Cubism and Capitalism
The critic can seem an impotent spectator, tossing in smiles and frowns from his seat while in the arena the Artist strains and strides, creating something new. But some critics, with their pen and their patronage, succeed in steering art’s development, making and breaking careers along the way. Clement Greenberg was such a critic. Let’s check in on him in 1948.
The Modernism born in Paris appeared exhausted. The question was why, when various impressionists and German expressionists were still going strong. Greenberg’s focus was cubism, which, he claimed, was “the epoch-making feat of twentieth-century art,” as significant and as radical as Renaissance naturalism.
Greenberg’s praise of cubism is hyperbolic: “the only vital style of our time”; the one “best able to convey contemporary feeling”; the only “tradition which will survive...and form new artists.” His reason: only cubism “relates itself to the true insights of its time”: