302
PARTISAN REVIEW
their perception that Greenberg's intellectual center coincides with
his literary origins. "Avant-garde and Kitsch," Greenberg's entry
into the discourse of the anti-Stalinist avant-garde intelligentsia,
voiced support for the artistic resistance. No compromise, no rap–
prochement with commercial mass culture was allowed if the mod–
ernist artist was to be worthy of the avant-garde . Kitsch, whether
promulgated by totalitarian propaganda or democracies' regional
notions of art, was seen as both politically and aesthetically noxious.
With World War II in the wings and with Trotsky exiled and send–
ing
Partisan Review
cultural bulletins from Mexico, Greenberg's con–
tribution to the discussion initiated by William Phillips, Philip
Rahv, and Dwight Macdonald, as editors of this journal , was not
idle chatter but decidedly activist. Neither was the notion of the
avant-garde an abstraction, given that Greenberg was writing this
even as Eliot's "East Coker" and "Dry Salvages," published in 1940
and 1941, appeared in
Partisan's
pages. The avant-garde was hap–
pening in the present.
Announced in "Towards a Newer Laocoon," and argued in
essays thereafter, is Greenberg's contention that whatever purists
may say, we do not need to resort to their metaphysics to see that
abstraction is the best of today's visual art . Greenberg is not being
coy when he says that the excellence of abstraction can be appre–
hended directly. But neither does this suggest he is incapable of em–
ploying certain privileged ideas for preemptive metaphysical strikes .
An idealist right from the start, he insists on identifying canonical
art with the most advanced expressions of culture to distance himself
from what he calls "the lesser talents." The short honor list Green–
berg compiled over the years is well known. Matisse, Picasso, Mon–
drian, Mir6, and Pollock manage to enter his canon of painting. De
Kooning's first abstractions earn highest praise. Early, that is to say
Cubist, Giacometti and David Smith form the short list of indispens–
able sculptors.
"Indispensable" is the operative word.
If
more and more people
wield pigment-laden brushes, this fact does not make them all paint–
ers nor all their products paintings - at least in anything but a tech–
nical sense. According to Greenberg's interpretation of Woelffiin ,
pictures may come into being but remain irrelevant for the history of
painting unless they originate or bring to fruition a major spatial
paradigm. They will prove their worth definitively, as modernist
history since Courbet has shown, by intensifying those plastic and
flat qualities unique to the visual medium of painting.
