From Publishers Weekly
Legendary modernist art critic Greenberg (Art & Culture, etc.) was known for his harsh opinions. Indeed, one characteristic anecdote tells of his condemning some work by the painter Morris Louis, whereupon Louis destroyed all of the reviled canvases in despair. Despite his undeniable role in advancing a generation of American abstract expressionists from Jackson Pollock to Frank Stella, Greenberg's destructive urges overwhelm this collection of letters, edited by his widow, Janice Van Horne. Addressed over 15 years to a gay former college roommate of Greenberg's from Syracuse University, these letters are as macho as Hemingway and often twice as full of themselves. In one 1939 letter about Auden's work, Greenberg has "to admit to myself that my latest poems are better than his, on a higher level" and that Wallace Stevens is "a numbskull with paltry ideas." (An appendix presents some of Greenberg's doggerel.) Page after page brims with the sort of sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic observations that were common in the era, and only the most patient readers will wade through them in order to reach vitriolic gems like "Curse the [Partisan Review editors Dwight and Janice] Macdonalds & the people like them who have no personal lives and fail to recognize them in others." The editing here ("to create a story of appropriate length and accessibility") leaves Greenberg's correspondent little more than the object of conjecture. Yet there is a sort of grim fascination in seeing the underside of a great critic's apparatus, and these letters do form a portrait of the critic as a bright and angry young man. (June) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Candid, breathless, arrogant, ambitious—here, in his own words, is Clement Greenberg, a young man of limitless intellectual appetite on his way to becoming the twentieth century's greatest art critic.

Clement Greenberg was, and remains, America's most perceptive, prescient, and influential art critic. More alive than any of his contemporaries to the genius of art in his time, it was Greenberg who, in the 1940s and '50s, charted and celebrated the rise of Abstract Expressionism. The authority of his aesthetic judgment, and the force and clarity of his arguments, went far to establish those artists whose work he championed—Pollock, de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, David Smith.

Before all that, however, he was a young man burning to become an intellectual, to make what he called "Important Discoveries" about art and life. His confidant during these early years was Harold Lazarus, a classmate at Syracuse University and a future professor of English. From 1928, when both were nineteen, until 1943, when they went their separate ways, the two exchanged honest, funny, deeply personal letters. Greenberg's side of the correspondence, here collected by his widow, Janice Van Horne, is the intellectual memoir Greenberg never wrote, the chronicle of a great tastemaker forming his own taste among the social, political, and cultural turbulence of the early twentieth century.

About the Author:Clement Greenberg (1904-1994) was a lifelong New Yorker. His works include Art and Culture and the four-volume Collected Essays and Criticism, 1939-1969.

FROM THE CRITICS

Helen Frankenthaler - Partisan Review