Greenberg includes references to Cubism or modern painting six times, while in the original review, they were not mentioned at all. Also added was a discussion of Czanne, whom Greenberg regarded as Klines model for stripping his art down. These additions, which derive from Greenbergs own historical narrative of modern art on display in A&C, beg several important questions. Given the strong narrative thrust of Greenbergs texts and what this implies about their interpretation (i.e., determining their referent), an analysis of the development of Greenbergs narrative is necessary for determining his intention in revising the Kline pericope and its subsequent role in the narrative, a narrative that Greenberg spends the next two decades dogmatically re-asserting and elaborating in articles, lectures, and interviews. And because the revised Kline pericope ts within the larger context of Greenbergs revised A&C narrative, it is important to look at other essays in A&C (as well as their unedited earlier versions) in order to nd evidence for the construction of this remarkably effective and compelling narrative. If Thierry de Duve, one of Greenbergs more sensitive and provocative commentators, is correct that there are three Greenbergs the dogmatist, art critic, and theorist Greenbergs art criticism achieves meaning and signicance only within the dogmatic and theoretical framework he constructed in A&C.24

22. A&C, pp. 15152. 23. I use the literary term pericope, which is a fragment or a section from a book, to drive the point home that this review functions within the larger narrative framework of A&C and that his revisions are literary. 24. Thierry de Duve, Clement Greeenberg Between the Lines, trans. Brian Holmes (Dis Voir, 1996), pp. 710.

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III.
One of the rst places to turn for additional insight into Greenbergs view of Franz Kline is his highly inuential American-Type Painting, originally published by Partisan Review in 1955 and reprinted and revised in A&C, a piece which serves, for all intents and purposes, as the climactic dnouement of the narrative. It is in this essay and its subsequent revisions that we see evidence of Greenberg reworking Klines role in the contemporary New York avant-garde. In the original 1955 version of the essay, Greenberg observes, But it was left to Franz Kline, whose rst show was in 1951, to work with black and white exclusively in a succession of canvases with blank white grounds bearing a single large calligraphic image in black.25 It is clear that Greenberg, at least in 1955, understood Kline to be a major player in the contemporary avant-garde, so much so that his black and white style needed to be defended against the many assertions that it derived from Oriental art and not from the Western Modernist tradition. Greenberg reaffirms this more emphatically in his edited version of the essay for A&C. Actually, not one of the original abstract expressionists least of all Kline has felt more than a cursory interest in Oriental art. The sources of their art lie entirely in the West. . . .26 In a 1953 essay entitled The Plight of Our Culture, Greenberg affirms that authentic culture is a disinterested culture and is, by denition, continuous with the past.27 This aspect that informed Greenbergs master narrative remained completely consistent. In Modern Painting, which was delivered as a radio commentary in 1960 and subsequently anthologized, Greenberg asserts: Modernism has never meant anything like a break with the past.28 Greenbergs emphasis on Klines work as continuous with the Western tradition demonstrates that Greenberg regarded Kline at least in 1955 to be playing a major role in authentic culture, the survival of which was mandatory for the success and survival of an avant-garde in the United States. It is important to keep in mind that Greenbergs dogmatic assertions regarding continuity are not only due to his admiration for T.S. Eliots conservative view of the history of modern literature but to his reaction to Harold Rosenbergs criticism, which emphasized discontinuity, breaks, ssures, and ruptures from tradition.29 Greenbergs revision of American-Type Painting for A&C consisted of a small but substantial change in his view of Klines role in his narrative. Greenberg observes, But it was left to Franz Kline, a latecomer, to restrict himself to black and white consistently, in large canvases that were like monumental line drawings [emphasis mine].30 Now, Kline is a latecomer, one who ultimately does not play a key role in the New York avant-garde. How does Kline subsequently become a latecomer rather than one of the important members of the New York avant-garde at mid-century? A brief survey of the critical review literature in the mid-fties might shed some light. In a review of Klines rst solo show at the Sidney Janis Gallery, Dore Ashton observes that,

