KAREN WILKIN
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though, at various times, he owned important examples of their work,
some of the artists he was closest to, such as Morris Louis, are wholly
absent from Portland's acquisitions, while other intimates, such as Pol–
lock and Smith, are represented only by small scale works on paper. The
explanation is simple. Never sentimental about the art he lived with,
Greenberg, despite his notorious frugality and modest way of living,
had sold works that had been given to him when he needed money.
"Life before art," he was fond of saying.
I'm certain, though, that the Syracuse incarnation of the show will be
worth seeing, based on my earlier experience of the larger version. In Port–
land, I was struck by the freshness, energy, and often sheer beauty of the
works on view.
It
was refreshing, too, to encounter a group of first-rate
paintings and sculptures that, without exception, sprang from a belief in
the power of the visual to be deeply expressive, without resorting to text,
explanations, or irony. "No soundtrack," Clem used to admonish ner–
vous artists who attempted to tell him about their intentions.
I'd like to know what Greenberg would have made of "The Park
Avenue Cubists" at NYU. It's plain that Gallatin, Frelinghuysen, Shaw,
and Morris were passionate fans of Picasso, Braque, Gris, and some–
times Mira-whose work they frequently lived with-and that their
own art was deeply informed by what they had learned from the
painters they admired most. The flat, opaque planes, frontal structure,
and stylized patterns of Synthetic Cubism form the basis of all of their
efforts. Such dedication to modernist abstraction was a progressive
stance when these works were made, in the
1930S
and
'40S,
when the
social realism of the American Scene painters was widely praised. But
Synthetic Cubism was hardly a vanguard movement at the time. Mor–
ris's unswerving faith in the significance of Cubism fueled a public
falling out with Greenberg. Both the younger critic's enthusiasm for
Abstract Expression and the question of what constituted originality
entered into the argument. Morris was not impressed by what he saw as
the random efforts of the artists Greenberg was beginning to champion,
believing that Cubism had not been exhausted and could still provide a
stimulating basis for American modernism. Greenberg, on the contrary,
came
to
use "late Cubist" as a pejorative term.
Still, some years ago, when Greenberg lectured on a survey of Amer–
ican abstract art of the
1920S
and
'30S
at the Whitney-which included
the Park Avenue Cubists-he publicly acknowledged that he found
much of the exhibited work far better than he had thought when he
encountered it initially. "I was wrong," he said. "I missed a lot." Would
he have dismissed the quartet at the Grey Gallery as "late Cubists" or
