Greenberg, Clement

Related Category: American Art: Biographies

1909–94, American art critic, b. New York City. Greenberg's criticism was primarily concerned with art produced after abstract expressionism. This art, now known as color-field painting, he termed post-painterly abstraction, reflecting Heinrich Wölfflin's theory that painterly and linear styles alternate through the ages. In his essay collection Art and Culture (1961), Greenberg argued that the essence of modern art, especially painting, lies in its purely visual content. Greenberg's philosophy of art was outlined in a series of lectures posthumously published as Homemade Esthetics (1999).

See biography by F. Rubenfeld (1998).