A process-relational sociology of art critics: Clement Greenberg’s Modernist theory and practice

Abstract

A central theme of this article is the developing tension between art specialists and non-specialists as a function of complex, differentiated figurations. Bourdieu’s sociology of symbolic revolutions is allied to Elias’s model of the relative autonomy of the artistic figurations within lengthening relations of interdependencies and shifting cognitive-emotional tension balances of feeling and reasoning and spontaneity and self-restraint. Within the sociology of art, the field positionings, power, interdependencies, language and habitus of art critics remain a relatively underdeveloped area of enquiry. Art critics function as ‘professional explicators’ in Bourdieu’s terms or ‘specialists in verbalisation’ in Elias’s to communicate standard-setting models of value and taste of specialists to non-specialists. Clement Greenberg emerged as a socially mobile oblate from a position of artworld outsider to hegemonic dominance as the leading notable of Modernist art criticism. The article examines the social conditions of possibility for Greenberg’s standard-setting codes as they came to be established and sustained by particular figurations of people (a self-conscious avant-garde) at particular times (late 1930s–1970s) and places (New York).

Introduction

Despite, or because of, a long-running ritualistic critique and counter-critique Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture continues to exercise hegemonic authority over the field. In part this may be a consequence of Bourdieu’s inheritance being taken as constitutive of the field of cultural sociology itself (Thorpe & Inglis, 2022). It is also a reflection of the fact that Bourdieu’s conceptual tools and classic studies not only profit from reputational value but remain a fecund resource for substantive studies of the cultural field. Bourdieu’s model-setting defence of the relative autonomy of sociology continues to cast a long shadow in the face of more recent negative appraisals. Most influentially, Nathalie Heinich’s (2022) sociology of art expressly disavows Bourdieu’s focus on domination and misrecognition as an updated version of a Marxist critique that needs to be abandoned for a pragmatic and axiologically neutral sociology of art informed by the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias. As Shapiro and Heinich (2012) argue, relational sociology attends to what they call, following Elias, the ‘artification process’ without endorsing or repudiating valuations about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art, aesthetics or taste. However, as I will argue, construing Bourdieu and Elias as sociological antipodes neglects the extent to which they shared a common project of process-relational sociology, albeit one approached in distinctive ways. They attempted to formulate conceptual models that aimed to overcome a sociology seduced by the prestige value of art, reproducing value hierarchies rather than elaborating specific institutional processes of valorisation.

Bourdieu’s debt to the (now unfashionable) Marxist inheritance, predictably subject to claim and counter-claim (Paolucci, 2022), has been affirmed most forcefully by Bridget Fowler. Never an epigone, Fowler (1997, 2011) is one of the foremost authorities on Bourdieu’s sociology of culture, particularly the potential of Bourdieu’s logic of practice for a socio-analysis of the mechanisms of cultural legitimation, the sociogenesis of field autonomy in conditions of artistic anomie, and the heretical transformations of symbolic revolutions that dispel current doxa (Fowler, 2020). Nonetheless, Fowler was moved to challenge Bourdieu’s account on several fronts. Her case study of Manet and the Impressionists took issue with Bourdieu’s one-sided emphasis on revolutionary formal innovations and neglect of the contemporary subject matter of their paintings, not least urban modernity as sites of avant-garde representation. In his work of the 1970s and 1980s Bourdieu adopted a rather ahistorical and formalist standpoint at a time when the conditions of the art field were undergoing a symbolic transformation. Moreover, while Fowler extols Bourdieu’s elucidation of a restricted field of artistic competence and an expanded field of popular art, she objects to the rigid conventional divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art that he cleaved to. Fowler upbraids Bourdieu for neglecting the homology between artistic anomie and the economic anomie of the new consumerist leisure opportunities of nineteenth-century Paris.

This article takes up Fowler’s critical appraisal of Bourdieu by engaging with the process sociology of Elias, as Fowler (2022) herself has done. It examines the symbolic revolution that took place in the 1940s and 1950s when New York replaced Paris as the epicentre of the Western art field. Key to this process was the role of art critics as cultural intermediaries in the classification struggles of the mid-century crisis over what constituted serious advanced art. Within the sociology of art, the field positionings, power, interdependencies, language and habitus of art critics are underdeveloped areas of enquiry (Wohl, 2022). No one has come to personify the intensely competitive field of post-war US culture more than the art critic Clement Greenberg (1909–1994). Greenberg’s reputation as the domineering, pugnacious ‘art czar’ (Marquis, 2006) of Modernism has been perpetuated by biographers, scholars and critics since the eclipse in the 1960s of his self-referential model of artistic autonomy. What Caroline Jones (2005) calls, in the manner of Foucault, ‘the Greenberg effect’ produced ‘the critic-function’ of naming, classifying and circulating a defining discourse that indelibly stamped the history of Modernism and its aftermath. Yet, in contrast to the stereotype of Greenberg as the creator of an unrepentant ‘formalism’ his writings nonetheless secreted a proto-historical sociology of the avant-garde.

Greenberg’s standard-setting codes and conventions came to be established and sustained by the social conditions of possibility of particular figurations of people (a self-conscious, largely male-dominated avant-garde) at particular times (late 1930s–1970s) and places (New York). In this regard the process sociology of Elias attends to long-term changes in the models of standard-setting conventions for judging the relative merits and purpose of art. For Elias (2018, p. 48), like Bourdieu, the Modernist art establishment functioned as ‘a kind of internal public opinion, a competitive estimate of each other’s achievements and values, an internal status order of their production and performances’. Intermediate professionals in the extensive division of labour of the artification process such as art historians, critics, commentators, promoters, curators and journalists are compelled to demonstrate a specific competence (Becker, 1982). What Elias (2018, pp. 52–57) called ‘specialists in verbalisation’ articulate and circulate new models of taste in an attempt to bridge the gap between an esoteric art establishment and the aesthetic uncertainties, hostility or indifference of non-specialist outsiders. For some this process culminated with the high Modernism of Greenberg as the last model-setting art critic before contemporary art became subject to centrifugal movements (Elkins, 2003).

