The Essential Legacy of Clement Greenberg from the Era of Stalin and Hitler

ion. Now that Breton had recently implicated himself with Rivera, it would have appeared to him that geometrical abstraction would have been the more likely of those two options for a radical artist to address as a basis for practice. All this illuminates the somewhat contradictory argumentation put forward by Greenberg in 'Towards a Newer Laocoon'. He tries, for example, to demonstrate that the art of Ernst and Dali is reactionary because their technical use of illusionistic effects remains what he refers to as 'art school painting'. Here, what Greenberg really had in mind was that it was now impossible for him to value the art of someone like Ernst, for its critical perceptions of bourgeois society might have been ideologically unacceptable to the corporate consensus of the Museum of Modern Art. However, a more effective criticism of Surrealist art would have been to argue that many of its works tended to degenerate into impoverished and almost tautological illustrations of fashionable theory, principally, psychoanalysis. It is unfortunate that this inadequacy too often characterises many works of today's contemporary art.