Greenberg vs. Kandinsky

Though I really ought to be doing nothing but regroup from the trip, I’m never too busy to share samples of powerful writing. And the more Clement Greenberg I read, the more I tend to agree with our friend Robert Jackson that he’s one of the most powerful writers of the 20th century.

To repeat an earlier point, I think that was largely because he adapted so well to the genre that was forced upon him. Greenberg had to write extremely short pieces of art criticism in most cases, and so he developed the ability to pack sentences and paragraphs as densely as bombs.

For example, here he is on Kandinsky, about whom he is rather critical. I don’t even think I agree with much of this, but it’s so good that it doesn’t matter in the least. Try to count how many potentially important cultural insights there are in these samples:

“There are two sorts of provincialism in art. The exponent of one is the artist, academic or otherwise, who works in an outmoded style or in a vein disregarded by the metropolitan center– Paris, Rome, or Athens. The other sort of provincialism is that of the artist –generally from an outlying country– who in all earnestness and admiration devotes himself to the style being currently developed in the metropolitan center, yet fails in one way or another really to understand what it is about… [One] provincial of this latter sort is… the Russian, Wassily Kandinsky, who died two weeks ago in Paris at the age of seventy-eight.”

“[Kandinsky and Marsden Hartley] were quite different as painters but both were alike in being provincial. Hartley failed to understand the School of Paris because he really lacked culture. Kandinsky was learned and at ease in his learning, and was one of the first, if not the first, to get an intellectual purchase on post-cubist painting, yet he failed in the end to understand it in practice. (Kandinsky and Hartley were further alike in that they both came to post-impressionist painting through German expressionism, which seemed to make post-impressionism more accessible to non-Latin outsiders.)”

“Like many a newcomer to a situation, seeing it from the outside and thus more completely, Kandinsky was very quick to perceive one of the most basic implications of the revolution cubism had effected in Western painting. Pictorial art was at last able to free itself from the object… But Kandinsky erred in assuming that this newly won freedom exhausted the meaning of the cubist revolution and that it permitted the artist to make a clean break with the past and start all over again from scratch– something which no art can do without losing all sense of style.”

“Kandinsky, in principle, seems to have paid ample homage to the new awareness that easel-painting takes place on a flat, continuous, finitely bounded surface, but he lacked an intuitive grasp of the consequences of these facts in actual practice. As if in reaction against his earlier liquescent style, he came to conceive of the picture überhaupt as an aggregate of discrete shapes; the color, size, and spacing of these he related so insensitively to the space surrounding them… that this remained inactive and meaningless; the sense of a continuous surface was lost, and the picture plane became pocked with ‘holes.'”

“At the same time, having begun by accepting the absolute flatness of the picture surface, Kandinsky would go on to allude to illusionistic depth by a use of color, line, and perspective that were plastically irrelevant. Last but not least, the consistency of his paint surface and the geometric exactness of his line seem more appropriate to stone or metal than to the porous fabric of canvas– this stricture also applies to Mondrian.”

“…academic reminiscences crept into [Kandinsky’s paintings] at almost every point other than that of what they ‘represented.’ And only a sense of style acquired from closer contact with the School of Paris would have insured him against such reminiscences, or at least agaisnt their discordant quality.”

“As a result of his failure to acquire a modern sense of style, Kandinsky remained an insecure painter… The stylistic and thematic ingredients of Kandinsky’s later work are as diverse as the colors of Joseph’s coat: peasant, ancient, and Oriental art, much Klee, some Picasso, surrealist protoplasma, maps, blueprints, musical notation, etc., etc…. A real high style would have imposed harmony upon materials even more diverse, but Kandinsky could have developed such a style, as I have said, only by going to the the School of Paris for inspiration. It remains the necessary source of the only high styles of painting our age is capable of, even as Italy remained the only such source during the sixteenth century.”

Again I complain that people don’t really know how to size up philosophers this well (regardless of what you happen to think of Kandinsky, whose paintings I rather enjoy looking at, in fact). We rush to considerations of what they are right and wrong about, as if all other questions were nothing but arbitrary personal reverie.

Occasionally Nietzsche and Schopenhauer hit this sort of Greenbergian note in advance, but not often. This sort of criticism remains largely untested in philosophy.

Just think how good a history of philosophy essay could be that began: “There are two sorts of provincialism in philosophy…”

Good wine criticism is just as impressive, and so too with the first-rate critics in cinema, restaurants, theater, music, etc. These people often know how to write extremely well simply because their subject matter presses them towards new kinds of subtlety. Good writing is not an ornament plastered onto pre-existent propositions: good writing is itself the best way of probing for fresh thoughts.