What fall?(Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg)(Book review)

Alice Goldfarb Marquis Art Czar: The Rise & Fall of Clement Greenberg. MFA Publications, 312 pages, $35

reviewed by John Russell

This reader was momentarily put off by the title of this fascinating book. Clement Greenberg was like no one else, and he held fast to his opinions. He was in no sense a "czar" Nor would he have wished to be so described. The word "czar" is now applied primarily to metropolitan gangsters by people who see it almost as a backhanded compliment. Like many a strong and sometimes peremptory character, Greenberg had his detractors. But if a "czar" had turned up at his front door, Greenberg would have given him the bum's rush.

Nor did Greenberg have "a fall" As Ms. Marquis tells it, Greenberg in the last years of his life was "stripped by a larcenous accountant" of some $750,000. That was not "a fall" but it was a considerable misfortune. Two days after his death on May 4th, 1994, he was described by Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times as "the most important art critic that the United States had produced." If that is "a fall" others would stand in line to get it.

Greenberg's mother had arrived in New York in 1899, when she was eleven years old. The Greenbergs came from a Lithuanian Jewish enclave in northern Poland. More than 163,000 refugees from Europe arrived in the United States in 1899, and when Greenberg's father, aged twenty, arrived in 1904, the year's arrivals numbered 322,000.

New York was acquiring its distinctive and endlessly rewarding character. The Greenbergs described themselves as "tailors, shoe-makers, and horse-thieves"--a trio that has "survival" written all over it.

New York was forever to be pervaded, and, in part, defined, by those arrivals. Their way of talking--rapidly, incisively, and always to the point--can still be heard on the street, in the restaurants, in the museums, in the irresistible shops, and on the subway.