Clement Greenberg: A Life

Drawing on exclusive interviews with Clement Greenberg before his death, this is the first comprehensive biography of Americas greatest, and most controversial, critic. <P>Clement Greenberg was born in the Bronx in 1909, the child of Jewish immigrants from Polish Lithuania. He attended Syracuse University, spent three years sleeping late, reading, and frequenting museums, and then toured the country as a traveling salesman for a necktie business owned by his father. By 1935 he was back in New York working at a routine civil service job. One could hardly have predicted that from these inauspicious beginnings would emerge one of the centurys premier cultural critics. <P>In 1939 he wrote Avant-Garde and Kitsch, the landmark essay that catapulted him from anonymity to the center of a stellar group of intellectuals known as the Partisan Review crowd-- Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Meyer Schapiro, and Lionel Trilling, among others. The subject of Greenbergs essay was modem society examined through popular culture and painterly abstraction. It was his uncanny response to the form abstraction was going to take in advanced American painting t

Author: Florence Rubenfeld

Language: English

Binding: Hardcover

Pages: 336

Publisher: Scribner

Publication Date: 1998-04-07