The 10 Essays That Changed

Art Criticism Forever

There has never been a time when art critics held more power
than during the second half of the twentieth century. Following
the Second World War, with the relocation of the world’s artistic
epicenter from Paris to New York, a different kind of war was
waged in the pages of magazines across the country. As part of the
larger “culture wars” of the mid-century, art critics began to take
on greater influence than they’d ever held before. For a time, two
critics in particular—who began as friends, and remained in the
same social circles for much of their lives—set the stakes of the
debates surrounding the maturation of American art that would
continue for decades. The ideas about art outlined by Clement
Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg are still debated today, and the
extent to which they were debated in the past has shaped entire
movements of the arts. Below are ten works of criticism through
which one can trace the mainstreaming of Clement Greenberg’s
formalist theory, and how its dismantling led us into institutional
critique and conceptual art today.

The American Action Painters

Harold Rosenberg

Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950

Harold Rosenberg, a poet who came to art through his

involvement with the Artist’s Union and the WPA, was introduced
to Jean-Paul Sartre as the “first American existentialist.” Soon,
Rosenberg became a contributor to Sartre’s publication in France,
for which he first drafted his influential essay. However, when
Sartre supported Soviet aggression against Korea, Rosenberg
brought his essay to Elaine de Kooning, then the editor of
ARTnews, who ran “The American Action Painters” in December,
1952.

RELATED: What Did Harold Rosenberg Do? An Introduction

to the Champion of “Action Painting”

Rosenberg’s essay on the emerging school of American Painters

omitted particular names—because they’d have been unfamiliar
to its original French audience—but it was nonetheless
extraordinarily influential for the burgeoning scene of post-WWII
American artists. Jackson Pollock claimed to be the influence of
“action painting,” despite Rosenberg’s rumored lack of respect for
the artist because Pollock wasn’t particularly well-read.
Influenced by Marxist theory and French existentialism,
Rosenberg conceives of a painting as an “arena,” in which the
artist acts upon, wrestles, or otherwise engages with the canvas, in
what ultimately amounts to an expressive record of a struggle.
“What was to go on the canvas,” Rosenberg wrote, “was not a
picture but an event.”

Notable Quote

Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new

movement, tends … toward easy painting—never so many
unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical
 tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a
tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only
be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to
collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His
gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing
movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the
act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain
safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of
the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily
annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

‘American-Type’ Painting

Clement Greenberg

Frank Stella, Untitled, 1967

Throughout the preceding decade, Clement Greenberg, also a
former poet, had established a reputation as a leftist critic
through his writings with The Partisan Review—a publication run
by the John Reed Club, a New York City-centered organization
affiliated with the American Communist Party—and his time as
an art critic with The Nation. In 1955, The Partisan
Review published Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in
which the critic defined the now-ubiquitous term “abstract
expressionism.”

RELATED: What Did Clement Greenberg Do? A Primer on the

Powerful AbEx Theorist’s Key Ideas

In contrast to Rosenberg’s conception of painting as a

performative act, Greenberg’s theory, influenced by Clive Bell and
T. S. Eliot, was essentially a formal one—in fact, it eventually
evolved into what would be called “formalism.” Greenberg argued
that the evolution of painting was one of historical determinacy—
that ever since the Renaissance, pictures moved toward flatness,
and the painted line moved away from representation. Henri
Matisse and Pablo Picasso were two of the landmarks of this view.
Pollock, who exhibited his drip paintings in 1951, freeing the line
from figuration, was for Greenberg the pinnacle of American
Modernism, the most important artist since Picasso. (Pollock’s
paintings exhibited in 1954, with which he returned to semi-
representational form, were regarded by Greenberg as a
regression. This lead him to adopt Barnett Newman as his new
poster-boy, despite the artist’s possessing vastly different ideas on
the nature of painting. For one, Greenberg mostly ignored the
Biblical titles of Newman’s paintings.)

