Art Criticism/Biography

“Florence Rubenfeld has given us an absorbing, fair-minded biography.” -New Yorker

“Rubenfeld has written a gossipy, vivid, and above all intelligent life of Clement Greenberg.” -James Atlas

Love him or hate him, admire him or revile him, there is no doubt that Clement Greenberg was the most influential critic of modern art in the second half of the twentieth century. His championing of abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, and David Smith put the United States on the international art map, and the intellectual power of his polemical essays helped bring about the midcentury shift in which New York replaced Paris as the art capital of the Western world.

Drawing on the diaries that Greenberg handed to her in 1993, the year before his death, as well as other unpublished materials (including interviews with him from 1988 to 1991 and also with artists, curators, and critics who knew him), Florence Rubenfeld compiled his life story, chronicling not just Greenberg’s eclectic life but also his contribution to art criticism and the vibrant, chaotic art world of the 1950s and 1960s.

Florence Rubenfeld was the East Coast editor of the New Art Examiner for many years. She lives in Washington, D.C.

University of Minnesota Press
Printed in U.S.A.
Cover design by Ariana Grabec Dingman
Cover photograph: Clement Greenberg, 1950 by Hans Namuth. Copyright 1991 Hans Namuth Estate. Courtesy of Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.