BOOKS
301
This historical view of culture has produced a powerful aca–
demic movement that is attempting to bring the curriculum into line
with its sense of the historically constructed, rather than eternal or
absolute, nature of culture. What educational changes this new
movement will produce remain to be seen, but they are likely to be
an improvement over the pieties of General Education, which no
longer express the way most of us live, if they ever did.
GERALD GRAFF
A
GREENBERG RETROSPECTIVE
CLEMENT GREENBERG: THE COLLECTED ESSAYS AND CRIT–
ICISM. VOLUMES 1 AND 2. Edited
by
John O'Brian. University of
Chicago Press. $55 .00.
By all rights a retrospective exhibition of an artist's career
is selectively comprehensive. Chronicling the artist's oeuvre from
start to finish, it argues against years of received opinion handed
down by critics speaking on the artist's behalf. Fifty years after his
first articles in
Partisan Review
catapulted him to instant notoriety,
Clement Greenberg himself gets to see a full-scale retrospective of
his complete critical writings, and with it the opportunity to have
matters restored to fullness and perspective.
But not quite. Published so far are two of the four volumes pro–
jected in the series, these covering the years 1939-1949, the first
formative decade of Greenberg's criticism. Nor are the other two vol–
umes soon forthcoming; given the previous commitments of his edi–
tor John O'Brian, the remainder of Greenberg's retrospective will
have to wait at least until the early 1990s. In plain view, however, is
Greenberg's sense of modernism, honed to a radical instrument of
culture. The formalism Greenberg has contrived continues to re–
main one of the most penetrating interpretions of modernism by
which we understand the inner structure and goals of advanced art
created in the twentieth century.
Fifty years after the fact, when art historians and critics target
Greenberg to prove either how right or how wrong he is, the essays
to which they most often appeal are "Avant-garde and Kitsch" (1939)
and "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (1940). The main reason for this is