Greenberg’s formalist theories were immensely influential over

the subsequent decades. Artforum in particular grew into a locus
for formalist discourse, which had the early effect of providing an
aesthetic toolkit divorced from politic. Certain curators of the
Museum of Modern Art, particularly William Rubin, Kirk
Varnedoe, and to an extent Alfred Barr are credited for steering
the museum in an essentially formalist direction. Some painters,
such as Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kenneth Noland,
had even been accused of illustrating Greenberg’s theories (and
those of Michael Fried, a prominent Greenbergian disciple) in
attempt to embody the theory, which was restrictive in its failure
to account for narrative content, figuration, identity, politics, and
more. In addition, Greenberg’s theories proved well-suited for a
burgeoning art market, which found connoisseurship an easy sell.
(As the writer Mary McCarthy said, “You can’t hang an event on
your wall.”) In fact, the dominance of the term “abstract
expressionism” over “action painting,” which seemed more
applicable to Pollock and Willem de Kooning than any other
members of the New York School, is emblematic of the influence
of formalist discourse.

Notable Quote

The justification for the term, “abstract expressionist,” lies in

 the fact that most of the painters covered by it took their lead
from German, Russian, or Jewish expressionism in breaking
away from late Cubist abstract art. But they all started from
French painting, for their fundamental sense of style from it,
and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of
all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious,
major art, and of the general direction in which it had to go in
their time.

ABC Art

Barbara Rose

Donald Judd, Galvanized Iron 17 January, 1973

Like many critics in the 1950s and 60s, Barbara Rose had clearly
staked her allegiance to one camp or the other. She was, firmly, a
formalist, and along with Fried and Rosalind Krauss is largely
credited with expanding the theory beyond abstract expressionist
painting. By 1965, however, Rose recognized a limitation of the
theory as outlined by Greenberg—that it was reductionist and
only capable of account for a certain style of painting, and not
much at all in other mediums.

RELATED: The Intellectual Origins Of Minimalism

In “ABC Art,” published in Art in America where Rose was a

contributing editor, Rose opens up formalism to encompass
sculpture, which Greenberg was largely unable to account for.
The simple idea that art moves toward flatness and abstraction
leads, for Rose, into Minimalism, and “ABC Art” is often
considered the first landmark essay on Minimalist art. By linking
the Minimalist sculptures of artists like Donald Judd to the
Russian supremacist paintings of Kasimir Malevich and
readymades of Duchamp, she extends the determinist history that
formalism relies on into sculpture and movements beyond
abstract expressionism.

Notable Quote

I do not agree with critic Michael Fried’s view that Duchamp,

at any rate, was a failed Cubist. Rather, the inevitability of a
logical evolution toward a reductive art was obvious to them
 already. For Malevich, the poetic Slav, this realization forced a
turning inward toward an inspirational mysticism, whereas for
Duchamp, the rational Frenchman, it meant a fatigue so
enervating that finally the wish to paint at all was killed. Both
the yearnings of Malevich’s Slavic soul and the deductions of
Duchamp’s rationalist mind led both men ultimately to reject
and exclude from their work many of the most cherished
premises of Western art in favor of an art stripped to its bare,
irreducible minimum.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Philip Leider

Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969

Despite the rhetorical tendency to suggest the social upheaval of

the '60s ended with the actual decade, 1970 remained a year of
unrest. And Artforum was still the locus of formalist criticism,
which was proving increasingly unable to account for art that
contributed to larger cultural movements, like Civil Rights,
women’s liberation, anti-war protests, and more. (Tellingly, The
Partisan Review, which birthed formalism, had by then distanced
itself from its communist associations and, as an editorial body,
was supportive of American Interventionism in Vietnam.
Greenberg was a vocal hawk.) Subtitled “Art and Politics in
Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Utah,” the editor’s note to
the September 1970 issue of Artforum, written by Philip Leider,
ostensibly recounts a road trip undertaken with Richard Serra
and Abbie Hoffman to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in the
Nevada desert.

RELATED: A City of Art in the Desert: Behind Michael Heizer’s

Monumental Visions for Nevada

However, the essay is also an account of an onsetting disillusion

with formalism, which Leider found left him woefully
unequipped to process the protests that had erupted surrounding
an exhibition of prints by Paul Wunderlich at the Phoenix Gallery
in Berkeley. Wunderlich’s depictions of nude women were shown
concurrently to an exhibition of drawings sold to raise money for
Vietnamese orphans. The juxtaposition of a canonical,
patriarchal form of representation and liberal posturing, to which
the protestors objected, showcased the limitations of a
methodology that placed the aesthetic elements of a picture plane
far above the actual world in which it existed. Less than a year
later, Leider stepped down as editor-in-chief and Artforum began
to lose its emphasis on late Modernism.