25. American-Type Painting (1955), in OBrian, vol. 3, p. 226. 26. A&C, p. 220. 27. The Plight of Our Culture: Industrialism and Class Mobility, Commentary (June 1953), pp. 55866 and Work and Leisure Under Industrialism: The Plight of Our Culture: Part II, Commentary (July 1953), pp. 5462. Greenberg included a piece entitled The Plight of Our Culture and dated 1953 as one of the two cultural lead essays to A&C. However, the A&C piece bears almost no resemblance to either of the original pieces. 28. Modernist Painting, Art and Literature (Spring 1965). Reprinted in The New Art, ed. G. Battcock (EP Dutton, 1966), p. 75. 29. See Harold Rosenberg, The American Action Painters (1952) in The Tradition of the New (George Baziller, 1959), pp. 2339. 30. A&C, p. 220.

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despite the power of his black and white paintings, no one can fail to notice that the Kline imagery is now, after ve years of repetition, diluted in its impact . . . Since his last show in 1954, Kline has not found his way forward and one must ask why. And to this Ashton concludes in Eliotic fashion, The fact is, Kline fails to sustain the initial emotion he arouses.31 Klines work does indeed fail to develop, that is, develop beyond working and reworking the black and white compositions he initiated around 1950. In an insightful review of Klines 1968 Whitney retrospective, Hilton Kramer concludes that Kline is not the kind of artist who is interesting primarily, or even incidentally, because of the way he developed. In a very real sense, he did not develop. . . .32 But it was precisely the concept of development that was of paramount importance to Greenberg in his narrative (on a meta-conceptual level), as he built in a qualifying statement in his initial review of Klines work in 1952 that such development would indeed be necessary if he was to fulll his potential. Although Greenberg and other critics were mum about what exactly they expected to see with regard to Klines development, it is clear that it had much to do with the ability of his work to conform to roles prescribed by the narrative itself. Kline failed to develop, one must assume, because his work failed to advance Greenbergs evolving narrative. Greenberg (and others in the critical community) found Klines work throughout the fties less and less capable of executing its prescribed role in the multiple narratives operating at mid-century within the New York art world. With such development the prescribed role of art criticism itself was rendered problematic, for part of the critics role was to identify and interpret the implications of such development within the context of the development of modern art. Again, Harold Rosenbergs criticism provides a contrast, for he regarded the new gesture painting of the fties to be a challenge to traditional roles, particularly the role of the art critic. Therefore, criticism needed to re-negotiate its relationship to the new art. Ultimately, Rosenbergs criticism is an attempt to reconstruct the role of the art critic.
It follows that anything is relevant to it. Anything that has to do with action psychology, philosophy, history, mythology, hero worship. Anything but art criticism. The painter gets away from art through his act of painting; the critic cant get away from it. The critic who goes on judging in terms of schools, styles, form as if the painter were still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (the work of art), instead of living on the canvas is bound to seem a stranger.33

In his revised review, Greenbergs Model Reader is intended to recognize that Kline has failed in the task that the critic had set before him that is, to explore the formal limitations of painting. Greenbergs revised review puts in place an unambiguous and successful Kline of the early fties, working clearly and unproblematically within the Western Modernist tradition as his references to modernist painting, Cubism, and Czanne drive the point home. However, in leaving the concluding phrase unedited, (. . . yet I have the impression that the powers of this gifted and accomplished artist are still a little inhibited.), Greenberg signals to his Model Reader that Kline has not, indeed, developed to his satisfaction. (I often wonder if readers who were discovering Greenberg through A&C believed that what they were reading was a record of the critics experience of Kline

31. Dore Ashton, Art, Arts and Architecture (April 1956), pp. 3, 1012. 32. Hilton Kramer, Franz Kline: Turning Art into Academic History, New York Times (October 6, 1968), p. 35. 33. The American Action Painters, p. 28.

