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› Volume 15, 2010
 
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Volume 5, December 2004
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Modernism’s Last Post: The Critical Demise of
Clement Greenberg’s ‘Post Painterly Abstraction’ Exhibition in Los Angeles
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DAVID BRIAN HOWARD
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax
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Abstract
In the post-World War Two North American art world, no art critic
wielded greater hegemonic authority than Clement Greenberg. Greenberg’s
defense and promotion of Jackson Pollock and the other painters
associated with the modernist avant-garde movement known as the
Abstract Expressionists vaulted him to a position of critical authority
that no individual American critic has ever held before or since.
However, even in the 1950s, signs of challenge to Greenberg’s authority
were beginning to manifest themselves throughout the art world,
especially through the emergence of such aesthetically and socially
dissimilar movements as Pop Art that would culminate in the complete
rupture with Greenberg’s modernist aesthetic in the later 1960s,
especially with the rebellion of postmodernism against the perceived
formalist limitations of modernism. Yet narratives of the transition
from the moment of Greenberg’s domination to its replacement by
postmodernism generally partake in an oddly crude binarism in which a
demonized Greenberg is overthrown from his position around 1965, the
date of the republication of his notorious essay Modernist Painting,
and supplanted by a pluralistic, open, non-hegemonic postmodernism.
This paper examines a key exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg for
the Los Angeles County Museum in 1964, an exhibit which was intended to
travel triumphantly across America and to culminate in a grand opening
in New York City symbolizing the reassertion of Greenberg’s new concept
of painting after Abstract Expressionism and the reaffirmation of his
status as the chief arbiter of modern art taste. A more complex
historical analysis of this key exhibition and its organization helps
to destabilize the binary assertions of both modernism and its
postmodern detractors.
Keywords:
Post Painterly Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, Los Angeles Museum,
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, modernist avant-garde, modernism,
modernity |
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