Notable Quote

I thought the women were probably with me—if they were, I

was with them. I thought the women were picketing the show
because it was reactionary art. To the women, [Piet] Mondrian
must be a great revolutionary artist. Abstract art broke all of
those chains thirty years ago! What is a Movement gallery
showing dumb stuff like this for? But if it were just a matter of
reactionary art, why would the women picket it? Why not?
Women care as much about art as men do—maybe more. The
question is, why weren’t the men right there with them?

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Linda Nochlin
Linda Nochlin teaches an art history class at Vassar in 1965

While Artforum, in its early history, had established a reputation

as a generator for formalist theory, ARTnews had followed a
decidedly more Rosenberg-ian course, emphasizing art as a
practice for investigating the world. The January 1971 issue of the
magazine was dedicated to “Women’s Liberation, Woman Artists,
and Art History” and included an iconoclastic essay by Linda
Nochlin titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

RELATED: An Introduction to Feminist Art

Nochlin notes that it’s tempting to answer the question “why have
there been no great women artists?” by listing examples of those
overlooked by critical and institutional organizations (a labor that
Nochlin admits has great merit). However, she notes, “by
attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative
implications,” namely that women are intrinsically less capable of
achieving artistic merit than men. Instead, Nochlin’s essay
functions as a critique of art institutions, beginning with
European salons, which were structured in such a way as to deter
women from rising to the highest echelons. Nochlin’s essay is
considered the beginning of modern feminist art history and a
textbook example of institutional critique.

Notable Quote

There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or

Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even
in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than
there are black American equivalents for the same. If there
actually were large numbers of “hidden” great women artists,
or if there really should be different standards for women’s art
as opposed to men’s—and one can’t have it both ways—then
what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved
the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine
as it is.
But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they
have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are
stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women
among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born
white, preferably middle class and above all, male. The fault
 lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or
our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our
education.

Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

Thomas McEvilley

Exhibition view of “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of

the Tribal and the Modern

One of the many extrapolations of Nochlin’s essay is that

contemporary museum institutions continue to reflect the
gendered and racist biases of preceding centuries by reinforcing
the supremacy of specific master artists. In a 1984 Artforum review,
Thomas McEvilley, a classicist new to the world of contemporary
art, made the case that the Museum of Modern Art in New York
served as an exclusionary temple to certain high-minded
Modernists—namely, Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock—who, in fact,
took many of their innovations from native cultures.

RELATED: MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a

Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

In 1984, MoMA organized a blockbuster exhibition. Curated by

William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, both of whom were avowed
formalists, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the
Tribal and the Modern” collected works by European painters like
Paul Gaugin and Picasso with cultural artifacts from Zaire, arctic
communities, and elsewhere. McEvilley takes aim at the “the
absolutist view of formalist Modernism” in which MoMA is
rooted. He argues that the removal tribal artifacts from their
contexts (for example, many were ritual items intended for
ceremonies, not display) and placement of them, unattributed,
near works by European artists, censors the cultural contributions
of non-Western civilizations in deference to an idealized
European genius.

Notable Quote
 The fact that the primitive “looks like” the Modern is
interpreted as validating the Modern by showing that its
values are universal, while at the same time projecting it—and
with it MoMA—into the future as a permanent canon. A
counter view is possible: that primitivism on the contrary
invalidates Modernism by showing it to be derivative and
subject to external causation. At one level this show
undertakes precisely to coopt that question by answering it
before it has really been asked, and by burying it under a mass
of information.

Please Wait By the Coatroom

John Yau
Wifredo Lam, The Jungle, 1943

Not content to let MoMA and the last vestiges of formalism off the
hook yet, John Yau wrote in 1988 an essay on Wifredo Lam, a
Cuban painter who lived and worked in Paris among Picasso,
Matisse, Georges Braque, and others. Noting Lam’s many
influences—his Afro-Cuban mother, Chinese father, and Yoruba
godmother—Yau laments the placement of Lam’s The Jungle near
the coatroom in the Museum of Modern Art, as opposed to within
the Modernist galleries several floors above. The painting was
accompanied by a brief entry written by former curator William
Rubin, who, Yau argues, adopted Greenberg’s theories because
they endowed him with “a connoisseur’s lens with which one can
scan all art.”

