Clement Greenberg:
A Critic's Collection
Karen Wilkin & Bruce Guenther

Cloth | 2001 | $60.00 / £41.95
180 pp. | 9 7/8 x 12 | 220 color plates

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Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) is the most renowned American art critic of the twentieth century and the first to treat New York modern artists as an independent school. In the work of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and sculptor David Smith, Greenberg saw a vitality absent from the art of postwar Europe. His writings helped transform the bohemian colony huddled around Manhattan's grimy Eighth Street into the churning center of an international movement. Far less known is the fact that Greenberg was also a major collector; because of his insistence on anonymity when loaning pieces to museums, the scope of his private collection surprises many. Recently acquired by the Portland Art Museum, his incredible collection is now coming to the public in a multi-venue traveling exhibition. This extraordinary book illustrates, in color and for the first time, the collection's 155 works. Spanning five decades of American art, it features some of the twentieth century's finest artists.

Works by Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, and Adolph Gottlieb represent Abstract Expressionism. Paintings by Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, and others represent the Color Field movement, in which artists used liquid pure color on raw canvas. One highlight is Noland's first ''target'' painting--a 1958 masterpiece exploring the flatness of paint. The collection also includes excellent examples of the movement Greenberg dubbed Post-Painterly Abstraction, including pieces by Walter Darby Bannard and Larry Poons.

The works Greenberg collected reflect his ideas, passions, and personal associations. They reveal him as a reviewer and intellectual but also as a friend to the artists. Many of the more than two hundred color plates are accompanied by Greenberg's comments about the artists--painters and sculptors now being rediscovered by young contemporary artists exploring formalism, the nature of paint, and the evolution of modern art. The text includes discussions of Greenberg's significance to criticism, his famous studio visits, and the controversy attached to his work, as well as short biographies of each artist.

PARTIAL EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon
July 14, 2001-September 16, 2001

Review:

"An important publication, an important collector, and an important collection."--Choice

Table of Contents:

Director's Foreword by John E. Buchanan, Jr. 7
Dedication 9
Collector's Statement by Janice van Horne 11
In the Studio by Anthony Caro 13
Clement Greenberg: A Critical Eye by Karen Wilkin 15
The Clement Greenberg Collection 29
A Path to Portland by Bruce Guenther 131
Illustrated Checklist of the Collection 135
Artist Biographies by Hrag Vartanian 179

Subject Area:

• Art and Architecture

Published in association with the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Cloth: $60.00 ISBN13: 978-0-691-09049-8

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Cloth: £41.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-09049-8

Prices subject to change without notice

File created: 6/4/2009

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