"Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye." - Clement Greenberg

"Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work. The meaning of art in our time flows from this function of self-creation." - Harold Rosenberg

Action/ Abstraction
Norman L. Kleebatt, "Action, Abstraction, Reaction" in
Action/ Abstraction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Harold Rosenberg
1906 - 1978

Clement Greenberg
1909 - 1994

Earned law degree

Studied English literature

Art critic for The New Yorker 1967 - 1978

Art critic for The Nation 1942 - 1949

Actively wrote about art 1952 - 1978

Actively wrote about art 1939 - 1972

• Existentialist

• Metaphysics

• Expression of the individual

• All-Over composition

• Gestural marks declared artist's heroic existence

• Large expanses of color

• Content came from the activity of making
  

• Content is the effect of the work on the viewer

• Politics, psychology, and phenomenological

• Subject matter should be avoided like a plague

• Letting the picture happen

• Making the picture

• Ab Ex was a radical break with the past

• Ab Ex was a coninuation of modern progression towards abstraction

American art after WWII had radically broken with the past, and ruptured tradition

• emphasized the creative act and the individual

• Interpreted American art after WWII through existentialism

• Artists now saw the canvas as an "arena in which to act"

• Artists as individuals engaged in the creative process as an escape from the alienation of the modern world

• Content came from activity of making (the creative act)

• Abstract Expressionism represented a starting point forward

Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955.

• The goal is no longer to produce an object of aesthetic pleasure

• Rather, the purpose is to embody the inner dimensions of the psyche on the canvas-a record of the event of painting

• The motive for painting was more important than the medium

Elaine de Kooning, Harold Rosenberg, 1956.

• Rosenberg argued that Greenberg's formalism was academic

• Attacked Greenberg's personal involvement in the making and selling of artist's works who he championed

Purchased by Eli Broad in 2005 for $23.8 milion making it the most expensive contemporary work sold at auction at the time

• The problem was that modern art had been "institutionalized" and promoted solely on "aesthetic quality" by the "bureaucrats of taste"

• Art had become just another commodity.

• Connected Abstract Expressionism with the goals of earlier avant garde movements like Dada and Surrealism

• The avant garde opened up the future for art by allowing infinite possibility

• Importantly, these radical breaks argued for the integration of art with life

Allan Kaprow in Life magazine 1967

Greenberg

• Modern art was a means of resisting the leveling of culture produced by capitalism

• Distinction between high and low art/ culture

• kitsch = mass produced, low quality, consumer culture

• Modern art was like philosophy in that it explored conditions under which we experience and understand the world

• Urged artists to break with traditional dominance of subject matter and narrative

• Art should not simply illustrate experience

• Used the fear of communism in support of abstraction and formalism

Hitler touring the Degenerate Art Exhibition, Munich, 1937

Alfred Baar Jr. torpedo diagram

Alfred Baar Jr. on the founding principles of MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum

• Borrowing from Kant's argument on philosophy, Greenberg asserts "purification"

• The arts should remain autonomous

• Art forms should avoid "confusion" with each other as they are stronger when they do not mix

Kenneth Noland, Tide, 1958.

• Argued that the avant-garde had not broken with tradition.

• Rather, that painters were moving towards greater emphasis on the flatness of the picture plane.

• Dialogue on flatness moved their art away from the Old Masters

• Artists had previously seen the flatness of the picture plane as a hurdle to overcome in the attempt to depict three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface

• Content is the effect of the work on the viewer

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952.

• Traced interest in the flatness of the picture plane back to the Impressionists

• Considered the history of the avant-garde as a continuous stripping away of subject matter, illusion and pictorial space

• Favored dialogue on unique, formal qualities of paint

• Concept of "mainstream" as a strictly linear progression of art history

• Each new style builds on its predecessors

• Only one style exists at any given time

• Ignored all other styles

• Concept of "mainstream" as a strictly linear progression of art history

• Each new style builds on its predecessors

• Only one relevant style exists at any given time

• Ignored all other styles

Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538.