one Greenberg piece I never get sick of

“Cézanne and the Unity of Modern Art,” which I just read again in connection with my fourth Brazil lecture. It’s not only very good on Cézanne (the insights here are so dense that I can barely keep up), but also gives a striking conception of how history works more generally: some eras move rapidly because they are tying together the loose threads left by previous innovators who were too startled by their own innovations to finish the job, while others are dominated by a few isolated innovations that move slowly because they are trying to retrieve and transform valuable things that were prematurely left behind by earlier revolutions. Cézanne, of course, belongs to the second category.

Greenberg can often be unduly harsh– today I was also rereading his devastating obituary assessment of Kandinsky, which isn’t his fairest piece by any means. (If Duchamp and Dali are secretly “academic” artists, Kandinsky is a secretly “provincial” artist, as Greenberg sees it) But most of his writing is impossible to put down. Last summer I went through the 4 volumes of collected criticism in not too many weeks, and not because it always moves quickly. He’s simply addictive, and I don’t think we have anyone in philosophy who is this good a “critic” (in the sense of art criticsm, food criticism, wine criticism, movie criticism) of other philosophers. We don’t have “philosophy critics” in this sense because we are generally in too big a hurry to detect the truth and falsity of the views of other philosophers. Since truth and falsity in that sense are impossible in art, a different kind of criticism becomes possible. But I suspect it’s possible in philosophy as well. Nietzsche shows flashes of it when discussing his predecessors. And Schopenhauer– again not always fairly.