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in 1952 and were thus amazed at his remarkable aesthetic intuition and prescience.) Ultimately, Kline did not pan out as a leader, only a latecomer. The artist gracefully and without fanfare is ushered from center stage while the critic moves forward to take his bows for his prescience. Hence Greenberg does not crassly write Kline out of the New York avant-garde. His narrative is much too subtle, sophisticated, and multi-layered to commit such gross historical revisions. What occurs is that Kline is ever so gently marginalized. His early success is made clear, unambiguous, and denitive, which thus throws his inability to develop into higher relief and makes it easier for Greenberg to view him as a latecomer. This latecomer status and what Greenberg means by it is revealed even more clearly in a 1956 article entitled, New York Painting Only Yesterday, which appeared in Art News in 1956. It is in this personal recollection of his own entre into the New York art world in the late thirties and early forties that Greenberg reveals much about his own narrative perspective. First and foremost, Greenberg regards much of the best art of the period to have been done by the early to mid-forties. About de Kooning, Greenberg remarks,
[T]he rst on the American scene to open a really broad and major vein for himself inside Late Cubism; but it also raises the question whether de Koonings art has gained anything in the way of quality since the thirties whether it has not, in fact, lost something since then, and especially since it turned expressionist.34

For Greenberg, it was the Surrealist or expressionistic inuence which watered-down the New York avant-garde. And the fact that in 1956 Greenberg could even suggest that de Koonings best work was done in the late thirties certainly raises the question of what Greenbergs narrative intentions actually consist if such classic paintings as Excavation (1950), Woman I (195052), and others of de Koonings work are too expressionist. (Is it simply a coincidence that Greenbergs disregard of de Koonings classic work in the 1950s is due to their celebration by Rosenberg and Hess?) The answer, in part, is that we err if we assume that Greenberg was rst and foremost a champion for Abstract Expressionism and that his A&C was constructed in order to justify its importance. In fact, Foster has convincingly argued that Greenbergs critical framework was derived from and intended to be used for the analysis of the American Abstract Artists Group, a group organized with the goals of reasserting the primacy and viability of Cubism over against the expressionism (re: Romanticism) of Surrealism. According to Foster, Greenberg reects values similar to those of artists of the thirties such as Fritz Glarner and G.L.K. Morris (who also happened to be a critic for Partisan Review). He argues that Greenberg was not formulating his early notions of history to justify Abstract Expressionism, but writing an apology for the American Abstract Artists Group.35 In addition, this essay reveals the intentions that he imposes on the artists whom he regards to be most signicant. Greenberg observed that in the late thirties, with the inuence of Hans Hofmann, et al., Americans have no longer to retreat to Ryder . . . in order to get free of Czanne and Matisse.36 The intentions of serious artists, then, with Eliots notion of Tradition echoing in the background, is to get free of Czanne and Matisse. Moreover, Greenberg also demonstrates

34. New York Painting Only Yesterday, Art News (Summer 1957), p. 85. 35. The Critics of Abstract Expressionism, p. 17. 36. New York Painting Only Yesterday, p. 86.

