| Phi 220 Spring 2016 |
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Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) was an art critic closely associated with the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s and early 1960s. This article is one of his first published pieces and comes at a time when the members of that movement (many of whom were about his age) were only beginning to develop their styles. The art teacher and artist Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), who Greenberg credits with a key idea in his note 2, was an important influence on many them.
Greenberg’s main topic is given by his title, the distinction between the idea of the avant-garde and that of kitsch. The first two sections characterize these ideas, and the last two discuss their political significance.
• Some of the description of the avant-garde in §I is social: the bohemian vs. the bourgeois and the relation to revolutionary politics, but be sure to notice Greenberg’s use of the idea of imitation.
• Much of the discussion in §II is social, too—e.g., the peasant’s presumed reactions to Picasso and Repin—but watch for the ideas of “effect” and “synthetic art” near the end. (The images that appear with the article on the website may be helpful but they weren’t part of the original publication, and Greenberg may not have had particular pictures in mind. Greenberg noted later that Repin never painted a battle scene and guessed that he was thinking of someone else’s painting. In the painting included for Repin on the webiste, the crowd is having a good time—as you can see in the larger version here.)
• Greenberg’s sharpest characterization of his distinction appears at the very beginning of §III. Much of his discussion of the political significance of art in §III and §IV is less important for the distinction, but it is relevant both for his relation to Tolstoy and, even more, for his relation to Benjamin (who we will discuss on Monday).