Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T17:03:21.508Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Their Jewish Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Matthew Baigell
Get access

Extract

Clement Greenberg (1909–94) and Harold Rosenberg (1906–78) were the two art critics most closely associated with abstract expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s. Neither began their careers as art critics, however. By the mid-1980s, Rosenberg had published literary essays and poems in left-wing magazines, and Greenberg's articles and reviews first appeared at the end of that decade. During the 1940s, Greenberg began to write art criticism, and Rosenberg's essays began to appear frequently in the 1950s. By that time, both had become part of the group known informally as the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish and children of immigrant parents.

Highly verbal, vocal, argumentative, and politically left of center, they often published in magazines such as Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent. Although both Greenberg and Rosenberg ultimately rejected the more dogmatic and authoritarian aspects of leftist politics, they nevertheless supported the idea that society must move forward, but not necessarily by political means. Greenberg thought that such momentum could be maintained by the cultural elite, and Rosenberg, influenced by surrealism's concerns for the creative process, believed that individuals who were independent minded and creative could do the same. Both encouraged artists to turn from the social concerns that engaged many during the 1930s to apolitical, self-searching themes that came to characterize the art of the 1940s. In effect, they, especially Rosenberg, lionized the artist as an heroic individual. In the words of one historian, both “worked to find a safe haven for radical progress within the realm of individualistic culture.” And both, among the most perspicacious critics of their time, discovered, encouraged, and/or supported artists who ultimately became major figures, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 30 , October 2005 , pp. 651 - 664
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Herbert, James D., The Political Origins of Abstract-Expressionist Art Criticism: The Early Theoretical and Critical Writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, Stanford Honors Essays in the Humanities, no. 27 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 2Google Scholar.

2. Greenberg, Clement, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. O'Brian, John (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1:8–20Google Scholar.

3. O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 1:8Google Scholar. See also Greenberg, Clement, “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940), in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 1:28–37Google Scholar; and Greenberg, Clement, “Henri Rousseau and Modern Art” (1946) in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 2:94Google Scholar.

4. Storr, Robert, “No Joy in Mudville: Greenberg's Modernism Then and Now,” in Art and Popular Culture: Readings in High and Low, ed. Varnedoe, Kirk and Gopnik, Adam (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 162Google Scholar.

5. Rosenberg, Harold, “The Herd of Independent Minds: Has the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture?” Commentary 6 (09 1948): 251Google Scholar.

6. Rosenberg, Harold, “The American Action Painters” (1952), in The Tradition of the New (New York: Grove, 1961), 25Google Scholar.

7. Many of these issues are considered in my Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

8. Bloom, Alexander, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 142–57Google Scholar. For additional material on this generation, see Cooney, Terry a., The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Wald, Alan M., The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

9. Cohen, Morris Raphael, “Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism?” New Republic, 03 8, 1919Google Scholar, cited and discussed in Omer-Sherman, Ranen, Diaspora and Zionism in American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. The essay most available at that time was Lewin, Kurt's “Self-Hatred Among Jews,” Contemporary Jewish Record 4 (06 1941): 221–26Google Scholar. See also Simmel, Ernst, Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease (New York: International Universities Press, 1946)Google Scholar; Patai, Raphael, The Jewish Mind (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977), 461–62Google Scholar; Gilman, Sander L., Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 305Google Scholar; and Rubin, Theodore Isaac, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind (New York: Continuum, 1990), 120Google Scholar.

11. If world conditions were mentioned by Christian artists, these usually concerned rejection of bourgeois values or generalized considerations rather than specific references to war and genocide. See, for instance, Robert Motherwell's essay “The Modern Painter's World (1944)” and his “Prefatory Note to Max Ernst: Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends (1948),” in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Terenzio, Stephanie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 29, 47Google Scholar.

12. More has been written about Greenberg's rather than Rosenberg's sense of Jewishness. See, for example, Storr, Robert, “No Joy in Mudville,” 175Google Scholar; de Duve, Thierry, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, trans. Holmes, Brian (Paris: Editions dis Voir, 1996)Google Scholar, passim; Platt, Susan Noyes, “Clement Greenberg in the 1930s: A New Perspective on His Criticism,” Art Criticism 5, no. 3 (1989): 47–64Google Scholar; Olin, Margaret, “C[lement] Hardesh [Greenberg] and Company: Formal Criticism and Jewish Identity,” in Too Jewish? Challenging Jewish Identities, ed. Kleeblatt, Norman L. (New York: Jewish Museum, 1996), 39–59Google Scholar; and Kaplan, Louis, “Reframing Self-Criticism: Clement Greenberg's ‘Modernist Painting’ in Light of Jewish Identity,” in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Soussloff, Catherine M. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 180–99Google Scholar. See also Cooney, , Rise of the New York Intellectuals, 234–44Google Scholar. For the most recent consideration of Rosenberg, see the text and bibliography in Winkenweder, Brian's “Art History, Sartre and Identity in Rosenberg's America,” Art Criticism 13, no. 2 (1998): 83–102Google Scholar.

13. In his autobiography (A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982], 252)Google Scholar, Irving Howe mentioned the differences between private conversations and published writings. See also Rabinovich, Anson, “Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy,” October 108 (2004): 104Google Scholar.

