"The Park Avenue Cubists: Gallatin, Morris, Frelinghuysen, and Shaw". (Exhibition notes).

at the Grey Art Gallery, New York. January 14-March 29, 2003

Clement Greenberg was undoubtedly a great critic. But he also undoubtedly had his crotchets and blind spots. One crotchet he inherited from Marxism. He tended to see artistic developments in terms of a necessary historical evolution (the ineluctable unfolding of' the dialectic, comrade). In "The Decline of Cubism," a famous essay first published in Partisan Review in 1948, Greenberg extolled Cubism ("the only vital style of our time") as an "experiment" that advanced the "hope, coincident with that of Marxism and the whole matured tradition of Enlightenment, of humanizing the world." Greenberg's use of "experiment" was not an accident. Cubism, he wrote, "expressed the positivist or empirical state of mind" with its "faith in the supreme reality of concrete experience" and "an all-pervasive conviction that the world would go on improving."

The great irony of Hegelian-Marxist thought--the thing that keeps its adherents in such limber intellectual trim--is the never-ending task of explaining why the inevitable has failed to happen. Cubism was necessary, nevertheless it was in "decline." "Conservative" artists were part of the problem: they lacked "nerve," had turned their back on the "real insights of the age," etc.

Now, it's tough work, fabricating excuses for an unreliable necessity. But Marxists can be clever people. Only a few of them, however, have managed to leaven their cleverness with a highly refined aesthetic sense. Greenberg did it. And the tension between his political commitments and his nose for aesthetic quality was one source of his vitality and richness as a critic--a vitality and a richness, it must be said, that often operated by exclusion.

Greenberg was seldom less than illuminating. It was part of his greatness as a critic that he was also often infuriating. One person who was articulately infuriated by Greenberg's writings about "the decline of Cubism" and related issues was the rich, socially prominent American painter and critic George L. K. Morris (1907-1975). "One must stretch a point to call it criticism at all," Morris wrote about "The Decline of Cubism," "rather it is an appraisal-sheet built around a thesis." (Morris, incidentally, had preceded Greenberg as chief art critic for Partisan Review and, in 1937, had quietly provided the financial wherewithal that allowed the magazine to break away from its Stalinist roots.)

Morris was unhappy about Greenberg's diagnosis partly because it depreciated the achievement of Cubist-inspired artists like ... well, like himself and his wife and friends: Estelle ("Suzy") Freylinghuysen (1911-1988), A. E. Gallatin (1881-1952), and Charles G. Shaw (1892-1974). But Morris's displeasure was not merely personal. He believed, and not without good reasons, that Greenberg's contention that in times of crisis "radical" artists retreat to safer, more conventional aesthetic practices exaggerated "the connection between nerve and great painting." "Surely," Morris wrote, "it is on quality that artists get judged in the end, and not on their innovations."

I think Morris was right about that, and there is some irony in the fact that his pronouncement--the first half of it, anyway--has a distinctly Greenbergian ring to it. "Quality," after all, was a prime enabling epithet for Greenberg and his circle. It was part of Greenberg's Marxism and commitment to the idea of the avant-garde to link quality and innovation; it was part of his common sense to attenuate that link as he matured. Greenberg, like many other observers at the time, regarded Morris and the artists congregated around the American Abstract Artists (the AAA) as derivative lightweights. ("Bravura technical performances and nothing more," wrote Robert Goldwater in 1947.) By the 1960s, however, Greenberg shelved the ...