A process-relational sociology of art draws on Bourdieu’s socio-analysis of the function of critics and Elias’s sociology of interdependent artistic figurations within the shifting feeling–reasoning balances of the wider civilising process. Process-relational sociology is radically processual and radically relational (Dunning & Hughes, 2013). As Fowler (2022, p. 62) notes, process-relational sociology is ‘profoundly anti-substantialist’: it conceives ‘the real as relational’, as Bourdieu put it, of interdependent people in media res; of unplanned but purposeful figurations of people oriented to changes in the gradient of asymmetrical power balances, as Elias argued. Process-relational sociology refuses to reduce processes to static entities or reified dichotomies such as individual/society or structure/agency, or to naturalise present-centred perspectives as the self-images of an age that has erased the antecedent conditions of its own possibility. Elias framed artistic resonance in terms of a continuum of feeling–reasoning tension balances, a controlled decontrolling of self-regulation, of interdependent people in the plural, supplanting fixed binaries of fact–value, subject–object or high–low that animate solipsism not only in art history and criticism but that also pervade discourse more generally, including that of sociology (Law, 2023).

From the vantage point of process-relational sociology Greenberg’s dominant position in the post-war consecration of the New York avant-garde was dependent on the formation of an outsider habitus and the accumulation of social, intellectual and cultural capital in a small but self-perpetuating intellectual figuration that saw itself as isolated from an alienated society (Greenberg, 1948b, p. 193). From a position of marginality, Greenberg was able to develop a specific competence for communicating specialised knowledge of art, culture and politics. Greenberg’s writings, interviews and lectures are examined here as ‘process-produced data’ contemporaneous with the symbolic transposition effected by the New York artworld (Baur & Ernst, 2011). As a publicly engaged intellectual Greenberg felt compelled to provide reflexive justifications, explanations and self-representations intelligible to artists, critics, curators, academics and other audiences in the restricted avant-garde field, and, increasingly, to wider circles of readers in the expanded cultural field seeking comprehensible criteria to discern the value of ‘difficult’ art in the absence of a social, moral and aesthetic consensus.

A process-relational sociology of art critics

Bourdieu

Symbolic revolutions are neither single cataclysmic breaks with previous orders of representation nor the inevitable unfolding of a continuous teleology. Neither can they be reduced to the personal dispositions of a single figure like Flaubert or Manet as the producers of a transformed world of meaning (Bourdieu, 1996, 2017). For symbolic ruptures to successfully transform a social space many mutually reinforcing positions must be taken and held for the reordered perceptual and evaluative dispositions to be assimilated as the nomos of a shared social universe. Bourdieu (2017) identified the morphological preconditions for Manet’s symbolic break in the ‘numerical effect’ of an over-production of producers by the competitive logic of the academic institution. Surplus producers denied consecration by the academy found refuge as outsiders in a bohemian milieu that was able to successfully institutionalise itself as a relatively autonomous field of competition and experimentation, eroding the legitimacy of the academic hierarchy: ‘the monotheism of the central nomothete gives way to a plurality of competing cults with multiple uncertain gods’ (Bourdieu, 2017, p. 253). From now on, art was to serve no authority or social function beyond itself, with the artist recast as a suffering prophet in revolt against the bourgeois universe, rejecting its profane rewards for ‘an economic world reversed’ of the specific profits of a ‘veritable interest in disinterestedness’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 12). As a highly accomplished player in a game where the rules were in the process of being rewritten, Manet’s technical competence, cleft habitus and functional interdependencies with specific figurations in Paris’s salons, cafes and studios had a cumulative effect on the continuous and collective process of ambiguously but effectively occupying changeable positions at both the dominated and dominant poles of the avant-garde field as an outsider craving establishment recognition.

As he had done for the literary field, Bourdieu (1996, 2017, p. 80) aimed to plot the positions of journalists, caricaturists, literary writers and art specialists as art critics across a continuum of restricted and expanded autonomy from political and academic domination, on one side, and, on the other side, a continuum of restricted and expanded autonomy from the bourgeois public. Art critics function as ‘professional explicators’ who render explicit what is experienced practically as implicit and assume the authority to put into words words that their readers would not themselves have used (Bourdieu, 2023, pp. 177–182, 198–202). The alchemy performed by critics requires ‘a considerable undertaking to help people, without forcing them, to find the means to say precisely what they are unable to say because they don’t have the words to say it with, and the words that we supply them with are often words taken from outside their experience’ (p. 80). Professional explicators not only mediate the relationship between the restricted art field and the social space as a whole; in speaking directly about artefacts and artists they also, and even primarily, speak to and about the capital holdings and competitive positions of rival explicators (pp. 188–189).

Art critics differentiated themselves only gradually from a fluid and ill-defined journalistic field, dominated by ‘aesthetic populism’, heteronomy and pretentious literary witticisms that required little specialist knowledge of art history or artistic practices. Critics at the dominant pole of the literary field courted establishment favour as communicative intermediaries between the bourgeois public and academic authorities and, with few exceptions, slavishly reproduced the academic code as an indisputable model of value (Bourdieu, 2017, p. 422). Journalistic critics, temporally dominant but intellectually dominated, felt the most threatened by Manet’s symbolic revolution and tended to produce the most malicious and resentful criticism (pp. 283–284). On the other hand, critics who were dominated temporally but dominant culturally, notably Zola, Huysmans and Mallarme, formed a self-consciously intellectual avant-garde. As professional explicators critics changed position as the field developed and social interactions permitted (Bourdieu, 2017, p. 429). Erudite political conservatives with a knowledge of history could exert a more pronounced legitimation effect than marginalised opponents of the establishment (p. 285). Artists needed the self-referential model-setting code of art critics as protective armour from the heteronomous, externally imposed criteria of the conservative academy and the public (p. 412). Sympathetic critics inverted the orthodox lexicon of art criticism to exalt ‘originality’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘personality’ and ‘emotion’ and, in the process, circulated their own personal tastes and sensibilities (Bourdieu, 1996, pp. 135–137). Bourdieu suggests that the double-bind relationship of artist and critic came apart in the 1880s with Redon’s struggle against his critics, especially Huysmans, and that the ‘structural inferiority’ of the artist vis-a-vis critics was ended decisively when Duchamp’s ‘veritable sociological experiments’ of the 1910s nominated found objects, (in)famously placing a mass produced urinal in a museum, as artistic ‘readymades’, suspending the categories of perception active in the field (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 111). On the contrary, an unequal dependency relationship of artists on favourably disposed art critics survived under the critical tutelage of Greenberg, not to mention the dependency relations of contemporary artists on the promotional economy of neoliberal cultural consumption (Stallabrass, 2004).

