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The Differences Of Modernism: Clement Greenberg And Ronald Rosenberg

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Modernism has found new expressions in art which in turn have changed how people critic and understand art, in this essay I am going to focus more on abstract expressionism. Debates in this movement have gone as far as influencing many artists and the two well-known critics who have made this movement more remarkable and have changed the art world completely are Clement Greenberg and Ronald Rosenberg. On the writings of these two gentlemen about art I will try to draw out the differences in the idea of what abstract expressionism is and what it is supposed to be, compare and outline the similarities and the differences between the two critics.
Modernism as a profound historical base of art that intimidates past known traditions, questioning …show more content…

“Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, and while he withdrew much from its old jurisdiction…” (Greenberg, 1959: 1). So Greenberg had taken that theory and placed it in art. Greenberg focuses on recycling the old and …show more content…

For Rosenberg Abstract Expressionism is not a continuation or explanation on what was in the past or re-defining it as Greenberg had proposed, he says it was losing it. Whereas Greenberg wrote that action painting was a total drift away from art. On the basis where the two critics where trying to convince each other of what is and what art should be they came with a defining type of style of painting in abstract expressionism, well Greenberg’s idea was a response to Rosenberg’s idea of American Action Painting , but its aim was accurate. American Type Painting “is an empirical, sustained, and unrelenting attempt to refute the claim that abstract expressionism painting constitutes a break with the past” (O’Riordan, 1957:5). Greenberg states that art should be a self-justified meaning, art should be able to defend its reality through the means of its features and gives nothing similar to any other, and he then states that if that type of art is seen as similar it should be eliminated, for example “a representation of objects - trees, people, fruits, tables, buildings, horses, etc. they can be produced not only in painting , but just as well, if not better, in sculpture, photography, and film, thus they are not essential to painting and must be discarded in art that aspires to be modern” (O’Riordan, 1957: 6). In Greenberg’s American type painting an artist would be acquired to

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