Just finished my friend Alice Goldfarb Marquis's biography of Clement Greenberg, The Art Czar. Finished reading it, appropriately, in a guest room at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park South, a magnificent 19th-Century mansion formerly home to New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden. There were announcements of a testimonial dinner for Arthur Gelb, long-time New York Times "culture czar" in the lobby. So, when Marquis' described the incestuous and inbred New York art scene, so inbred that even I desperately tried to find a personal connection--someone I know had been a student of Rosalind Krauss, Greenberg's disciple turned nemesis, and I once delivered a term paper to her downtown loft; I met Hilton Kramer once or twice; gee, Greenberg knew Irving Kristol at Commentary; my cousin went to Syracuse University, etc.--to the incredibly juicy and melodramatic story of alcohol, sex, money, and "Painterly Abstraction" (not "Action Painting," please! That's Harold Rosenberg's heresy). Don't forget Greenberg's former life as a Trotskyist cum Cold Warrior. At one level aesthetic, at another political, deeply personal, Marquis' book is also about the twin seductions in Greenberg's life--Avant-Garde (aka holiness) and Kitsch (aka sin). Greenberg may have been an art czar, but he was, as Marquis makes clear, also an art rabbi, making Talumudic pronouncements, koshering the work of artists in their studios, and ensuring a moral dimension. Did he strip paint off David Smith's sculptures? Yes, he did--to make them look better.
This high moral purpose, interestingly, sounds somewhat Victorian from the vantage point of 2006. Today, it seems that Kitsch has triumphed in the Art World. So, Marquis looks back nostalgically to the days of Clement Greenberg--a critic who may not have known much about art, but who certainly knew what he liked. Unlike today, the post-war period was a time when art mattered, and Alice Goldfarb Marquis has done a marvellous job of explaining how and why, through the life of Clement Greenberg.