Bourdieu praised Greenberg as the architect of ‘pure formalist theory’ in post-war America, as distinct from the nineteenth-century French tradition of formalist critique, and endorsed his judgement that Manet’s work is defined by a self-referential quest for flatness on the two-dimensional plane of the canvas as ‘the truth of painting’ (Bourdieu, 2017, p. 332). Bourdieu took as paradigmatic Greenberg’s 1960 essay ‘Modernist Paining’, where, beginning with Manet, Greenberg rehearsed painting’s engagement with the literal order of the medium as a flat surface in the formal terms of an inner, self-critical aesthetic imperative derived from Kant. While Bourdieu (2017, pp. 95–97) agrees ‘absolutely’ with Greenberg’s ‘admirable’ essay on the Modernist revolution in painting, he recoiled from the strict formalism ‘imputed to an artist, and to himself as a critic of genius able to reveal the intentions of an artistic genius’ as completely devoid of any orientation on the social conditions of possibility, above all the surplus production of artists. Bourdieu (p. 87) characteristically reformulates the avant-garde universe beyond the reductive formalist model attributed to Greenberg as ‘a social field of competition calling works and affect, etc. into question, and which produces a process of self-criticism tending to purge each art form of everything that it has in common with the other arts’. Undetected by Bourdieu is the extent to which Greenberg and other critics routinely mobilised reifying rhetoric that personifies the medium itself as engaging in ‘self-criticism’ which the art critic merely verbalises (Harris, 2005). Bourdieu (2017, p. 95) also neglects to account for Greenberg’s earlier writings, which attempted to specify the avant-garde as a socio-historical process. Neither was Bourdieu concerned to undertake a socio-analysis of the conditions of possibility – habitus, field and capital composition – that made Greenberg intelligible as ‘a critic of genius’ and valorised his aesthetic ‘model’ in the first place.

Elias

Compared to Bourdieu, Norbert Elias’s contribution to the sociology of art is fragmentary and underdeveloped (Law, 2023). Yet, for more than 60 years Elias reflected on the specific function of art across a wide range of contexts from ‘primitive art’, to aristocratic Romanticism and bourgeois Modernism. More so than Bourdieu, Elias accounted for long-terms shifts in visual art as a symbol of the transition from the ‘craftsmen’s art’ of a courtly aesthetic to the ‘artists’ art’ of bourgeois Modernism. This took the form of increasing functional differentiation and specialisation issuing in the gradual emancipation of painting from the normative codes of cohesive ruling classes ranging from: the court aesthetic, ‘realistic’ perspectival art, nostalgic romanticism, through to commodity kitsch and specialised Modernism of highly differentiated but relatively unexciting work-oriented societies. Leisure time in work-dominated societies permits chances for spontaneity, excitement and pleasure through sport, entertainment, art and culture in the form of a temporary and compartmentalised ‘controlled de-controlling of restraints on emotions’ (Elias & Dunning, 2008, p. 77).

Changes in the production and perception of art are inextricably bound up with longer-term shifts in the interdependencies between artists and publics (Elias, 2010, pp. 90–96). In the case of ‘craftsmen’s art’, art’s main function was to symbolise the coherence and unity of ruling social groups. By contrast, Manet, Cezanne and Picasso were the social equals and cultural superiors even of other specialists like connoisseurs, collectors and critics. A small, inward-facing artistic milieu proved largely indifferent to the perceived unintelligibility of their work by an anonymous public, allowing modern artists to extravagantly promote the formal properties of art (Elias, 1935, p. 88). Elias highlights the enlarged capacity for social distancing, detachment and reflexivity furnished by art. As the ideological religious-moral function of painting waned a greater sense of detachment from non-painterly concerns came to be shared by artists and public alike. An increasingly self-regulating habitus enables viewers to remove themselves from the immediate subject matter of painting and to comprehend in a more detached manner its formal aesthetic qualities (Elias, 2007, p. 45).

Art must, at some level, resonate with the experiences of wider groups. Specialised categories of aesthetic resonance need to be situated within the socially learned and approved normative codes of specific figurations. Art’s resonance may arouse, disturb and transform the self-steering demands of conscience in the direction of controlled excitement (Elias, 2018, p. 64). Continual ‘spontaneous’ artistic innovation by a specialised, hermetic avant-garde ran ahead of the non-specialist tastes of the viewing public. Intermediate professionals such as art critics, art historians, promoters and journalists function as ‘specialists in verbalisation’ to articulate and circulate new models of taste. While competitive figurations of avant-garde specialists formulate standards of evaluative criteria non-specialists tend to fall back on a consumer ideology of personalised individual feelings:

Whether it is stated explicitly or not, the sincere conviction represented by this ideology is that there are no intrinsic criteria for determining the relative merits of productions for the leisure enjoyment of people other than their personal feelings. (Elias, 2018, p. 53)

Appeal to less personalised formal criteria or historical conventions for evaluating the relative merits of artefacts known as ‘artworks’ is likely to be suspected by non-experts as merely the rationalisations of the personal preferences of experts.