14. Greenberg, Clement, “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews” (1944), in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 1:176Google Scholar.

15. Greenberg, Clement, “Autobiographical Statement” (1955), in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 3:194–96Google Scholar.

16. See, for example, Lipstadt, Deborah E., Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York: Free, 1986)Google Scholar.

17. Greenberg, and Macdonald, Dwight, “10 Propositions on the War,” Partisan Review 8 (07–08, 1941): 271Google Scholar. See Philip Rahv's reply, “10 Propositions and 8 Errors,” in the November–December issue (499–506). At a much earlier date, 1935, Trotskyite Bertram D. Wolfe said that he would not necessarily oppose Hitler, since all capitalists were the same (“What Will I Do When America Goes to War? A Symposium,” Modern Monthly 9 [09 1935]Google Scholar, cited in Browder, Earl, Communism in the United States [New York: International, 1935], 306)Google Scholar.

18. O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 1:79–83Google Scholar.

19. Greenberg, Clement, “A Martyr to Bohemia: Review of Out of This Century by Peggy Guggenheim” (1946), in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 2:97–98Google Scholar.

20. Greenberg, Clement, “The Jewish Dickens: Review of The World of Sholom Aleichem by Maurice Samuel” (1943), in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 1:155Google Scholar.

21. I want to stay with the Jewish issues here and not explore Greenberg's literary and intellectual sources, which have been considered elsewhere.

22. O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 1:158Google Scholar.

23. Cooney, touches upon these issues in The Rise of the New York Intellectuals (263–64)Google Scholar. For a more thorough and enlightening discussion in which such popular midcentury authors as Erich Fromm and Karen Hornay are considered, see Schacht, Richard, Alienation (New York: Doubleday, 1970), ch. 4Google Scholar.

24. Gottlieb, Adolph, “The Artist and the Public,” Art in America 42 (12 1954): 267Google Scholar.

25. Howe, Irving, “The Lost Young Intellectual: A Marginal Man, Twice Alienated,” Commentary 2 (10 1946): 367Google Scholar. See also Glazer, Nathan, “The ‘Alienation’ of Modern Man: Some Diagnoses of the Malady,” Commentary 3 (04 1947): 378–85Google Scholar.

26. Greenberg, , “Under Forty,” in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 1:178Google Scholar.

27. Hook, Sidney, “Reflections on the Jewish Question,” Partisan Review 16 (05 1949): 468, 480Google Scholar.

28. “Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism: Some Reflections on ‘Positive Jewishness’,” in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 3:51, 47Google Scholar.

29. Gilman, Sander, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 321Google Scholar.

30. Cooney, , Rise of the New York Intellectuals, 243Google Scholar.

31. O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 3:55–57Google Scholar. These issues were discussed in the pages of various Jewish magazines at that time. See, for example, Friedlander, Israel, “Can Judaism Survive in Free America?” Commentary 2 (07 1946): 73–80Google Scholar; and Cohen, Elliot E., “Jewish Culture in America,” Commentary 3 (04 1947): 412–20Google Scholar.

32. Greenberg, Clement, “Introduction to ‘The Great Wall of China’ by Franz Kafka” (1946), in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 2:99–104Google Scholar; Greenberg, , “The Jewishness of Franz Kafka: Some Source of His Particular Vision” (1955), in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 3:202–9Google Scholar; Greenberg, , “At the Building of the Great Wall of China,” in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 4:48–52Google Scholar; and Greenberg, , “Kafka's Jewishness,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 266–73Google Scholar.

33. O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 2:101, 102Google Scholar.

34. Ibid., 3:206.

35. Greenberg, , “Kafka's Jewishness,” 273Google Scholar.

36. Storr, , “No Joy in Mudville,” 175Google Scholar.

37. Greenberg, , “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” 1:28Google Scholar.

38. Ibid., 1:32, 34.

39. Winkenweder, , “Art History,” 87Google Scholar.

40. Rosenberg, Harold, “Rediscovering Judaism” (1947), in Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 235Google Scholar.

41. Rosenberg, Harold, “Letter to a Jewish Theologian” (1947), in Discovering the Present, 256Google Scholar.

42. Rosenberg, Harold, “Does the Jew Exist? Sartre's Morality Play About Anti-Semitism,” Commentary 7 (01 1949), 18Google Scholar. The essay was revised as “Sartre's Jewish Morality Play” for Discovering the Present, 270–87Google Scholar.

43. Rosenberg, Harold, “Jewish Identity in a Free Society,” in Discovering the Present, 259–69Google Scholar.

44. Newman, Barnett, “The Sublime Is Now,” in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. O'Neill, John P. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 173Google Scholar. For a further consideration of a Rosenbergian view of Newman, see my “Newman's The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani, a Jewish Take,” in Art Criticism 19, no. 1 (2004): 55–56Google Scholar.

45. Rosenberg, Harold, “Is There a Jewish Art?” Commentary 42 (07 1966): 60Google Scholar. The essay was slightly revised for publication in Discovering the Present, 223–31Google Scholar.

46. Feingold, Henry L., “From Commandment to Persuasion: Probing the ‘Hard’ Secularism of American Jewry,” in National Variations in Jewish Identity: Implications for Jewish Education, ed. Cohen, Steven M. and Horencyzk, Gabriel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 167, 171Google Scholar.