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that he is largely unconcerned with the artists own understanding of their situations and intentions, choosing rather to impose a meta-intention on all serious artists. Whether Gorky, Graham, de Kooning, Hofmann or anyone else was aware that the problem was to overcome the provincialism that had been American arts historic fate, I cannot tell.37 And this is made clearer and reinforced even more strongly with the seductive (and rather reductive) historicism in Modernist Painting. What modernism has made clear is that, though the past did appreciate masters like these justly, it often gave wrong or irrelevant reasons for doing so.38 Imposing a common and univocal intention on serious artists is also evidence for Greenbergs particular concern with developing a coherent narrative structure, a narrative structure that requires a unied perspective of the narrator in order to craft a compelling story with actors performing their prescribed roles as directed. Greenbergs revisions to this essay which appear in A&C also consist of an addendum, a paragraph-long pericope about a difference between Eighth and Tenth Streets as a reection of a fundamental change occurring in the trajectory of contemporary New York avant-garde art.39 For Greenberg, Eighth Street represented authentic American avant-garde painting that had succeeded in surpassing (re: developing beyond) the School of Paris, a situation that took place in the late thirties and early forties. Tenth Street for Greenberg represents the expressionistic and Surrealistic democratization of the New York avant-garde that, according to him, had become a style and a school, for Tenth Street returned to the French notion of good painting.40 (Tenth Street also refers the Model Reader to the Tenth Street of Harold Rosenberg and a competing critical narrative that Greenberg attempts to defeat retroactively in this addendum.)41 Greenberg continues, If Eighth Street in the late thirties and early forties meant catching up with Paris, Tenth Street in the fties has seen New York falling behind itself.42 Eighth Streets interest in Cubism as the means by which the rigorous formal issues were dealt with is contrasted favorably to the expressionistic and Surrealistic degradation on Tenth Street. In addition, the period of the late thirties through the mid-forties manifested an authentic cultural expression of the continuities of the Western tradition, something Greenberg found lacking in the Tenth Street artists with their claims to independence and emphasis on their break from the past.
And though the independence and more than the independence, the leadership of American art began to be proclaimed there in the early 1950s more loudly than elsewhere, an implicit loyalty to what was an essentially French notion of good painting persisted on Tenth Street as it did not among most of the painters named in the forgoing paragraph. Gorky, de Kooning, then Bradley Walker Tomlin and the later Franz Kline seemed to stand for that notion, which was why, as it seems to me, they were celebrated and imitated downtown as Pollock never was.43

37. New York Painting Only Yesterday, p. 85. 38. Modernist Painting, p. 76. 39. Both Eighth Street and Tenth Street refer to the downtown Manhattan location of the New York School avant-garde community. 40. Retitled The Late Thirties in New York, A&C, p. 235. 41. Tenth Street: A Geography of American Art (1954), in Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, and Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 100109. 42. The Late Thirties in New York, A&C, p. 235. 43. The Late Thirties in New York, p. 235.

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Greenbergs concern that such an interest in independence and relative unconcern with the rigorous formal issues which, as dened by his narrative, have preoccupied all great artists working in the Western tradition, prompted him ever-so-subtly to move Gorky, de Kooning, Tomlin, and Franz Kline from the cluster of main characters in his plotline. During the fties many commentators echoed Greenbergs assertion that Tenth Street had abandoned the rich reservoir of the Western cultural tradition (re: interpreted through the Czanne-Cubist tradition). This is important because the success of Greenbergs narrative did not occur in a vacuum, nor was it simply imposed on the mid-century art world. Its power dwelt in the fact that it utilized and brought together many nascent formalist narrative fragments available at mid-century within the art world, literary criticism, and connoisseurship, consolidating them in a powerfully unied vision that possessed an air of the obvious. Greenbergs positioning of Kline in his narrative raises several important issues which center on the nature of art criticism and the uses to which it was put for the sake of mid-century cultural politics.

