562
PARTISAN REVIEW
visual art, particularly early on. There are probing essays about fiction and
poetry, reviews of biographies and art historical works, ruminations on
literary criticism and the state of culture. Interestingly, there is nothing on
music or architecture - "too hard," Greenberg remarked,
in
the early
1980s. A 1945 piece on Anthony Tudor's ballet,
Dim Lustre,
is, I believe,
unique; Greenberg admired the work - the piece protests the omission of
Dim Lustre
from two consecutive seasons of Ballet Theater - but curi–
ously, the man whose name is synonymous with formal analysis seems
wholly engrossed by the ballet's narrative and oblivious of its character as
dance.
To read all four volumes is to watch a trenchant, widely-read ob–
server educate himself
in
public, tracking his responses, measuring what
he sees against what he has seen, generalizing from particular encounters,
but staying close to his original experience. The prose is lean and work–
man-like; words are used with near-pedantic precision. (Greenberg cared
intensely about accurate language; despite his rather old-fashioned code of
good manners, ,he never hesitated to correct anyone's grammar or usage.)
From the start, his critical voice is assured, so much so that his conclu–
sions, his generalizations about how modernist art evolved, were often
viewed as directives. Yet it's clear that each essay begins with a tacit "in
my opinion" and that the critic, at his best, was led, however unwillingly,
by his eye, never by preconception.
In
a 1969 interview, the last inclusion
in
the published works to date, he said:
There are criteria, but they can't be put into words - any more than
the difference between good and bad can be put into words. Works of
art move you to a greater or lesser extent, that's
all.
So far, words have
been futile in the matter. Nobody hands out prescriptions to art or
artists. You just wait and see what happens - what the artist does.
Greenberg's deceptively simple methodology, of looking voraciously
and then drawing general, albeit entirely subjective conclusions from par–
ticular, direct experience, was established early on. A 1948 review of a
Museum of Modern Art exhibition,
Collage,
is typical. Embedded
in an
evaluation of the show - Greenberg concludes that Picasso and Braque
are the medium's masters, "followed at a distance by Arp and Schwitters"
and faults Gris for using collage
in
a way indistinguishable from paint - is
a terse summary of the significance of Cubism:
Cubism brought about the destruction of the illusionist means and ef–
fects that had characterized Western painting since the fifteenth cen-