Such is the magnitude of functional differentiation that specialists in verbalisation are unable to bridge the gap as intermediaries to the vast population of non-specialists. The divide between specialists and non-specialists fostered ambiguity and apprehension about taste and value in art, exacerbated by accelerating cycles of artistic innovation as contemporary art pursued sensory and cognitive possibilities not encountered before. Before it became assimilated into the Western social canon much modern art aroused strong, often unpleasant and hostile feelings involving a clash between what Elias (2018, pp. 73–74) called ‘the feeling–reasoning balance’ of producers and consumers. As artists’ artists Manet and Picasso restructured the ‘feeling–reasoning balance’ in ways that did not conform to either traditional ideas of ‘aesthetic’ beauty or contemporary forms of popular taste (p. 67). Just as Bourdieu (2017) had emphasised extensive knowledge of the history of Western art as among the conditions of possibility for Manet’s symbolic revolution, Elias (2010, p. 170) argued similarly in his sociology of Mozart’s ‘genius’ that artistic spontaneity has an increased chance of resonating with other people in compelling ways ‘through fusion with the canon, while at the same time energising and individualising the canon or the conscience’. Yet it was precisely the standard-setting models of the Western artistic canon that appeared to be under threat by avant-garde specialisation. As Adorno (2023, pp. 2–3) noted of the ‘conservative-restorative’ function of cultural models, ‘the question of aesthetic norms and models arises when permission and prohibition are no longer relatively uncontested’. Until the nineteenth century visual art resonated with the model-setting demands of patrons: clergy, princes, courts and nobles. Deprived of common criteria about the relative merits of leisure performances and productions, avant-garde painting resonated negatively with wider publics. Even experienced art critics began to find it difficult to judge with much confidence aesthetic success or failure as modern art was placed under suspicion as the emperor’s new clothes, special pleading or a cultural ruse visited on a guileless public. Moreover, like Bourdieu, Elias generally accepts that the intrinsic value of ‘great’ modern art can be and has been definitively established by figurations of specialists (Elias, 2010, p. 92).

From outsider to establishment: Greenberg and the avant-garde figuration

My concern here is with the social conditions of possibility that enabled Greenberg to legislate for almost three decades on what counts as quality for art that is no longer subject to an external standard-setting authority. Between the 1940s and the 1960s Greenberg defined the parameters of Modernism in terms of the long-term processes of Western art’s distinctive problems and possibilities inhering in the specific properties of the medium itself. In the 1960s it was Greenberg’s account of modern art that determined the point of departure for the critique and dissent of a new generation of art specialists. Here the relational sociology of Bourdieu and Elias provide a critical means of avoiding the double temptation of either denouncing or celebrating Greenberg’s Modernism, even if both sociologists share some of the art critic’s (qualified) assumptions about ‘formalism’ as the key to comprehending modern art. Both Bourdieu and Elias alert us to the specific competence of the art critic engaged in dynamic field struggles or tension-filled figurational processes. Greenberg explicated what Elias (2007) described as the continuum of affect–cognition balances: feeling–reasoning, involvement–detachment, spontaneity–conscience. He shared a commitment to the continuities and discontinuities of modern art as deeply historical, albeit conceived as a unilinear teleological process that, despite Greenberg’s disclaimers, placed an increasingly emphatic accent on the specifics of the medium as a vehicle for the feelings of the critic as ideal viewer over knowledge of socio-historical processes.

Specific forms of symbolic and social capital were required for the accumulation of profits in the New York avant-garde. As summarised by Diana Crane (1987, p. 41), the New York art field was divided by the forms and volume of cultural capital that different art movements accumulated from unequally positioned critics, collectors and museums:

Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism drew their support from academic critics and curators of New York museums who were committed to the modernist aesthetic tradition, while Pop, Photorealism, and Neo-Expressionism drew theirs from dealers and investor-collectors. The Figurative and Pattern painters appeared to lack a major constituency in the New York art world; their supporters were to be found in regional museums and corporate collections.

In a later interview Greenberg (1969b) gave what he called a ‘sociological’ explanation for the emergence of the New York avant-garde as a small, intense and interdependent figuration competitively raising the level of ambition and knowledge about European art through local gossip networks. Not quite the stereotypical Cold War cultural propagandist, Greenberg (1969b, p. 304) retained something of his Marxist past to explain Paris’s displacement by New York in terms of Trotsky’s (1977, pp. 27–28) model of uneven and combined development where traditional social relations are destabilised by the leading edge of socio-technical development, issuing in potentially explosive hybrids of the archaic and the modern. Greenberg would have been familiar with ‘the accelerated mutation’ in art made possible by ‘the law of combined development’ from the pages of Partisan Review in the late 1930s, which claimed the radical subversive sensibility of Dostoevsky, despite his ideological declarations, for anti-Stalinist cultural politics (Rahv, 1938, p. 35; cf. Davidson, 2019). The flight of Jewish and radical artists, scientists and intellectuals from fascism transplanted the cosmopolitan figuration of Paris, ‘the cultural International’ as Rosenberg (1940) called it, to New York where the avant-grade, overwhelmingly immigrants and children of immigrants, already looked to Paris for models and where leading artworks were made available by wealthy New York art dealers and collectors (Greenberg, 1987, pp. 156–157).

