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Quotes from Art and Culture: Critical Essays — Clement Greenberg

1909–1994 United States

← All quotes by Clement Greenberg

5 quotes

Complete honesty has nothing to do with "purity" or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart.

Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961)

A large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best re-create the instantaneous unity of nature as a view — the unity of which the eyes take in at a single glance.

Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961)

One cannot condemn tendencies in art; one can only condemn works of art. To be categorically against a current art tendency or style means, in effect, to pronounce on works of art not yet created and not yet seen. It means inquiring into the motives of artists instead of into results. Yet we all know — or are supposed to know — that results are all that count in art.

Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961)

The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cézanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.

Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961)

The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.

Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Clement Greenberg (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.