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A
Smear From the Art Critic
Is
it a paradox for a critic to love art and hate artists, or is it merely
a commentary on modern esthetics? This portrait of Clement Greenberg
is from "Jackson Pollock: An American Saga" by Steven Naifeh and Gregory
White Smith (Clarkson N. Potter)."To
be an artist is to be pompous," Greenberg would later declare with characteristic
certitude: "Painters are less cultivated than writers and therefore pretentious
in ways writers know enough to avoid." He was fond of the phrase "as
stupid as a painter," and frequently lamented that "all artists are bores."'
When asked why-he spent much of his career in their company, he answered:
"Before analysis, I had a faculty for hanging around people I didn't
like." His judgments of individual artists, even those whose work he
supported, were curt and, supercilious. Mark Rothko was "a clinical paranoid.
pompous and dumb". . . Marc Chagall, "a Yiddish theater version of genius";
Adolf Gottlieb, "a pantspresser" Arshile Gorky, a "violent anti-Semite'';
Franz Kline, "a bore."