Adopting Bourdieu’s field theory, Grenfell and Hardy (2007, p. 136) summarised the forms of capital, habitus formation and field conditions that made possible the critical success of Abstract Expressionist painting, interdependent with Greenberg’s criticism: ‘the strongest capital constituents were paralleled by art education, ideally at the Art Students League in New York or Black Mountain College (educational capital), work exhibited at MOMA or the Art of the Century Gallery (consecrated artistic capital), and living and working in New York (social and cultural capital)’. As an outsider Greenberg lacked the main forms of symbolic capital for entry to the avant-garde field. He had little formal art school education, leaving the Art Students League as a 16-year-old after three months, before immersing himself in European history, literature and languages at Syracuse University, and only later attended the lectures on the formal qualities of Cubism of émigré artist Hans Hofmann, who, along with the charismatic Russian émigré John Graham’s (1937) System and Dialectics of Art, formed the hinge between European Modernism and the outsider figuration of Greenwich Village artists and intellectuals (Ashton, 1972, pp. 58–71). Greenberg’s father was a relatively prosperous dry goods merchant and metal manufacturer who self-identified as an assimilated Jewish socialist. Much to his father’s frustration, however, Greenberg had little interest in a career in business and found employment only intermittently after graduating in 1930, eventually settling on customs inspector at the Port of New York (Greenberg, 1955). For Caroline Jones (2005, p. 22) Greenberg’s occupational function in the bureaucratic field of power was homologous with the function of the aspiring art critic:

Approving which items were dutiable as commodities and which should pass freely as gifts or art, what would enter the American context and what would be screened, he felt both the grinding boredom of the bureaucrat, and the incremental power that could be wielded by an inspector of our customs.

As he became more assured, secure and authoritative in his judgements, Greenberg’s detached formalism, rationalism and empiricism appeared to embody the bureaucratic habitus of mid-century capitalism. In terms similar to that of Elias, Greenberg (1953, p. 145) formulated the problem of the relationship between work and leisure as one of industrial efficiency: ‘present standards of efficiency require one to key oneself to a higher pitch of nervous and mental effort, if only for the sake of self-control and self-denial required by any sustained activity directed solely towards an end outside itself’. On the basis of an astringent means-end rationalisation Greenberg (pp. 148–149) rejected responses to art as leisurely ‘hobby’, as proposed by Herbert Read, or ‘play’, as proposed by Johan Huizinga, as trivialisations of the cultural crisis that refused to undertake the necessary asceticism of serious art and ‘subject its means to the rule of efficiency’. In this context leisure represents a compensatory release, a distracted flight from tedium and self-control into respite and recuperation, a condition hardly propitious for the demanding requirements of ‘difficult’ specialised art. Greenberg (1944, p. 201) understood that ‘an age of specialization and of limited spiritual objectives sets in’ when artistic resonance is self-consciously obscured by the fragmentation, distortions and opacity of form and lamented that the combined developments of large-scale technological ‘mutation’ in the second half of the century would generate sharp contradictions ‘between culture as such and the well-being of society at large’ (Greenberg, 1953, pp. 142–143). On the other hand, social mobility, rising educational levels and material security might alleviate the divisions between elitist and populist cultures and between work and leisure to produce a more democratic culture even if mass access to ‘craft secrets’ was not at this point on the horizon. Yet so long as the rule of efficiency dominates work relations, where ‘no one is ever efficient enough’, and work, leisure and art remain divided into separate specialisms the scope remains limited for realising the possibilities for human freedom in ‘genuine culture’ (p. 147).

Before his personal conversion to inspector of artworks Greenberg (1961b, p. 230) acknowledged that a severe deficit of social and cultural capital positioned him as ‘an outsider’ in relation to the Greenwich Village artworld and later confessed that he ‘did not know about everything that was going on, and much of what I did know about I could not fully understand’. Yet within the dense morphological conditions of the New York avant-garde and radical politics Greenberg began to accumulate forms of social capital needed to gain entry. Greenberg formed an important friendship with another of Hofmann’s students, the painter Lee Krasner, one of a number of powerful, if routinely neglected, female artists within the macho New York avant-garde (Gabriel, 2018). It was Krasner who introduced ‘Clem’ to Jackson Pollock, soon to be famously consecrated by Greenberg as America’s greatest painter. He met Harold Rosenberg, his later art critic rival, and Lionel Abel, the dramatist and critic, at one of Greenberg’s cousin’s Sunday afternoon house gatherings (Marquis, 2006, p. 36; Rubenfeld, 1997, p. 44). Rosenberg introduced Greenberg to the inner circle of the radical avant-garde periodical Partisan Review. Here Greenberg would elaborate his evolving conceptions of art and culture under the critical (and intimidating) inspection of the editorial group. Appealing to creative values, intellectual detachment, individual conscience and integrity felt to be under assault from all sides, Partisan Review functioned as a cohesive unit for New York intellectuals disenchanted by the cultural politics of Stalinism, fascism and Western capitalism (Gilbert, 1992; Wald, 1987; Wilford, 1995). Partisan Review attempted to fuse the revolutionary politics of Leon Trotsky with the cultural elitism of T. S. Eliot. As Greenberg (1961b, p. 230) later (in)famously noted of the symbolic revolution of the New York avant-garde: ‘some day it will have to be told how “anti-Stalinism”, which started out as more or less “Trotskyism”, turned into art for art’s sake and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come’.

Partisan Review was an avowedly ‘non-commercial’ quarterly cultural and political journal written by specialists for a self-styled ‘advanced’ audience. Intellectual distancing was demanded from revolutionary politics or, at most, what Elias (2007, pp. 169–170) called ‘secondary involvement’ by taking ‘a detour via detachment’. According to one of its founding editors, William Phillips (2017, p. 144), Partisan Review was ‘content with publishing things that may not be popular, and to rely on a smaller, devoted audience of writers, teachers and sophisticated professionals who identify with the aims of the magazine’. Partisan’s readership was estimated at 3500 subscribers in 1941, rising to a peak post-war circulation of 14,000 (Macdonald, 1941). Although the actual readership was estimated, rather optimistically, at ten times the number of subscribers, a readership survey in 1941 revealed that very few were in working-class occupations and were overwhelmingly young intellectuals of an emerging professional managerial class concentrated in New York (Macdonald, 1941, pp. 344–345). A figuration of readers seeking models of good taste increased in the post-war years with upward social mobility into the educated middle class. In his explicitly Marxist-influenced sociological critique of T. S. Eliot’s irreal fear-images of cultural decline, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’, Greenberg (1953, p. 135) could have been describing his own cleft habitus and lack of inherited cultural capital: ‘higher culture comes to [the new middle class] from the outside, in adolescence at most, and has to be acquired by conscious effort, therefore tends to remain somewhat external and artificial’.

