628
PARTISAN REVIEW
has not written an "intellectual biography" but rather a "social" one-a
curious distinction, given that her subject's reputation was established by
his articulation of ideas and aesthetic perceptions. She does attempt-very
superficially-to summarize Greenberg's thinking and to grapple with
some of the factors that influenced his formation as a critic, but most of
her discussion draws heavily on other publications. You won't learn any–
thing new, for example, about Greenberg and the New York Intellectuals,
or anything substantial about Greenberg's contribution to art critical writ–
ing, or anything illuminating about the nature of his connection to the
artists with whom he was most closely associated. You certainly won't get
much sense of his wholehearted passion for art or of how his eye and his
thinking were affected by his studio relationships with painters and sculp–
tors. Instead, Rubenfeld perpetuates old accusations and half-truths,
dredges up old grievances and resentments, without being too scrupulous,
for the most part, about presenting all the evidence. A great deal of the
information in the book, from small points to large ones, can't be trusted.
The one thing we can demand of a biographer is getting the facts right,
whatever conclusion he or she draws from them;
Clement Greenberg: A Life
is so riddled with errors that is impossible to rely on anything Rubenfeld
tells us.
Yet despite its evident inadequacies, this disappointing effort has been
received with respectful attention, even praise. Because it is the first biog–
raphy of the most notorious, celebrated, and disputed of American critics
and because anyone seriously interested
in
the history of twentieth-century
art must take Greenberg's criticism into account,
Clement Greenberg: A Life
has been reviewed everywhere-from the
New York Times
to the
Los Angeles
Times,
from
Ariforum
to
The New Yorker-by
everyone from Arthur Danto
to Adam Gopnik. And more. When Greenberg's collected critical writ–
ings, edited by John O'Brian, appeared, their publication set off a similar
flurry of articles. That responses ranged from the admiring to the hostile
was not surprising, since Greenberg's reading of the development of mod–
ernist art has come to be regarded not as a definitive tracking of the course
of adventurous, innovative art, but as only one of many possible ways of
describing what happened in painting and sculpture during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. But whether they agreed or disagreed with
Greenberg's views, writers discussing his collected essays made enormous
efforts to come to terms wi th what the cri tic had actually said during the
thirty years-1939 to 1969-covered by the four volumes. Whether they
posited the influence of the New Criticism on Greenberg's method or
found a Marxist notion of historical inevitability in his reading of mod–
ernism as each discipline's gradually purging itself of everything not
intrinsic to its medium, reviewers of the collected writings were attentive
