My oUFA407 presentation on the theories of Clement Greenberg

1. CLEMENT
GREENBERG
Modernist
Painting
A Presentation by Lucy Teoh

2. What I’m going to be talking about
• Who is this Greenberg person?
• What on earth is he talking about?
• What are all these art periods he’s going on about?
• Is he right?
• What have I done that he would like, and what I’ve done that he
wouldn’t?

3. Who is this dude?
• Clement Greenberg (1909-1994)
• Bad-ass art critic
• Fancied the pants off Jackson
Pollock
• Thinks only smart people can ‘get’
art

4. He wrote an essay didn’t he
• Modernist Painting (1961)
• Written during peak abstract expressionist times
• Written in New York where if you weren’t doing modernism
WHY ARE YOU EVEN IN NEW YORK
• Big artists at the time: Rothko, Paul Klein, Kandinsky

5. Why are you still painting pretty pictures?

6. Art is dead?
• Photography basically messed everything up for everyone
• What’s the point of painting something when you can just
take a photo of it?
• BASICALLY WHAT’S THE POINT IN BEING AN ARTIST
ANYMORE

7. Art isn’t dead
• Artist’s began to look at the actual materials they were using
• Painting should be about PAINT
• Sculpture should be about SPACE (but Greenberg thought
sculpture was useless anyway)
• Everything should be super duper flat

8. Everything is meaningless
• Greenberg said that there shouldn’t be a meaning behind art
• Art should be purely about art
• Real life things mess everything up
FORM
form
Form!

9. Who are these modernists?
Paul Cezanne
Edouard Manet
Claude Monet

10. But these are just squiggles?
William de Kooning
Helen Frankenthaler
Jackson Pollock

11. And after all this he’s wrong
• While the materials used are important, art without meaning
is BORING
• Why rely solely on the way it looks when it can be interesting
too!
• LOOKS AREN’T EVERYTHING GREENBERG

12. My work

13. More of my work

14. That’s the end folks
• Modernist painters painted with paint
• Greenberg thinks art shouldn’t have any meaning
• I think he’s WRONG
• Art might be dead after all