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PARTISAN REVIEW
works of Minimalism by Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, that at once
extend David Smith while returning to Constructivism's genuinely
radical conception of sculpture? How Greenberg copes with radical
art unforeseen by him is beyond the historical frame of this part of
the retrospective. What is immediately pertinent is that Greenberg
does not confuse the abstract concerns of art for art's sake with enter–
tainment; art is not entertainment for the sighted. As Greenberg was
to write years later, "Trotskyism turned into art for art's sake, which
cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come ."
Adversaries of Greenberg protest that emphasizing formalist
implications of modernism is simply not historical, yet even though
anyone scanning these volumes of collected essays will note that a
contextual approach to art is indeed notably absent, such an objec–
tion to his approach by no means invalidates it. In actuality, giving
formal priority to art does not so much register Greenberg's par–
ticular choice as a widely-held period assumption. In the 1920s when
Greenberg went to school, formalism was in vogue throughout Eu–
rope, utilized by a contextual art historian such as Erwin Panofsky
as much as by critical upstarts like Greenberg, not because it was
fashionable but because such sustained formal analysis was tanta–
mount to a demonstrable visual literacy . It is no wonder that armed
with his analytic skills, plus native perceptivity, Greenberg spotted
the work of Pollock and Smith and confidently championed their art,
as unintelligible as it may have been to others at the time. With both
social history and biography ancillary to informed sight, this signifi–
cant art did not get lost in the welter of contemporary artifacts plea–
bargaining their way into history but was appreciated for the defini–
tive achievement it is. Stringent though it may be, pure visibility has
survived Woelfflinian coinage for reasons more valid than pro–
ponents of pure contextuality would like to concede.
There is a lesson that Greenberg's radical, fotmalist interpre–
tation of modern art still can teach history. In a recent interview
William Lieberman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art told me
that, as his title suggests, he is curator not of "modern art" but of
"twentieth century painting and sculpture." Even so, the logic of this
does not disguise what amounts to an aesthetic policy statement:
now the Metropolitan Museum of Art maintains that modernism be
relegated to a small aesthetic inflection in the history of twentieth
century practice, and on the walls of the vast halls of the Lila Ache–
son Wallace Wing, we do indeed see evidence of Lieberman's deci–
sion to support an untheoretical chronicle of painting in its many
I