IV.
First, what do Greenbergs subsequent revisions of his initial review of Klines work reveal about the relationship between aesthetic experience wrought from a direct engagement with works of art and the literary genre of art criticism? A comparative analysis of his Kline reviews demonstrates that Greenberg is not revising, editing, or revisiting his aesthetic experience or intuition of Klines paintings but revising, editing, and revisiting his own piece of writing. Therefore, these changes demonstrate that Klines works of art have long since receded into the background of his storyline. For a host of philosophical and historiographical reasons, I am skeptical of the reigning assumption that art criticism is interpreted as if it offers a faithful record of aesthetic experience, or is identical or equivalent to aesthetic experience. A decision to move from an aesthetic experience of a work of art to writing a piece of art criticism involves a conscious decision to leave the realm of one kind of experience (intuitive, visceral, subjective albeit culturally contingent) for a literary genre with layers of literary conventions, not to mention the numerous institutional and sociological frameworks through which we express ourselves in language. Greenbergs reviews of Klines 1951 exhibition suggest that the overriding subject is not Klines paintings but the narrative structure within which Klines paintings become worth writing about. The danger for working art historians in assuming that art criticism is a transparent interpretive medium is clear when Greenbergs A&C revision of Klines 1951 exhibition is read uncritically as historical evidence for the painters role in the mid-century art world or insights into the art itself and not interpreted as the activities of an art critic working to rene his own art critical narrative nearly a decade after the original event. In short, art historians have failed to take seriously the fact that Greenbergs art criticism tells us more about Greenberg and mid-century art criticism than it does the art it claims to interpret. In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward W. Said admitted, all intellectuals represent something to their audiences and in so doing represent themselves to themselves.44 A&C is a text that represents and reveals a lot more than an interpretation of modern art.

44. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (Pantheon Books, 1994), p. xv.

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Interpreters of Greenberg and the mid-century art world must recognize the important role that narrative played in A&C. As countless theorists have observed, narrative representation relies upon the ability of the author to construct a compelling story. The narrative focus of Greenbergs art criticism, reected in A&C and which undergirds all of his critical encounters, reveals that there is a story to be told, a plot line to follow, a beginning, middle, and end which serves as the primary control on the determination of critical meaning. It is my contention that because of the important role that narrative plays in Greenbergs art criticism, interpreting his specic encounters must respect the broader story line within which they were intended to serve. And this story line is not derived directly from his experience of the art itself but is a framework that is selected and maintained in order to guide, categorize, and otherwise impose meaning and signicance on his experience of art and artists. Second, what, then, is the ultimate function of Greenbergs narrative? A&C begins with two broadly cultural essays in which Greenberg articulates his concept of culture and the role that the visual arts play in it. He then proceeds to include reviews of artists from the School of Paris, general essays on painting and sculpture, a section on Art in the United States, and a section focusing on literature. It is clear that A&C was not intended to champion the Abstract Expressionists. The role that such artists play in A&C is a signicant one but it is difficult to come to the conclusion that it is primary. Nor should we overlook that Greenberg included several reviews in A&C to reveal the antithesis against which his Cubist-Czanne tradition is pitted. Two such artists are Georges Rouault and Wassily Kandinsky. Greenberg declares both to be non-Cubists and thus artists whose art is severely limited in its scope. The taste which nds that the Cubists sacriced feeling to intellectualism sees the redemption of modernist art in Rouault.45 Greenberg criticizes Kandinsky for he was never quite able to grasp the pictorial logic that guided the Cubist-Czannian analysis of appearances. . . .46 With these reviews, Greenberg rehearses these artists defeat and in the process teaches an important narrative lesson that only those artists who have worked through the CubistCzannian analysis of appearances will ultimately have consequence for modern culture. If the central theme of Greenbergs narrative does not rotate around Abstract Expressionism, around what does it rotate? It appears that his narrative is rst concerned with shaping a certain conception and trajectory for culture, an authentic disinterested culture which transmits Western values, in which Greenberg reinterprets the avant-garde to serve as a primary vehicle for such transmission. Greenberg, who began his career as a cultural critic, culminates this work with the publication of A&C. For Greenberg, as for so many others at mid-century, the existence of a healthy, serious, and viable American culture was predicated upon the existence of a healthy, serious, and viable American art world. For many intellectuals, many of them part of the community of New York Intellectuals, art visually manifested the presence of authentic culture in the United States.47 And certainly Greenbergs discussion of lowbrow, middlebrow, and highbrow cultures in such essays as Avant-Garde and Kitsch and The Plight of Our Culture is a manifestation of a

45. A&C, p. 84. 46. A&C, p. 111. 47. The so-called New York Intellectuals, of which both Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg were a part, was made up of Jewish cultural critics primarily centered around Partisan Review. On the New York Intellectuals, see Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (Oxford University Press, 1986) and Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

