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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Clement Greenberg (1909–94) and Harold Rosenberg (1906–78) were the two art critics most closely associated with abstract expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s. Neither began their careers as art critics, however. By the mid-1980s, Rosenberg had published literary essays and poems in left-wing magazines, and Greenberg's articles and reviews first appeared at the end of that decade. During the 1940s, Greenberg began to write art criticism, and Rosenberg's essays began to appear frequently in the 1950s. By that time, both had become part of the group known informally as the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish and children of immigrant parents.
Highly verbal, vocal, argumentative, and politically left of center, they often published in magazines such as Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent. Although both Greenberg and Rosenberg ultimately rejected the more dogmatic and authoritarian aspects of leftist politics, they nevertheless supported the idea that society must move forward, but not necessarily by political means. Greenberg thought that such momentum could be maintained by the cultural elite, and Rosenberg, influenced by surrealism's concerns for the creative process, believed that individuals who were independent minded and creative could do the same. Both encouraged artists to turn from the social concerns that engaged many during the 1930s to apolitical, self-searching themes that came to characterize the art of the 1940s. In effect, they, especially Rosenberg, lionized the artist as an heroic individual. In the words of one historian, both “worked to find a safe haven for radical progress within the realm of individualistic culture.” And both, among the most perspicacious critics of their time, discovered, encouraged, and/or supported artists who ultimately became major figures, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
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7. Many of these issues are considered in my Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.
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13. In his autobiography (A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982], 252)Google Scholar, Irving Howe mentioned the differences between private conversations and published writings. See also Rabinovich, Anson, “Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy,” October 108 (2004): 104Google Scholar.
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16. See, for example, Lipstadt, Deborah E., Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York: Free, 1986)Google Scholar.
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19. Greenberg, Clement, “A Martyr to Bohemia: Review of Out of This Century by Peggy Guggenheim” (1946), in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 2:97–98Google Scholar.
20. Greenberg, Clement, “The Jewish Dickens: Review of The World of Sholom Aleichem by Maurice Samuel” (1943), in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 1:155Google Scholar.
21. I want to stay with the Jewish issues here and not explore Greenberg's literary and intellectual sources, which have been considered elsewhere.
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23. Cooney, touches upon these issues in The Rise of the New York Intellectuals (263–64)Google Scholar. For a more thorough and enlightening discussion in which such popular midcentury authors as Erich Fromm and Karen Hornay are considered, see Schacht, Richard, Alienation (New York: Doubleday, 1970), ch. 4Google Scholar.
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29. Gilman, Sander, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 321Google Scholar.
30. Cooney, , Rise of the New York Intellectuals, 243Google Scholar.
31. O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 3:55–57Google Scholar. These issues were discussed in the pages of various Jewish magazines at that time. See, for example, Friedlander, Israel, “Can Judaism Survive in Free America?” Commentary 2 (07 1946): 73–80Google Scholar; and Cohen, Elliot E., “Jewish Culture in America,” Commentary 3 (04 1947): 412–20Google Scholar.
32. Greenberg, Clement, “Introduction to ‘The Great Wall of China’ by Franz Kafka” (1946), in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 2:99–104Google Scholar; Greenberg, , “The Jewishness of Franz Kafka: Some Source of His Particular Vision” (1955), in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 3:202–9Google Scholar; Greenberg, , “At the Building of the Great Wall of China,” in O'Brian, , Clement Greenberg, 4:48–52Google Scholar; and Greenberg, , “Kafka's Jewishness,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 266–73Google Scholar.
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34. Ibid., 3:206.
35. Greenberg, , “Kafka's Jewishness,” 273Google Scholar.
36. Storr, , “No Joy in Mudville,” 175Google Scholar.
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38. Ibid., 1:32, 34.
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40. Rosenberg, Harold, “Rediscovering Judaism” (1947), in Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 235Google Scholar.
41. Rosenberg, Harold, “Letter to a Jewish Theologian” (1947), in Discovering the Present, 256Google Scholar.
42. Rosenberg, Harold, “Does the Jew Exist? Sartre's Morality Play About Anti-Semitism,” Commentary 7 (01 1949), 18Google Scholar. The essay was revised as “Sartre's Jewish Morality Play” for Discovering the Present, 270–87Google Scholar.
43. Rosenberg, Harold, “Jewish Identity in a Free Society,” in Discovering the Present, 259–69Google Scholar.
44. Newman, Barnett, “The Sublime Is Now,” in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. O'Neill, John P. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 173Google Scholar. For a further consideration of a Rosenbergian view of Newman, see my “Newman's The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani, a Jewish Take,” in Art Criticism 19, no. 1 (2004): 55–56Google Scholar.
45. Rosenberg, Harold, “Is There a Jewish Art?” Commentary 42 (07 1966): 60Google Scholar. The essay was slightly revised for publication in Discovering the Present, 223–31Google Scholar.
46. Feingold, Henry L., “From Commandment to Persuasion: Probing the ‘Hard’ Secularism of American Jewry,” in National Variations in Jewish Identity: Implications for Jewish Education, ed. Cohen, Steven M. and Horencyzk, Gabriel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 167, 171Google Scholar.
