In the interest of full disclosure, I should say at once that I am not an impartial reviewer of Florence Rubenfeld’s recent Clement Greenberg: A Life, since I knew Clement Greenberg for the last twenty years or so of his life. I stopped talking to him four or five years before he died, but that’s not the issue. I continue to admire Greenberg’s writing enormously. I learned a great deal from him, and I would not have become the critic I am without his example. I feel fortunate to have been with him on numerous visits to artists’ studios and to museums and galleries, during the many years when we were still on speaking terms. Whatever quarrels I had with the man—and they were substantial, well-founded, and often bitter—they were and remain private matters. They had nothing to do with Greenberg’s work and it is by his work that he deserves to be judged. He remains unquestionably one of the giants of twentieth-century art criticism.

Since the publication of four volumes of his collected critical writings from 1939 through 1969 (University of Chicago Press, 1986–93), intelligently edited by John O’Brian, it has been possible to read the essays, watch Greenberg educating himself in public, see him being led by his eye (sometimes unwillingly), and follow him as he used his extensive experience of looking to map the trajectory of recent art, from the advent of modernism to post-war abstraction. A fifth volume of unpublished material is promised, and, once we have that, the complete Greenberg will be available to anyone interested in what he had to say. (His letters and other papers are already available to scholars.)

The published material ranges from the brilliant, hyperbolic essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” which announced Greenberg as a voice to be reckoned with in 1939, to an illuminating rumination on the art of the 1960s, delivered as a lecture thirty years later. We can track his early Marxist allegiance in his positing of an internal dialectic that fuels developments in the visual arts. We can note his Trotskyist assumption that excellence and authenticity are inextricably connected, acknowledge his belief that high and low culture are widely separated, and above all, follow his efforts to distinguish the good from the less good, in a tireless pursuit of that now maligned term “quality.” Whether or not we accept Greenberg’s construction of the development of modernism as a full recounting of the story, whether or not we share his enthusiasms and prejudices, no one who cares about modern culture can ignore his densely reasoned arguments and often dazzlingly insightful observations. Whether or not we are wholly convinced by his conclusions, Greenberg’s articulation of his experience and his abstraction of that experience into a coherent overview are always stimulating and provocative, usually enlightening, and often persuasive. Moreover—something increasingly rare in a discipline riddled with academic jargon and clumsy coinages— Greenberg’s critical formulations are expressed in finely honed, tightly packed prose.

What Greenberg was like as a human being may be of deep concern to his friends and family, but it’s hard to believe that it had much to do with his achievement as a critic. What he read, what he looked at, who and what influenced him—yes—but not necessarily how he behaved. That he could be belligerent, difficult, and argumentative, as well as perceptive, disarmingly intelligent, brutally honest, and--especially in the studio—both pitiless and unexpectedly sensitive, is not news, nor does it tell us much about his contribution to intellectual life in twentieth-century America. I’m not convinced that knowing that Greenberg drank too much and smoked unfiltered Camels helps us understand his description of modernism as a process of self-criticism in which each discipline jettisoned everything not intrinsic to its medium. Does knowing that Greenberg liked to dance or that he liked using his fists when provoked alter our appreciation for his trenchant, prescient observations on the early work of Jackson Pollock and David Smith? (I admit that when I first discovered that the crusty Clem was an admirer of the Beach Boys, it made me reconsider his attitude toward popular culture.)

Since we live in an era when personality commands more attention than whatever that personality might produce, it’s probably inevitable that a biography of Greenberg should have appeared before that long-awaited final volume of his critical writings. And since we live in an era when hearsay and gossip cobbled together with generalizations drawn from secondary sources pass for carefully researched biography—what a colleague refers to as the “supermarket checkout counter school of research”—it is also probably inevitable that Florence Rubenfeld’s biography should be, to put it delicately, extremely problematic.

In her introduction, Rubenfeld declares that two books would be required to deal adequately with Greenberg. “First,” she writes, “an intellectual biography that traced his ideas and laid the groundwork for a reexamination of his important critical contribution. Second, a social biography that explored his career within the context of his life and times. It would examine the emotional and intellectual forces that shaped his character, personality, and intellect, the values he held dear, the animosity he provoked, and his own goals and aspirations.” Just how you exclude intellectual biographical issues from a book about a man whose career—and whose importance— was completely bound up with ideas is a challenging notion, but Rubenfeld claims that her book is of the second kind she describes.

