amusing line from Clement Greenberg

On the origin of modern art in the basically psychotic personalities of Henri Rousseau, Cézanne, and especially Van Gogh:

“Modern art is now practiced by such relatively cold, hard heads as Matisse and Picasso, who produce it out of their sense of contemporary experience. But it needed mental cases to show them the way, to cut through to the ultimate truth of life as it is lived at present.”

Much like the modernists who are his favorites, Greenberg also seems like someone who capitalizes on the condition of his medium. His best skill is the ability to make extremely intricate statements in very compressed paragraphs and still pull it off much of the time. And of course, he was required to do this by his task of writing extremely short pieces.