Art criticism in the 20th century

In the essay “Other Criteria” (1972), the American scholar and critic Leo Steinberg criticized Greenberg from an art-historical point of view, stating that in Greenberg’s “formalist ethic, the ideal critic remains unmoved by the artist’s expressive intention, uninfluenced by his culture, deaf to his irony or iconography, and so proceeds undistracted, programmed like an Orpheus making his way out of Hell.” In light of such criticism, throughout the second half of the 20th century there were art historians/critics who did not follow the approach of Greenberg and instead remained “passionate, partisan, and political,” to quote Baudelaire’s famous words, in their response to contemporary art: Schapiro in support of Arshile Gorky, Steinberg in support of Jasper Johns, and Rosenblum in support of Frank Stella are conspicuous examples. Schapiro spoke for all socially minded critics when he stated that he was committed to “the deep connection of art with the totality of culture.”

Greenberg’s intellectual nemesis and foil was American critic Harold Rosenberg. Greenberg attacked him, without naming him, in an essay on the “bad name” given art criticism by critics who viewed art in “lifeworld,” rather than formal, terms. In fact, Rosenberg, a dialectician and existentialist, famously described the canvas as “an arena in which to act,” stating that what appeared in it “was not a picture but an event,” the result of an “encounter” between the painter and his “material.” Out of this came Rosenberg’s most enduring ideas—Action painting (sometimes called process painting) and the concept of the avant-garde work of art as an uncertain or “anxious object” (the title of one of his books). For Rosenberg, art reflected an individualistic attempt by an artist to express himself, rather than simply to build on the formal achievements of those before him. Art was self-expression in the deepest sense—self-creation. Art criticism thus involved for Rosenberg, in critic Max Kozloff’s words, “perception of the self through the medium of the work of art and perception of the work of art through the medium of the self.” Rosenberg was speaking about the Abstract Expressionist painter and, more broadly, the avant-garde artist when he declared that “the anxiety of art is a philosophical quality perceived by artists to be inherent in acts of creation of our time.” This approach of seeing art from the artist’s perspective removed art from the formal vacuum of Greenberg’s criticism and placed it directly in the realm of the social. Implicit in the ideas of “action,” “anxiety,” and personal expression is the political, which had no place in the realm of possibility in Greenbergian formalism. Like Greenberg, Rosenberg was most supportive of Abstract Expressionist artists, but he preferred Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning to Greenberg’s preference, Pollock, without denying the latter’s importance. All three artists were gestural, but for Rosenberg, Gorky’s surreal landscapes and de Kooning’s bizarre figures suggested a greater awareness of the anxious self. It is worth noting that Rosenberg has been criticized for not attending to particular works the way Greenberg did, but then he attended to psychosocial context in a way Greenberg never did.

Beside Rosenberg, the English critic Lawrence Alloway is perhaps the most important of the “other” critics. He truly rebelled against Greenbergian formalism, although, as he acknowledged, he was initially a convinced Greenbergian. Alloway was the first critic who wrote about Pop art (which Greenberg had dismissed as “novelty art”) in any depth, even coining its name. Just as Dadaism, in its literary nature, was not directly part of the formal trajectory set by Barr, so Pop art defied Greenberg’s formal trajectory toward abstraction, best embodied by the work of the Abstract Expressionists.

Perhaps most important, Alloway was the first critic “to consider mass-produced sign-systems as art,” as he wrote in American Pop Art (1974). He used theories of mass communication and social behavior to analyze art, as opposed to using purely formal, material bases of analysis. Alloway had what he called an “expansionist aesthetic with a place for both abstract expressionism and Hollywood”—he in fact curated an exhibition of films dealing with violence for the Museum of Modern Art—and he argued for the existence of a “fine art/popular culture continuum.” He disputed the “elite, idealist, and purist” aestheticism of Greenberg and Fry, which “sought the pure centre of each art in isolation from the others.” Instead, as it was for Rosenberg, he felt that the work of art represented the reality of the artist’s engagement in the culture around him.

Alloway, then, collapsed the distinction between “high” and “low” art that had been established by Greenberg in his famous essay “Avant-garde and Kitsch” (1939). In so doing, Alloway opened the way to a new sense of what he called the social “topicality” of art. (It is worth noting that the integration of high and low art has been understood by some to be the gist of postmodern art.) Alloway’s ideas had far-reaching consequences: they opened the way for cultural studies—in Alloway’s formulation in American Pop Art, a “willingness to treat our culture as art”—and an anthropological approach to art that saw it as a way of making our “commonality” explicit. This commonality is especially evident in the familiar cultural iconography, or “clichés,” used by the artist that are the “common property that…binds us together.” For Alloway, the critic’s duty is to identify and analyze freshly topical art, restoring it to the social context from which it took its point of departure and acknowledging its contribution to that context. He held that art has sociohistorical content and that it is made by artists with a vital interest in the outcome of the issues it addresses.

Alloway extended his democratic understanding of art to his understanding of the role of the critic when, in Topics in American Art Since 1945 (1975), he repudiated “the tendency to view the reactions of art critics to works of art as signs of the real meaning and hence as more true than lay reactions,” stating that, “in fact, art criticism is not a model for the personal experience of each spectator. Art criticism is concerned with meaning, at a social and academic level, as sharable commentary. As such, it does not pre-empt other readings; it co-exists with them.” This seems to deny that there is any “essence,” or objective truth, to art criticism, or any truly proper way of practicing it.

Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Alloway represent an important phenomenon of the 20th century: the emergence of the professional art critic. They practiced art criticism assiduously and regularly and even earned income from it—Greenberg wrote for The Nation, and Rosenberg was a longtime critic for The New Yorker. A number of art historians also became critics, further professionalizing—indeed, academicizing—art criticism. In The Painted Word (1975), American author Tom Wolfe writes about the power of Greenberg and Rosenberg. Wolfe argues that they did not simply make a case for a certain reading of modern art, but their influence was such that contemporary painters obediently submitted to their ideas, showing the power of critical theory over art (a phenomenon prevalent since the 17th century, when Le Brun set the standard of Poussin for the Academy). Wolfe proposes that, during the heyday of such critics as Greenberg and Rosenberg, criticism no longer simply interpreted art, enlightening the viewer about it, but rather dictated to it, like an ideology: theoretical intervention became manipulative control of artistic practice. In other words, at a certain point conformity to critical theory became more important than creative nonconformity, suggesting the truth of the art historian Max J. Friedländer’s categorical statement that “the rule of theory always rises in proportion as creative power falls.”