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The so-called obscurity of modernist literature has, of course, a lot to do with the new stress on exegesis. When the overt meaning of a work can no longer be taken for granted, criticism is forced — or seems forced — to undertake the explication of the text of the work before doing anything else. But experience has shown us by now that the drift and shape of an "obscure" poem or novel can be grasped for the purposes of art without being "worked out." Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.
Clement Greenberg
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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.
Clement Greenberg
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Matisse's art speaks for itself through its "mechanics", it's "form" and through the feeling which that "form" makes manifest. It's not by far the first to do so and to transcend the illustrated subject by doing so. (All good painting and sculpture does that to some extent). But just as Matisse rejected verbal rhetoric so he kept every last trace of illustrational rhetoric out of his art. He may have been the first painter in our tradition to do that in a really radical way. This doesn't make his art better than a Giotto's or Caravaggio's or Goya's or David's, not necessarily. But it does make it a salutary example for all those people who find it hard, in any medium, to mean what they say.
Clement Greenberg
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The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility.
Clement Greenberg
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A large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best re-create the instantaneous unity of nature as a view — the unity of which the eyes take in at a single glance.
Clement Greenberg
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One is also reminded of how in art the tortoise so often overtakes the hare. Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating. This is how they first become accessible to broad taste, which is lazy taste, and by the same token to the processes of publicity and consecration. As long as they were trammeled up in the urgency of getting things said they were too difficult, too "controversial."
Clement Greenberg
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We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Clement Greenberg
Wikipedia
Born:
January 16, 1909
Died:
May 7, 1994
(aged 85)
Bio:
Clement Greenberg, occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century.
Known for:
Homemade esthetics
The Harold letters, 1928-1943
Joan Miró (1948)
Most used words:
art
kitsch
difficult
taste
startling
medium
form
work
artist
modernism
painting
Clement Greenberg on Wikipedia
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