Skip to content

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.

— Clement Greenberg Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961)

Another quote →

More quotes by Clement Greenberg

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)

* the dividing line between the painterly and the linear [painting] is by no means a hard and fast one.

The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.

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)

All Clement Greenberg quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Clement Greenberg (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.