Clement Greenberg
Overview
Clement Greenberg was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...

 closely associated with American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 Modern art
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...

 of the mid-20th century. In particular, he is best remembered for his promotion of the abstract expressionist
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...

 movement and was among the first published critics to praise the work of painter Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...

.
Clement Greenberg was born in the borough of the Bronx, NYC, in 1909. His parents were middle-class Jewish immigrants, and he was the oldest of their three sons.
Quotations

Complete honesty has nothing to do with "purity" or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart.

"Partisan Review 'Art Chronicle': 1952" (1952), p. 146

One cannot condemn tendencies in art; one can only condemn works of art. To be categorically against a current art tendency or style means, in effect, to pronounce on works of art not yet created and not yet seen. It means inquiring into the motives of artists instead of into results. Yet we all know — or are supposed to know — that results are all that count in art.

"Wyndham Lewis|Wyndham Lewis Against Abstract Art" (1957), p. 164

The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Gustave Courbet|Courbet to Paul Cézanne|Cézanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.

"On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting" (1949), p. 171

 
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