Clement Greenberg
"AMERICAN-TYPE" PAINTING
The latest abstract painting offends many people, among
whom are more than a few who accept the abstract in art in principle.
New painting (sculpture is a different question) still provokes scandal
when little that is new
in
literature or even music appears to do so
any longer. This may be explained by the very slowness of painting's
evolution as a modernist art. Though it started on its "modernization"
earlier perhaps than the other arts, it has turned out to have a greater
number of
expendable
conventions imbedded in it, or these at least
have proven harder to isolate and detach.
As
long as such conven–
tions survive and can be isolated they continue to be attacked, in all
the arts that intend to survive in modem society. This process has
come to a stop in literature because literature has fewer conventions
to expend before it begins to deny its own essence, which lies in the
communication of conceptual meanings. The expendable conventions
in music, on the other hand, would seem to have been isolated much
sooner, which is why the process of modernization has slowed down,
if not stopped, there. (1 simplify drastically. And it is understood, 1
hope, that tradition is not dismantled by the avant-garde for sheer
revolutionary effect, but in order to maintain the level and vitality of
art under the steadily changing circumstances of the last hundred
years-and that the dismantling has its own continuity and tradition.)
That is, the avant-garde survives in painting because painting
has not yet reached the point of modernization where its discarding
of inherited convention must stop lest it cease to be viable as art.
Nowhere do these conventions seem to go on being attacked as they
are today in this country, and the commotion about a certain kind
of American abstract
art
is a sign of that.
It
is practiced by a group
of painters who came to notice in New York about a dozen years
