Art Chowder September | October 2016, Issue 5

T here may be no better example of a truly powerful art critic to more fully illustrate the divide between the inside and the outside of the art world than Clement Greenberg (1909-1994). He was the most prominent and influential champion of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and ‘50s, most notably the work of Jackson Pollock. In August 1949, Life magazine published a spread, provocatively entitled “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” The article opened by noting that it was “a formidably high-brow New York critic” who had made the suggestion that Pollock might well be just that. The critic was Greenberg. The article depicted the artist himself, along with some of his now famous drip canvases, in color. This piece introduced Pollock to a wide audience while also inviting controversy. According to an extract from a 2012 book on the artist by Evelyn Toynton, Life received an unprecedented flood of letters because of the story. Most of these writers were indignant. How could paintings made with “paint ﬂung, dripped, and sometimes spread with sticks across the canvas, . . . be producing anything more aesthetically valid than a child’s ﬁnger painting”? The letter writers are not the only ones to have found the new art incomprehensible. Notwithstanding public skepticism that this new kind of painting could really be “art,” Abstract Expressionism was critically acclaimed as the first truly American art form, New York would replace Paris as the art world’s new capitol, and this mode of art would dominate the art world in the middle of the 20th century. How did this come about? The history traces back to the birth of Modern Art itself. In the middle of the 19th century Paris was the leading art center of Europe and the Paris art world was dominated by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Founded in 1648 the Académie was a direct heir of the Renaissance tradition of classical representational painting and sculpture, and also made Paris the leading center for the training of artists, not only in France, but from abroad as well. The annual Salon held under the auspices of the Académie was the single most important exhibition venue for aspiring artists and one’s options were severely limited if one could not get in. The struggles of the French Impressionists to get their unconventional works into the Salon, and their eventual vindication, are well known. Chardin’s still lifes and interior scenes with figures were regularly exhibited at the Paris Salon. His work was praised by Denis Diderot, who wrote regular critiques of the Salons. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) Still Life with Attributes of the Art 1766 Hermitage Museum Photo: Wikimedia commons The reaction of viewers to the drip canvases in the Life magazine article on Pollock echoes the sentiment expressed some 70 years earlier by acclaimed English writer on art and powerful critic John Ruskin when he saw James A. Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket at James A. McNiel Whistler Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket the Grosvenor Galc. 1875 Detroit Institute of Arts lery, London in 1877. Photo: Wikimedia commons His reaction led him to famously write a letter stating, “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler sued for libel. The jury ruled in his favor but awarded a mere farthing as damages. A British Guinea amounted to one pound plus one shilling. A farthing was smallest monetary unit, amounting to 1/960th of a pound. September|October 2016 39

Art Chowder September | October 2016, Issue 5 | Page 39