The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg

Abstract

To date, art-historical research regarding the concept of the decorative has focused primarily on the writings of artists and critics active at the turn of the century and the opening years of the twentieth century, a period in which the struggle to distinguish the Modernist aesthetic from ‘mere decoration’ was acute. Far less scholarly attention has been paid to the category of the decorative in Modernism of the post World War II period. Leading the renaissance in the use of the term was Clement Greenberg, who repeatedly employed the category of the decorative in his art criticism to advocate for an ‘advanced’ cubist-derived abstraction. One aim of this essay, which closely examines Greenberg's extensive use of the decorative in his criticism between 1940 and 1967, is to redress this imbalance in art historical scholarship. The larger aim of this essay is to demonstrate how the decorative functioned in Greenberg's writing beyond its ostensible role as a critical tool for making qualitative distinctions between works of art. I contend that the rhetorical power of the opposition of abstraction to decoration in his work derives from the opposition of art to craft. To be sure, Greenberg's conception of a pure and autonomous Modernist abstraction was deeply grounded in the decorative, but his pursuit of purity in painting also functioned to maintain the hierarchy of art and craft with significant consequences for artistic practice in the post 1945 era.

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