RELATED: From Cuba With Love: Artist Bill Claps on the

Island’s DIY Art Scene

Here, as with with McEvilley’s essay, Yau illustrates how

formalism, as adapted by museum institutions, became a
(perhaps unintentional) method for reinforcing the exclusionary
framework that Nochlin argued excluded women and black
artists for centuries.

Notable Quote

Rubin sees in Lam only what is in his own eyes: colorless or

white artists. For Lam to have achieved the status of unique
individual, he would have had to successfully adapt to the
conditions of imprisonment (the aesthetic standards of a fixed
tradition) Rubin and others both construct and watch over. To
enter this prison, which takes the alluring form of museums,
art history textbooks, galleries, and magazines, an individual
must suppress his cultural differences and become a colorless
ghost. The bind every hybrid American artist finds themselves
in is this: should they try and deal with the constantly
 changing polymorphous conditions effecting identity,
tradition, and reality? Or should they assimilate into the
mainstream art world by focusing on approved-of aesthetic
issues? Lam’s response to this bind sets an important
precedent. Instead of assimilating, Lam infiltrates the
syntactical rules of “the exploiters” with his own specific
language. He becomes, as he says, “a Trojan horse.”

Black Culture and Postmodernism

Cornel West

Cornel West

The opening up of cultural discourse did not mean that it

immediately made room for voices of all dimensions. Cornel West
notes as much in his 1989 essay “Black Culture and
Postmodernism,” in which he argues that postmodernism, much
like Modernism before it, remains primarily ahistorical, which
makes it difficult for “oppressed peoples to exercise their
opposition to hierarchies of power.” West’s position is that the
proliferation of theory and criticism that accompanied the rise of
postmodernism provided mechanisms by which black culture
could “be conversant with and, to a degree, participants in the
debate.” Without their voices, postmodernism would remain yet
another exclusionary movements.

RELATED: Kerry James Marshall on Painting Blackness as a

Noun Vs. Verb

Notable Quote

As the consumption cycle of advanced multinational

corporate capitalism was sped up in order to sustain the
production of luxury goods, cultural production became more
and more mass-commodity production. The stress here is not
simply on the new and fashionable but also on the exotic and
primitive. Black cultural products have historically served as a
major source for European and Euro-American exotic
interests—interests that issue from a healthy critique of the
mechanistic, puritanical, utilitarian, and productivity aspects
of modern life.
Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power

Anna C. Chave

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981

In recent years, formalist analysis has been deployed as a single

tool within a more varied approach to art. Its methodology—that
of analyzing a picture as an isolated phenomena—remains
prevalent, and has its uses. Yet, many of the works and movements
that rose to prominence under formalist critics and curators, in no
small part because of their institutional acceptance, have since
become part of the rearguard rather than the vanguard.

In a 1990 essay for Arts Magazine, Anna Chave analyzes how

Minimalist sculpture possesses a “domineering, sometimes brutal
rhetoric” that was aligned with “both the American military in
Vietnam, and the police at home in the streets and on university
campuses across the country.” In particular, Chave is concerned
with the way Minimalist sculptures define themselves through a
process of negation. Of particular relevance to Chave’s argument
are the massive steel sculptures by Minimalist artist Richard
Serra.

Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan in

1981. Chave describes the work as a “mammoth, perilously tilted
steel arc [that] formed a divisive barrier too tall to see over, and a
protracted trip to walk around.” She writes, “it is more often the
case with Serra that his work doesn’t simply exemplify aggression
or domination, but acts it out.” Tilted Arc was so controversial
upon its erecting that the General Services Administration, which
commissioned the work, held hearings in response to petitions
demanding the work be removed. Worth quoting at length, Chave
writes:

A predictable defense of Serra’s work was mounted by critics,

curators, dealers, collectors, and some fellow artists…. The
principle arguments mustered on Serra’s behalf were old ones
concerning the nature and function of the avant-garde….
What Rubin and Serra’s other supporters declined to ask is
whether the sculptor really is, in the most meaningful sense of
the term, an avant-garde artist. Being avant-garde implies
being ahead of, outside, or against the dominant culture;
proffering a vision that implicitly stands (at least when it is
conceived) as a critique of entrenched forms and structures….
But Serra’s work is securely embedded within the system:
when the brouhaha over Arc was at its height, he was enjoying
a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art…. [The
defense’s] arguments locate Serra not with the vanguard but
with the standing army or “status quo.” … More thoughtful,
sensible, and eloquent testimony at the hearing came instead
from some of the uncouth:

My name is Danny Katz and I work in this building as a clerk.