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common concern for mid-century intellectuals concerned with the presentation (re: reconstitution) of authentic culture amidst the radically changing demographic of American society. Greenbergs penultimate concern is with the mechanics of modern painting, which he regards as the most important producer of authentic culture. This is why artists such as Glarner, Morris, Hofmann emerge as key actors in his drama in the early forties, then Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline play signicant roles in his narrative, then move quietly backstage as other artists such as Still, Newman, and Rothko assume center stage. The constant for Greenberg is maintaining his concept of culture in whose service waves of emerging artists play out their roles. In a semiotic analysis of the role of the reader in textual interpretation, Umberto Eco describes the characteristics of what he calls open and closed texts. About the latter, he observes:
They apparently aim at pulling the reader along a predetermined path, carefully displaying their effects so as to arouse pity or fear, . . . Every step of the story elicits just the expectation that its further course will satisfy. They seem to be structured according to an inexible project.48

Within the context of Ecos textual analyses, Greenbergs A&C functions as a closed text, that is, a text that does not take into account the possibility of different kinds (or levels) of readers. In essence, the texts narrative is intended by the author to be consumed by a Model Reader from a specic and homogeneous reading community, in this case, the art worlds critical community of the 1960s. In The Open Work, Eco argues that, in effect, closed texts are Kitsch because they do not enable the reader to assume multiple levels of readings. It is ironic that an argument could be made that Greenberg used the devises of Kitsch to oppose Kitsch.49 But it was Greenbergs genius whether his texts were Kitsch or not to craft such an inexible project with seemingly limitless potential for other art writers to generate new interpretations. But these new interpretations, derived as they are from Greenbergs narrative, were always contained by his predetermined path, beholden to his view of what art criticism is or ought to be. But there seems to be another, less obvious, subject of Greenbergs narrative a main character who is never explicitly referred to but who is always present: the art critic. For ultimately, the main subject of Greenbergs narrative is art criticism, and the main character of his narrative is the art critic himself. (Greenberg, it must be noted, does not intend this reading for his Model Reader, for there is little room in his criticism for such a self-reexive, self-critical, and ironical reading.)50 Foster argues, it was the success of abstract expressionist painting which was assured in the fties, not abstract expressionist criticism, which was still under considerable suspicion.51 Due in large part to the reception of A&C and its deceptive appearance that his intuitive aesthetic judgments at mid-century were validated by the art world in the sixties, art criticism in general, including Abstract

48. The Role of the Reader, p. 8. 49. Eco, The Open Work (Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 183. 50. It is for this reason that I would argue that Harold Rosenbergs essays could be described as open texts in ways that Greenbergs could not. Rosenberg, unlike Greenberg, intends for his Model Reader to reect, sometimes ironically, on the tenuous role of the critic itself, throwing into question, or foregrounding the tensions inherent in assuming the stability of the role of the critic. For Greenberg, in contrast, the role of the critic and the authority of the narrator are never open to such reection and the critics a priori authority is, in fact, a prerequisite for his Model Reader. 51. The Critics of Abstract Expressionism, p. 75.

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Expressionist criticism, achieved an unprecedented institutional authority and autonomy. Although many critics at mid-century believed that the success of Abstract Expressionism guaranteed the authority and autonomy of their roles as art critics, Greenberg viewed his role in broader cultural terms, enlisting the visual arts in his cultural politics, which consisted rst and foremost in the salvation of criticism itself through the redemption of high culture. For it was criticism that dened for Greenberg the Western tradition in general and Modernism more specically. Its survival would ultimately signal the triumph of American high culture and the discipline of art criticism, a triumph that became identical with the triumph of his own voice as a critic. And it was through his publicly dened and vehemently defended role as an authoritative art critic on view in A&C that he could dene and narrate meaning, signicance, and value for himself as well as his culture.

Copyright of Journal of Modern Literature is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Copyright of Journal of Modern Literature is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.