L'avventura del modernismo

Antologia critica

This volume offers the broadest Italian collection of writings by Clement Greenberg (1909–94), an essential author for anyone with an interest in the period full of formal revolutions that saw the quick succession of artistic avant-garde movements as from the late 19th century. One of the most influential and controversial figures in 20th-century American art criticism, Greenberg bore witness to the decline of the three-dimensional illusionism of easel painting and the gradual triumph of abstract art leading up to the goal of radical flatness, which he saw as the hallmark of modernism. One of the first to sense the shattering importance of the painting of Jackson Pollock and the American Abstract Expressionists, he subsequently endorsed the practitioners of Post-Painterly Abstraction, including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. With a corpus of over three hundred essays, Greenberg’s militant criticism accompanied more than forty years of new American art and made a crucial contribution to New York’s replacement of Paris as the world capital of art. The texts are selected here in order to highlight the European cast of his critical thought. The influence of Kant and Trotsky as well as Italian thinkers like Croce and Lionello Venturi can be discerned in a critic capable of taking an exemplary approach to the development of modernism in the visual arts and asserting its values of objectivity. Alongside an acute socio-cultural analysis of the phenomenon of mass culture and its social consequences, Greenberg addressed longstanding topics such as beauty and quality and objective values in art, prompted by the urgent need to oppose the degradation of kitsch and academicism.

An undisputed champion of American art and highly controversial figure, Greenberg still remains a primary interpreter of modernism. Over fifteen years after his death, his legacy of writings is an indispensable aid to orientation in the complex artistic panorama of the second half of the 20th century.

Written by	Clement Greenberg
Edited by	Giuseppe di Salvatore Luigi Fassi
Topic	Theory
Collection	Saggi d'arte
Publisher	Johan & Levi
Size	cm 15.5 x 23
Pages	448 pages
Published on	06/2011
ISBN	9788860100375

Theory

Textual index

Prefazione - Greenberg for Italians di Caroline A. Jones
Introduzione - di Giuseppe Di Salvatore e Luigi Fassi

1 parte prima - Posizioni teoriche
Introduzione alla Parte prima
1.1 Avanguardia e kitsch
1.2 Verso un più nuovo Laocoonte
1.3 Arte astratta
1.4 Recensione di una mostra di Hans Hofmann e un riesame delle teorie di Mondrian
1.5 L’anello mancante: recensione di Saggio sull’uomo di Ernst Cassirer
1.6 Sul guardare i quadri: recensione di Paintings and Painters: How to Look at a Picture: From Giotto to Chagall di Lionello Venturi
1.7 Lettera al direttore di The Nation
1.8 La crisi della pittura da cavalletto
1.9 Irrilevanza versus irresponsabilità
1.10 Il ruolo della natura nella pittura modernista
1.11 La nuova scultura
1.12 La religione e gli intellettuali: un simposio
1.13 Astratto e figurativo
1.14 Introduzione a una mostra di Barnett Newman
1.15 Le ragioni dell’arte astratta
1.16 Pittura modernista
1.17 L’identità dell’arte
1.18 Lagnanze di un critico d’arte
1.19 Necessità del “formalismo”
1.20 Il gusto può essere oggettivo?

2 parte seconda - Greenberg critico dell’arte moderna
Introduzione alla Parte seconda
2.1 Recensione di mostre di Joan Miró, Fernand Léger e Wassily Kandinsky
2.2 Seurat, scienza e arte: recensione di Georges Seurat di John Rewald
2.3 Recensione delle mostre di Joan Miró e di André Masson
2.4 Pittura surrealista
2.5 Le attuali prospettive della pittura e della scultura americana
2.6 La situazione attuale
2.7 La necessità degli antichi maestri
2.8 Lo stile del nostro periodo
2.9 L’ibridismo della scultura moderna
2.10 Gli antichissimi maestri
2.11 La pittura “di tipo americano”
2.12 Recensione di Four Steps Toward Modern Art di Lionello Venturi
2.13 Il prezzo di mercato di Jackson Pollock va alle stelle

3 parte terza - Analisi sociale e contesto culturale
Introduzione alla Parte terza
3.1 L’Opera del mendicante. Dopo Marx: recensione dell’Opera da tre soldi di Bertolt Brecht
3.2 Uno sguardo dall’America
3.3 America, America!: recensione di The Mind’s Geography di George Zabriskie e The Poem of Bunker Hill di Harry Brown
3.4 Risposta a “Un’inchiesta sul materialismo dialettico”
3.5 Il Dickens ebreo: recensione di The World of Sholom Aleichem di Maurice Samuel
3.6 Sotto i quaranta: un simposio sulla letteratura americana e la giovane generazione di ebrei americani
3.7 La Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors e il Museum of Modern Art
3.8 Lettera al direttore di Politics
3.9 Eliot e le nozioni di cultura: una discussione
3.10 Recensione del balletto Dim Luster di Anthony Tudor
3.11 Lettera al direttore di The Nation
3.12 “Americanismo” fuori posto: recensione di Preface to an American Philosophy of Art di A. Philip McMahon
3.13 Jean Dubuffet e l’Esistenzialismo francese
3.14 Una martire della bohème: recensione di Out of This Century di Peggy Guggenheim
3.15 Recensione della mostra annuale del Whitney Museum
3.16 Valéry, l’essenza dell’uomo di lettere: recensione di Sguardi sul mondo attuale di Paul Valéry
3.17 Lo stato della scrittura in America, 1948: un simposio
3.18 Il mercato newyorkese per l’arte americana
3.19 La condizione critica della nostra cultura
3.20 L’ebraicità di Franz Kafka: alcune fonti della sua particolare visione
3.21 Stereotipi americani: recensione di Cousins and Strangers a cura di S. Gorley Putt