Retreating from the highly competitive field of literary criticism that he once coveted Greenberg’s cultural essays and socio-historical analysis of painting enabled him to successfully occupy the more dominated and the far less prestigious assignment of ‘art critic’ (Marquis, 2006, pp. 60–66). At the apex of the hierarchy of specific competence Greenberg (1972, p. 52) dissociated himself from both the security of established cultural and educational institutions and less specialised, heteronomous commentary about art in the form of journalism and ‘mere’ reviewers. After launching his apparently precarious art critic trajectory in 1939 with the small oppositional radicals at Partisan Review he contributed to and edited a range of influential publications in the 1940s and 1950s. Greenberg wrote for the ‘highbrow’ liberal-left magazines Horizon based in London and New Republic in New York, becoming art critic at the liberal Nation in the 1940s, which exposed him to a slightly larger audience of readers seeking knowledge about contemporary politics and culture. He became managing editor of Contemporary Jewish Record, which merged with Commentary in 1945 on the road to becoming a conservative house journal (from which Greenberg was fired in 1957). Living in the shadow of the concentration camps and nuclear atrocity, Commentary served a pedagogical function for a largely middle-class Jewish readership alienated from the more severe intellectual rigour of Partisan Review. He also contributed to mainstream publications like the New York Times Magazine and contributed in 1948 to a roundtable on Modernism organised by the mass circulation magazine Life, who would also promote Jackson Pollock the following year.

Such coverage placed Greenberg (and Pollock), known only to small circles of New York cultural specialists, before a national and international audience of millions of non-specialist readers, typically disparaged by the avant-garde for their ‘middlebrow’ taste. However, Life’s coverage of avant-garde art was generally more sympathetic and the artists more accommodating than the myth of bohemian outsiders in revolt against ‘middlebrow culture’ allows (Collins, 1991). Greenberg’s cultural and social capital stock was enhanced beyond New York by invitations to speak at numerous international engagements and to give lectures at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, the influential avant-garde educational institution (Rubenfeld, 1997, p. 146). While this breadth of intense activity helped communicate Greenberg’s theory and codes of perception as a means of orientation for wider groups of non-specialists, it nevertheless remained difficult for even determined readers to reconstruct the underlying coherence of his model until the publication of selected (and revised) essays as Art and Culture in 1961. As the supportive critic Michael Fried (1998, p. 3) recalled, Greenberg’s ‘verbally austere and intellectually rigorous yet passionately engaged criticism’ was limited to a small heretical universe and only later codified into the dominant orthodoxy.

Art critics engaged each other in classification struggles for the power of nomination to group the new art as a distinct movement under convenient labels, some referring to national practices of painting (‘American Action Painting’, 1952, Harold Rosenberg) or optical style (most famously ‘Abstract Expressionism’ 1946, attributed to the critic Robert Coates). Greenberg oscillated between a nationalist denominator (‘American-type painting’, 1955) and a designation focused on more formal properties (‘Painterly Abstraction’, ‘Color Field’, 1964) and bemoaned the deluge of new labels applied to what he derogatively called the ‘novelty art’ of the new art movements that defied his codification schema (Greenberg, 1969a, p. 294). And while ‘art-labelling used to be the affair of journalists’, Greenberg fumed that some artists even formulated their own labels in disregard of the lines of demarcation of the artification process. Uneven power balances in artist–critic interdependencies persisted, contra Bourdieu, with some artists feeling over-dependent on Greenberg’s vast accumulation of symbolic capital to promote work that he personally approved, even intervening in the immediate process of artistic production. Greenberg had a powerful presence in artistic figurations as friend, adviser and advocate of artists like Pollock, Barnett Newman, Morris Louis and Jules Olitski, shaping their practice by proffering critical advice on formal problems and organising exhibitions of their work, as well as publishing reviews of their work, notoriously intervening to materially alter sculptures by the artist David Smith after his death (Marquis, 2006, pp. 226–229; Rubinfeld, 1997, pp. 20–24). Moreover, Greenberg was far from immune from the wider masculine domination of American society and effectively excommunicated women painters like Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler from the value hierarchy of Modernism (Gabriel, 2018; Pollock, 1996).

Beginning as a radical refusal of the officially consecrated art of the 1930s, cultural detachment later corresponded, if uneasily, to the conservative post-war order in America. Contact with European Modernism helped inoculate Greenberg, already a Europhile by the 1930s, against the cultural nationalism of Popular Front social realism and the figurative painting of the American regionalists and predisposed him to the intellectual and aesthetic possibilities of abstract art. By the 1950s, however, the symbolic revolution of the New York avant-garde, its critics and museums were coopted by the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom as propaganda abroad for America’s superior liberal values against its totalitarian enemies, despite ferocious ideological and cultural reaction against contemporary art back home (Guilbaut, 1983; Saunders, 1999). ‘Modernist Painting’ was originally delivered as an international radio broadcast for Voice of America in which the separation of art and politics resonated at home with the ideological self-images of liberal America, a realpolitik of symbolic domination unacknowledged by Bourdieu’s (2017) qualified approval of Greenberg’s essay (Frascina, 2003). By the mid-1950s Greenberg broadly endorsed the imbrication of the field of art with the field of power of American cultural nationalism and hailed the inner logic of Modernism for the ‘vitality’ of Western urban culture in contrast to non-Western decline, even if he denied that he had ‘any chauvinist feeling whatsoever’ (1969b, p. 305; 1994, pp. 161–164). His symbolic authority began to be challenged by a professional dissident class of institutionally educated career experts, academics, art historians, curators, art journalists and others, more knowledgeable than previous generations of readers about competing perspectives and less committed to formalist criteria for value judgements. As a standard-setting theoretical-empirical model the so-called ‘Greenberg effect’ was in reality a lengthy, competitive and uneven process of diffusion that passed through shifting tension balances of attraction and repulsion. His model was only gradually established as artworld orthodoxy, despite European condescension towards American culture (Greenberg, 1950), before being assailed by an emerging heterodoxy demanding different social and theoretical forms of cultural authority.

