KAREN WILKIN
tury. The fictive depths of the picture were drained, and its action was
brought forward and identified with the immediate, physical surface of
the canvas, board, or paper. By pasting a piece of newspaper lettering
to the canvas one called attention to the physical reality of the work of
art and made that reality the same as the art. The large newspaper type
arrested the spectator's eye and prevented it from passing behind the
physical surface of the picture into space created by illusion. Painting
was no longer a matter of fictive projection or description, and the
picture became one with the pigment, the texture, and the £lat surface
that constituted it as an object.
563
At the end is one of those observations Greenberg's detractors insisted
were declarations of what pictures
ought
to be; the actual phrasing is
worth noting and helps to explain the critic's frequent recourse to "I
never said that" in public confrontations: "[The exhibition]
also would
seem to show that the greatest success in collage so Jar
has been gained through
compositions based on a preponderance of rectangular forms whose con–
tours are kept roughly parallel to the edges of the canvas - in other words,
repeat the canvas's shape." (Italics mine.) Description, not prescription.
Not that Greenberg couldn't be dogmatic or scathing. Witness a 1948
description of a painting by Theodoros Stamos as "sickeningly sweet, in–
ept, and utterly empty."
While a model for Greenberg's expository prose can be found in
Samuel Johnson's robust language, and while there are parallels to be
drawn between his critical approach and the penetrating criticism of
T.
S.
Eliot, whom he admired and learned from, we must look to Immanuel
Kant for the source of what Greenberg called his "home-made aesthet–
ics." Experiencing art directly was only the beginning; the critic's task was
to " ... draw the conclusions from his vast experience of art and shape
them into a coherent intellectual structure" - that is, "to approach art
philosophically," which Greenberg defines as "to abstract from one's ex–
perience of it."
"Kant had bad taste," Greenberg notes, "and relatively meager expe–
rience of art, yet his capacity for abstraction enabled him, despite many
gaffes)
to establish in his
Critique
if
AestheticJudgment
what is the most satis–
factory basis for aesthetics we yet have." (It's characteristic of Greenberg
to state this without recapitulating Kant's position.)
These passages come from a 1955 review of two books by Bernard
Berenson, an essay less interesting for what it tells us about its nominal
subject than for its insights into how Greenberg defined his own enter–
prise. (Such discoveries are part of the pleasure and extreme usefulness of
O'Brian's collection, which is not to discount the worth of having well–
known, frequently published articles set in the chronological context of