In one respect, she has succeeded. Greenberg’s voice can be heard, and the portrait that emerges is not wholly inaccurate. That is to say, close friends recognize the character quirks and behavior Rubenfeld describes. (Greenberg’s younger brother acknowledges that the man depicted corresponds to “Clem as I knew him.”) The trouble is that Rubenfeld is not only more interested in “the animosity [Greenberg] provoked” than in his critical achievement, but she is also far more eager to discuss what she calls “the emotional forces” that shaped his “character, personality, and intellect” than anything else. She gives more weight to personal foibles than to intellectual contributions and turns infrequent or unique actions into illustrations of habitual attitudes. She ascribes motives and offers pop-psychology explanations for complicated responses—the death of Greenberg’s mother when he was sixteen, for example, is construed as “abandonment” and used to explain most of his subsequent relations with women. Rubenfeld makes much of Greenberg’s rejection of his father’s materialistic values and his “reinvention” of himself as an intellectual, as though this were something remarkable and faintly distasteful, rather than being common among Greenberg’s generation of intelligent American-born children of immigrants.

The book would have benefited immeasurably from thorough fact-checking. It is just plain sloppy. Some of the bound galleys’ more egregious misspellings and misidentifications have been corrected in the published volume, but a great many irritating, avoidable gaffes persist. Rubenfeld still gets many easily verified facts wrong, mixes up sequences, and misspells names. Perhaps she relied too heavily on Greenberg’s recollection of events that were sometimes forty years in the past by the time she interviewed him, or took too literally the private shorthand with which he made barebones records of daily activities and encounters in his “diaries” (appointment books, not journals). She continually uses nicknames— Greenberg is “Clem” throughout—a stylistic choice, I suppose, intended to suggest intimacy, but it rankles. Sometimes the result is ludicrous: “Mike” Fried, as Rubenfeld calls him, is generally known as Michael, even to his intimates.

What’s far more important, Rubenfeld’s art history is full of holes, which leads her to make silly generalizations and wreak havoc with dates and sequences. “Clem entered the discussion of abstraction in New York soon after it got under way,” she states, a curious assertion about someone who was four at the time of the 1913 Armory Show and who didn’t publish his first essay on modern art until 1939. (Rubenfeld’s grasp of dates seems tenuous throughout; she cites James Dean as an exemplar of male behavior for hip Americans in the 1940s.)

The book is laced with small but nasty errors. Greenberg’s Litvak grandfather is described as having been a “moneylender” in the old country: a “pächter.” Rubenfeld is apparently unaware that the word means “tenant” or “leaseholder.” (Jews in Polish Lithuania, since they were forbidden to own land, paid rent on a lease made out in some peasant’s name.) David Smith, she notes, learned to weld in the Brooklyn ironworks whose name he appropriated for his studio, when it was having already acquired those skills in a Studebaker factory that allowed Smith to make the first constructed metal sculptures in America after seeing photographs of Picasso’s and González’s pioneering efforts. Stuart Davis is listed as having been a member of American Abstract Artists, a group whose aesthetic principles ran counter to everything he believed essential to the making of significant art and whose geometry-based “non-objective” efforts he loathed. And so on. Almost every page yields something in this vein, none of it important in itself, except that each small inaccuracy is emblematic of the author’s casual approach to facts throughout the book; cumulatively, they cast doubt on Rubenfeld’s more significant assertions.

And doubt we should. The book is based on what we are told were extensive interviews with people who knew Greenberg. Many who were close to him, however, declined to participate or to speak about personal matters. Still others say they were never approached. Rubenfeld never interviewed William Phillips, for example, an invaluable source of information, as a charter member of the New York Intellectuals (to whom she devotes a chapter) and a founding editor of Partisan Review. Phillips was not only the first champion of Greenberg’s art criticism, but one of his closest friends during his early years as a critic. Some of us, interviewed ten years ago when Rubenfeld began her project, were startled to find blatant misquotations, misattributions, and seriously warped interpretations of what we had said. (Just for the record, the term “Clemette” does not refer to what Rubenfeld claims to have been Greenberg’s “prodigious” womanizing—in the 1970s and 1980s!—but to the numerous female painters, encouraged by his attention to their work, who formed a corps of true believers.)

Many of Rubenfeld’s sources are plainly angry with Greenberg and have seized the opportunity to redress real or perceived wrongs, unburdening themselves of resentments harbored for years. The book relies heavily on implication, on hearsay of the “everyone knows” variety, with the tacit assumption that anyone who has anything scandalous or truly discrediting to report must be unbiased and should be given a far more ample hearing than a sympathetic or neutral commentator. It’s an insidious methodology. Implicit in it, for example, is Rubenfeld’s belief that Greenberg was motivated by a desire for power rather than by passionate enthusiasm for the art he espoused, though she doesn’t say so. She simply quotes people who think that it’s true, rarely noting whether or not they are credible witnesses.

Greenberg provoked, even courted, hostility. He enraged some people, left others feeling scarred. Speaking in public, he would make sweeping generalizations about works of art, entire movements, or whole centuries, and then truculently refuse to explain his reasoning. It wasn’t pure perverseness or arrogance, but simply a demonstration of what he believed the critic’s task to be: to look voraciously, to experience art directly and intensely, and then, as he once wrote, “to draw the conclusions from his vast experience of art and shape them into a coherent intellectual structure”—that is, “to approach art philosophically,” which Greenberg defined as “to abstract from one’s experience of it.” To know this, you’d have to have read his 1955 essay on Bernard Berenson, and absent that information Greenberg’s criticism is often thought to be overbearing.