Greenberg’s standard-setting model

The essay taken as paradigmatic by Bourdieu, ‘Modernist Painting’, represented the high point of Greenberg’s consecration as art critic. There Greenberg (1960, p. 87) codified his claim that the ‘essence’ and ‘purity’ of painting was restricted to concentrating optical attention on the physical property of flatness, which ‘alone was unique and exclusive to pictorial art’. Greenberg (pp. 93–94, n.1) later insisted that he merely advanced an empirical thesis, an ideal-type heuristic of visual ‘purity’, a ‘useful illusion, but this doesn’t make it any less of an illusion’. ‘Modernist Painting’ recapitulated Greenberg’s defence of abstract art from assault by the glacial ideologies of the Cold War, ranging from Stalinism (abstract art as imperialist decadence), right wing US politicians (abstract art as communist front) and conservative art historians like Ernst Gombrich (abstract art as loss of unifying standards). His Marxist-inspired cultural critique of the schism between the high and low arts, ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’ (1939), was an essay that resonates with Bourdieu’s binary schema of elite and popular culture criticised by Fowler and others, and, to a lesser extent, with Elias’s (1935) more nuanced sociology of art and the kitsch style. While Elias advanced a distinctively sociological approach to the ‘kitsch style’ as articulating the ambiguous ‘leisure dreams’ of the aesthetic style distinctive to capitalism, Greenberg (1939) was unremittingly hostile to kitsch as the over-familiar, corrosive antipode of high art within bourgeois society. Avant-garde culture was shaped above all by a heightened consciousness of historical processes, ‘more precisely, the appearance of a new kind of criticism of society, an historical criticism’ of ‘the antecedents, justifications and functions that lie at the heart of every society’ (Greenberg, 1939, p. 7). As simultaneous cultural phenomena, avant-garde and kitsch were separated from each other by ‘a tremendous interval’ that the various gradations of present-centred popular art were unable to bridge. In a manner not dissimilar to Elias, Greenberg (pp. 10–11) identified the reception tensions of an avant-garde that now struggled to maintain a relationship even with the cultivated sections of the ruling class ‘to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold’:

The avant-garde’s specialization of itself, the fact that its best artists are artists’ artists, its best poets, poets’ poets, has estranged a great many of those who were capable formerly of enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature, but who are now unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation into their craft secrets.

Under conditions of social stability, Greenberg (p. 19) claimed, dominated classes felt only ‘wonder and admiration’ for the dominant elite culture of court society compared to the instability and crises of capitalism that fuel feelings of ‘reactionary resentment’ inviting the fascist temptation as a magical-mythical solution to cultural incomprehension. Forty years later Greenberg (1980, pp. 30–31) continued to define Modernism as ‘the continuing endeavour to stem the decline of aesthetic standards threatened by the relative democratization of culture under industrialism; that the overriding and innermost logic of Modernism is to maintain the levels of the past in the face of an opposition that hadn’t been present in the past’.

Under the influence of European art, especially Cubism, developments in New York meant that it began to perceive itself as catching up and surpassing Paris – Greenberg’s ‘law of combined development’: ‘By 1940 Eighth Street had caught up with Paris as Paris had not yet caught up with herself, and a number of relatively obscure American artists already possessed the fullest painting culture of their time’ (Greenberg, 1957, p. 22). Provincialism of any kind was ‘what had most to be overcome’ by ‘ambitious’ American art, defined for Greenberg (1962, pp. 122–123) by its ‘painterliness’. Influenced by the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s distinction between the relative clarity of ‘painterly’ effects and the absolute clarity of ‘linear’ draughtsmanship (cf. Podro, 1982, ch. 7), what Greenberg (1962, p. 124) termed the ‘painterly abstractions’ of Pollock in 1943 and Hofmann in 1944 displaced the geometrical and diagrammatic flatness of abstract art with uneven painterly depth. This produced a kind of ‘homeless representation’ operating at the affective pole of Elias’s reasoning–feeling tension balance as ‘more a thing of immediate perception and less one of “reading”’. A purely literal description or reproduction of a two-dimensional surface marked in a particular way needs to be supplemented by specialised claims to esoteric insights into ‘craft secrets’. For example, Pollock’s ‘all-over’ painting, without a central point of visual focus or sharp contrasts, conveyed ‘the feeling that all hierarchical distinctions have been exhausted, that no area of experience is either intrinsically or relatively superior to any other’ (Greenberg, 1948a, p. 224).

Art critics and academics routinely praise or censure Greenburg for isolating the optical sense data of ‘the eye’ from the tactile sense data of the body (Fried, 1998; Harris, 2005; Jones, 2005; Krauss, 1993). Across the most active decades of his writing, Greenberg considered aesthetic taste to be a matter of historically formed experience, of a self-conscious habitus formation cultivated through concentrated, prolonged attention to painting until it becomes an involuntary, spontaneous second nature. Greenberg’s (1960, p. 93) conception is that of a discerning viewer immersed in the historically-derived conventions of ‘the intelligible continuity of taste and tradition’. Whatever the strength of the art critic’s personal convictions, and Greenberg’s were bluntly stated with ultimate finality, he asserted that the critic is simply compelled to accede to the involuntary compulsion imposed by the apparently self-evident ‘quality’ of ‘successful’ art – Bourdieu’s ‘interest in disinterest’ and Elias’s ‘secondary involvement’. Without imposing a theoretical model a priori the critic as specialist in explication must articulate how art is experienced involuntarily through a historical sequence of judgements about specific problems posed by the medium over time.

