Clement Greenberg

by Florence Rubenfeld

Clement Greenberg was born in the Bronx in 1909, the child of Jewish immigrants from Polish Lithuania. He attended Syracuse University, spent three years sleeping late, reading, and frequenting museums, and then toured the country as a traveling salesman for a necktie business owned by his father. By 1935 he was back in New York working at a routine civil service job. One could hardly have predicted that from these inauspicious beginnings would emerge one of the century's premier cultural critics. In 1939 he wrote "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," the landmark essay that catapulted him from anonymity to the center of a stellar group of intellectuals known as the Partisan Review crowd - Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Meyer Schapiro, and Lionel Trilling, among others. The subject of Greenberg's essay was modern society examined through popular culture and painterly abstraction. It was his uncanny response to the form abstraction was going to take in advanced American painting that placed him - with n