4 parte quarta - L’ultimo Greenberg
Introduzione alla Parte quarta
4.1 Recensione di una mostra di Joseph Cornell e Laurence Vail
4.2 Uno scambio critico con Thomas Hess su Art and Culture
4.3 La “crisi” dell’arte astratta
4.4 Astrazione post-pittorica
4.5 L’America passa alla guida, 1945-1965
4.6 La scultura recente
4.7 Pose avanguardiste: la nuova arte negli anni sessanta
4.8 Controavanguardia
4.9 Seminario n. 6
4.10 Moderno e postmoderno
4.11 Affrontare la decadenza
4.12 Arte e cultura
4.13 Risposta a “New York negli anni ottanta”

5 annessi - Scritti biografici
5.1 Dichiarazione autobiografica
5.2 Una conversazione con Clement Greenberg in tre parti

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Paris, 1 July 1867, the inauguration of the Universal Exposition. With the end of the American Civil War, the landscape painters, members of the first authentic American school, returned to Europe convinced that they deserved praise, prizes and medals. Rather than acclaim, however, it was bitter humiliation that awaited them. The French critics shattered their dreams of glory with cruel, sarcastic comments on the large canvases crammed with majestic waterfalls, age-old trees and boundless horizons, pouring scorn on the best that a nation eager to assert itself in the arts as in the economic field had to offer. The American exhibition, said the French, “is unworthy of the sons of Washington … young and crude, in the midst of our old cultures it gives the impression of a giant lost in a dancehall”. The unexpected humiliation led first of all to self-examination and criticism. Why was the land of Melville and Poe unable to produce painters with the expressive power of its greatest writers? What should the painters of a young nation do to earn the respect of the Old World? Was it possible to bridge the abyss between them and European art? For the time being there was no choice. They were forced to bow to the tastes of the French, the undisputed arbiters of world painting. In actual fact, the Parisian failure of 1867 became a stimulus that prompted the “sons of Washington” to transform the defeat suffered into a challenge. American painters set off for France in their hundreds and settled in Paris, where they attend the course of masters like Gérôme and Cabanel. They then founded new “colonies” of artists, like the legendary one at Pont-Aven in Brittany. The success of the greatest amongst them, including Whistler, Sargent and Cassatt, paved the way for a host of others. Backed at home by the colossal resources of philanthropists and patrons of the arts as well as extraordinary museums such as the MoMA in New York, they succeeded in surpassing Paris in the space of two generations and making America the new home of art, the pulsating centre of world painting that was also to attract renowned French artists. The epic tale of American painters recounted by Cohen-Solal moves from Paris to New York, Giverny to Chicago and Pont-Aven to Taos. The turning point came with the 1948 Venice Biennial and the first-ever exhibition in Europe of eight canvases by a largely unknown artist, namely Jackson Pollock, soon to be acclaimed all over the world as the first absolute master of American painting.

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This is the eternal question that the philosopher and critic Arthur C. Danto tackles in an essay that is part philosophical dissertation, part autobiographical musings. Taking his distance from the view that reduces art to what is regarded as such in an institutional context, or those who even consider it to be indefinable, the author identifies various features that can help provide some clear outlines, including the ontological permanence of art, beyond the different forms in which it manifests itself. What makes art art is the ability to lend form to an idea, to express an idea by means of an artistic "modus operandi" that translates thought into matter in the most effective way, bypassing contingencies. But that's not the full story. Art has to embody something intangible: like a daydream, it has to induce a new emotive and sensory state in the viewer. Danto thus arrives at conclusions far removed from the relativism attributed to him for decades: understanding art does not depend on an open concept, but an open mind.Guiding the reader through the big names in philosophy and art of every age (particularly Michelangelo, Poussin, Duchamp and Warhol), the author takes an ambitious path from Platonic and Kantian theory to an analysis of the innovations - perspective, chiaroscuro, physiognomy and the advent of photography - that have shaped Western art, until its apparent burn-out with the arrival of conceptual poetics and the disappearance of aesthetics as a value.As well as exploring fascinating new developments, Che cos'è l'arte? distills the essence of decades of work, and thus represents an ideal introduction to the work of America's greatest visual arts critic.

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L'avventura del modernismo

Antologia critica

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Annie Cohen-Solal

Americani per sempre

I pittori di un mondo nuovo: Parigi 1867 - New York 1948

Bernard Marcadé

Marcel Duchamp

La vita a credito

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg

Fotografie 1949-1962

Ugo Mulas. Vitalità del negativo

Arthur C. Danto

Che cos'è l'arte

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L'avventura del modernismo

Antologia critica

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Textual index

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I pittori di un mondo nuovo: Parigi 1867 - New York 1948

La vita a credito

Fotografie 1949-1962

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