Clement Greenberg (January 16, 1909)

Clement Greenberg was an influential art critic. His early essays included “Avant-Garde and Kitsch ” (1939), “Towards a New Laocoon ” (1940), “Abstract Art ” (1944), and “The Decline of Cubism” (1948). In the 1950s he became a champion of abstract expressionism and its followers, writing about Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, David Smith, and Helen Frankenthaler. He published works in Partisan Review, the Nation, and Commentary.

While he appears not to have much talked about his Jewish origins, Greenberg’s ideas were important to the Jewish Museum in New York in the 1960s, when “many in the emerging art world were Jews — artists like Mark Rothko and Diane Arbus, the dealer Leo Castelli, the critic Clement Greenberg (though not Rauschenberg and Johns) — and the museum made it its mission to champion their work.” *

I first became aware of Greenberg’s role in 2008 when I saw the exhibit “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976,” which was organized by the Jewish Museum and shown at the St. Louis art museum. The exhibit described the rivalry between Greenberg and another critic, Harold Rosenberg, and traced public opinion of expressionism and related art movements by showing clippings from Life magazine and other popular culture treatments of abstract art.

Here are two photos I took at the exhibit in St.Louis three years ago:

Helen Frankenthaler (December 12, 1928)

Helen Frankenthaler was a central figure in the New York School of painting, a movement that emerged in the early 1950s. She was involved with the art critic Clement Greenberg, and later married and divorced the painter Robert Motherwell.

Frankenthaler's background was Jewish and intellectual. Her father was a New York State Supreme Court judge, and she grew up on New York’s Upper East Side. According to the Jewish Women's Archive, "Frankenthaler absorbed the privileged background of a cultured and progressive Jewish family that encouraged all three daughters to prepare themselves for professional careers."

Frankenthaler was widely recognized when she was in her early twenties, especially for a work titled Mountains and Sea (shown above). "The color field painting that came to prominence during the later 1950s and 1960s, by Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland, Dzubas, and Jules Olitski, among many others, can be said to have had its origin at that moment." In an art world that discriminated against women, she managed to create and maintain a distinctive reputation.