To hold that one kind of art is invariably superior or inferior to another is to judge before experiencing. The whole history of art is there to demonstrate the futility of rules of preference laid down beforehand – the impossibility of anticipating the outcome of aesthetic experience. (Greenberg, 1954, p. 188)

Indeed Greenberg (1967, p. 265) repeatedly denied that he was engaged in theoretical model-setting through ‘the conscious application of standards, criteria, rules, and precepts’ and merely advanced testable hypotheses that are ‘entirely empirical and not at all an affair of theory’ (1962, p. 131). Too often, Greenberg (1987, pp. 147–151) complained, his empirical descriptions of the artworks were treated as normative prescriptions for measuring aesthetic standards. However, while historical theories of art may be tested empirically, the same cannot be said of the verbalised ‘experiences’ and intuitions of art critics. What Clark (2000, p. 106) calls ‘the priority-of-perception thesis’ of Greenberg’s later criticism forecloses historically-formed interests, knowledge and competences from the valorised object of art criticism.

Having allowed direct personal experience of art to determine taste, Greenberg denied that taste is purely subjective or ‘in the eye of the beholder’ as the cliché has it. What Greenberg (1999), in a Kantian mode, called a state of ‘exalted cognitiveness’ is induced through adopting an ‘esthetic distance’ from practical reality, a process of heightened self-distancing also emphasised by Elias, and giving the artefact undivided attention as the necessary ground for aesthetic experience, even if the source of attention was initiated by an art critic. An established consensus is formed by the ‘subliminal operation’ of ‘qualitative principles or norms’ that endures over time (Greenberg, 1967, p. 265). Later art lends new, retrospective meanings to earlier art that were not previously assigned to it. Modernism represented less a break with the art of the past than ‘a renovation of standards’ in the necessity of ‘reluctant innovators’ like Manet to pursue radical emulation against the stale imitation of past art (Greenberg, 1980, p. 28). Art of the past is made legible, ordered and re-evaluated in terms of a standpoint in the present as necessarily logical and sequential in presenting and resolving formal problems of the medium. Each succeeding generation inherits and tests the models of taste through its own practised experience of art, progressively modifying established conventions. That conventions of taste emerge from an ‘utterly empirical’ historical process, and not ‘the accidental convergence of a multitude of strictly private, solipsistic experiences’, helps explain for Greenberg (1972, p. 55) why philosophers since Kant have been unable or unwilling to account for the ‘objectivity’ of taste. An elevated disregard for the objective, empirical history of taste, Greenberg (p. 51) argues, is premised on a romantic and spontaneous conception of art. Although viewed as a dogmatic ‘formalist’, Greenberg’s criteria of ‘objective’ visual sense data provided him with considerable interpretative flexibility for arriving at judgements about artistic success and failure. His secondary involvement increased and decreased the stock of reputational capital held by artists, just as Greenberg’s own reputational capital waxed and waned in fiercely competitive intergenerational field struggles of institutionally authorised specialists.

Conclusion

Understanding Greenberg’s position of dominance as an art critic in the fiercely competitive social field of post-war Modernism, as Bourdieu argued, requires positioning his ascendancy in changing social conditions of possibility without neglecting the symbolic resonance that Greenberg’s writings had as a means of orientation for his readers, as Elias insisted. Greenberg demanded recognition for the art critic as a functional specialist, first from small coteries of radicals and, increasingly, from widening circles, not as an established university academic or commercial journalist but as a relatively autonomous outsider fortified by the dispositions of a cleft habitus experiencing the miraculous social mobility of an oblate. Mediating between production and reception, modern artists often felt overdependent on, compliant with, or resentful towards the ideological power of Greenberg to determine the symbolic (and economic) value of their paintings for the public. He maintained that the art critic’s specialised function is to reveal and share the ‘craft secrets’ of artists’ artists. As Greenberg noted, art criticism performs a necessary pedagogical function for widening circles of an expanding educated professional-managerial class, even if the processes of circulation and reception of art criticism are marked by the social distances of unequal social positions.

By the 1970s the model valorised by Greenberg began to appear obsolete, superannuated, an obstruction to emerging fields of perception. Greenberg’s critical judgements about good and bad art appeal to impersonal standards of apparently objective criteria that were placed under suspicion of smuggling subjective feelings, attitudes and preferences and concealed assumptions about race, gender and sexuality in ways that legitimated the arbitrary power of the critic’s authority. Rather than Greenberg’s self-referential autonomy of art or Bourdieu’s ‘economic world reversed’, the art field is always fraught with relations of attraction and repulsion with the economic field. While the booming New York art market of the 1950s lagged a decade behind the critical reception of Abstract Expressionism by art critics of the 1940s, the latter legitimised its reputational value (in part what Greenberg [1961a] lamented as the ‘false glamour’ of Pollock as untamed genius) for the belated investment of economic capital of dealers, museums and collectors (Robson, 1995). Greenberg’s mode of apodictic art criticism is constrained today by the ‘imperative to cooperate’ imposed by dense interdependencies of the art field where today’s rival may be called upon tomorrow as a supportive partner for much coveted positionings in field struggles (Graw, 2009, p. 107). Art critics generate what Isabelle Graw calls ‘intellectual surplus value’ for the contemporary art market in a promotional culture that thrives on affirmative gossip, publicity, awards and rankings. Greenberg (1980) argued that the ostentatious ‘high-flown art jargon’ of Postmodernism emerged from social conditions of heteronomy as a retreat from the more rigorous demands of advanced self-referential art. Nonetheless, Greenberg was aware that artistic resonance alone could not form its own self-referential justification. A dissenting Marxist in the late 1930s, by the late 1960s Greenberg identified racism and environmental degradation as more pressing problems facing American society and maintained that art should always be subordinate as a human value to collective and personal happiness and wellbeing, which art may or may not contribute to:

Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art . . . The weal and woe of human beings come first. I deplore the tendency to over-value art. (Greenberg, 1969b, p. 314)