My friend Vito told me this morning that I am a philistine.
Despite that I am getting up to speak…. I don’t think this issue
should be elevated into a dispute between the forces of
ignorance and art, or art versus government. I really blame
government less because it has long ago outgrown its human
dimension. But from the artists I expected a lot more. I didn’t
expect to hear them rely on the tired and dangerous reasoning
that the government has made a deal, so let the rabble live
with the steel because it’s a deal. That kind of mentality leads
to wars. We had a deal with Vietnam. I didn’t expect to hear
the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the
simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It’s not a great plaza
by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of
revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in
sealed rooms, and breathe recirculated air all day. Is the
purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to
 stress the absence of joy and hope? I can’t believe this was the
artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has become the
dominant effect of the work, and it’s all the fault of its position
and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can’t accept
physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human
activity. No work of art created with a contempt for ordinary
humanity and without respect for the common element of
human experience can be great. It will always lack dimension.

The terms Katz associated with Serra’s project include

arrogance and contempt, assault, and destruction; he saw the
Minimalist idiom, in other words, as continuous with the
master discourse of our imperious and violent technocracy.

The End of Art

Arthur Danto
Andy Warhol carries a Brillo box in his Factory

Like Greenberg, Arthur Danto was an art critic for The Nation.
However, Danto was overtly critical of Greenberg’s ideology and
the influence he wielded over Modern and contemporary art. Nor
was he a follower of Harold Rosenberg, though they shared
influences, among them the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-
Ponty. Danto’s chief contribution to contemporary art was his
advancing of Pop Artists, particularly Andy Warhol and Roy
Lichtenstein.

In “The End of Art” Danto argues that society at large determines

and accepts art, which no longer progresses linearly, categorized
by movements. Instead, viewers each possess a theory or two,
which they use to interpret works, and art institutions are largely
tasked with developing, testing, and modifying various
interpretive methods. In this way, art differs little from philosophy.
After decades of infighting regarding the proper way to interpret
works of art, Danto essentially sanctioned each approach and the
institutions that gave rise to them. He came to call this
“pluralism.”

RELATED: What Was the Pictures Generation?

Similarly, in “Painting, Politics, and Post-Historical Art,” Danto

makes the case for an armistice between formalism and the
various theories that arose in opposition, noting that postmodern
critics like Douglas Crimp in the 1980s, who positioned
themselves against formalism, nonetheless adopted the same
constrictive air, minus the revolutionary beginnings.

Notable Quote

Modernist critical practice was out of phase with what was

happening in the art world itself in the late 60s and through
the 1970s. It remained the basis for most critical practice,
especially on the part of the curatoriat, and the art-history
professoriat as well, to the degree that it descended to
criticism. It became the language of the museum panel, the
catalog essay, the article in the art periodical. It was a daunting
paradigm, and it was the counterpart in discourse to the
“broadening of taste” which reduced art of all cultures and
times to its formalist skeleton, and thus, as I phrased it,
transformed every museum into a Museum of Modern Art,
 whatever that museum’s contents. It was the stable of the
docent’s gallery talk and the art appreciation course—and it
was replaced, not totally but massively, by the postmodernist
discourse that was imported from Paris in the late 70s, in the
texts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard,
Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan, and of the French
feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. That is the
discourse [Douglas] Crimp internalizes, and it came to be
lingua artspeak everywhere. Like modernist discourse, it
applied to everything, so that there was room for
deconstructive and “archeological” discussion of art of every
period.

Editor’s Note: This list was drawn in part from a 2014 seminar taught
by Debra Bricker Balken in the MFA program in Art Writing at the
School of Visual Arts titled Critical Strategies: Late
Modernism/Postmodernism. Additional sources can be found here, here,
here (paywall), and here. Also relevant are reviews of the 2008
exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de
Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” notably those by Roberta
Smith, Peter Schjeldahl, and Martha Schwendener.