Greenberg’s assured, authoritative spoken or written voice (which always omitted the obvious phrase “in my opinion”) was frequently interpreted as dogmatic, and his descriptions—abstracted from his experience—were seen as prescriptions. (Few people seem to have noted his willingness to change his mind, publicly as well as privately, to say “I was wrong about that.”) Hence the accusations of his “telling artists what to do,” always made, it should be noted, by people whose work didn’t interest him, and of altering artists’ work after their death. Hence, too, the acrimonious assertions that Greenberg used his influence and authority to make stars of artists who followed his directives and then benefited financially from their success.

Many of these accusations became causes célèbres in the art world: how Greenberg, a trustee of the estate of his close friend David Smith, authorized removal of white paint from some of Smith’s late works and failed to protect other painted works from deterioration. How, in the case of Morris Louis, he arbitrarily decided the dimensions of the paintings left unstretched and unmarked—and therefore, unexhibitable— when Louis died. Greenberg did this at the request of the artist’s widow and her advisors, so that the pictures could be sold. And then there are the apparently unquashable rumors of Greenberg’s being paid fabulous sums of money by dealers who enriched themselves by selling the art he supported. These are not trivial issues, but, rather, they are bound up with the whole question of Greenberg’s reputation and with the perceptions of the strength (or the waning) of his influence at various moments in his career. Such matters certainly warrant the attention Rubenfeld accords them.

To her credit, Rubenfeld is even-handed and sensible in recounting the Smith affair, presenting various perspectives fairly and thoughtfully. She is less scrupulous, however, in her discussion of the Louis saga, even though there is ample factual material available about the number of stretched, marked, and unmarked works actually left in the studio after the painter’s death, and she resorts to pure innuendo in addressing the question of Greenberg’s relationship with André Emmerich Gallery. Although she says that both Greenberg and Emmerich stated “that there was no financial arrangement between them” and quotes Emmerich as saying “Clem Greenberg never received any compensation from me,” Rubenfeld also makes a point of stressing “the belief from those outside Clem’s circle that Clem was in it for the money.” She cites Rosalind Krauss’s remark that “she could not prove it but believed it was true” and Dore Ashton’s declaration that “he was getting a sizable retainer from André Emmerich. I also think—we all did—that he was getting a commission on every painting, by one of his painters, sold anywhere in the world.” (See what I mean about Rubenfeld’s methodology?)

By contrast, there are reasonable, thoughtful comments by William Rubin, the former head of the Department of Painting and Sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art, about Greenberg’s contribution and his relationship with the artists close to him; by the art historian Michael Fried on his own formative years as a critic, before he separated himself from the Greenberg inner circle; and by the sculptor James Wolfe about Greenberg’s demeanor in the studio. Wolfe’s observations give a sense of how valued and stimulating a presence Greenberg could be: “His comments were more than useful. They were an education. Clem was superb. He had a superb eye and he really cared about art. He might be brutally frank, but it was okay because he was basically sympathetic. Art was his whole life, you see. He was the only one I ever knew with that kind of voracious appetite for it.”

Wolfe offers a welcome corrective to Krauss’s statement that Greenberg “believed in the idea of studio criticism, where a critic spends time in an artist’s studio, while the artist is at work, and makes suggestions” (italics mine). The idea that anyone would coach an artist at work is preposterous—which I am sure Krauss knows perfectly well—and Wolfe makes it clear that what Greenberg did was comment on provisionally finished works or works in progress, presented for his response. What kind of comments? “He’d come in and focus on aspects of a sculpture—what he thought was right or wrong, or what might be too much … or not enough… . But it was always your sculpture. You could take things out and put them back in. You could try what he said. You didn’t lose anything … there was a dialogue.”

Dialogue is the operative word. Rubenfeld never suggests how reciprocal Greenberg’s studio experience was. For the artists with whom he is most closely identified~dash\Pollock, Smith, Frankenthaler, Noland, Louis, Olitski, Caro, and Poons, among others— Greenberg was a welcome, provocative, energizing presence in the studio, an informed, penetrating eye whose responses could help to resolve difficulties or provide reassurance in venturing into frightening new territory. But Greenberg himself thrived on encounters with works of art. Well into his eighties, despite his insistence that “life is more important than art,” his appetite for looking was insatiable, and he was always eager to visit studios of artists, celebrated or unknown, young or old, wherever he was. We’d never know this from Clement Greenberg: A Life, which barely touches on his last years (except to suggest erroneously that he was addicted to hard drugs), but until the very end he seemed revitalized by looking at art. Like Roger Fry, he had a vivid sense of works of art as physical, made objects with imperatives of their own. Greenberg’s controversial formalist approach is largely a nuts-and-bolts, maker’s approach, informed by studio talk, the kind of practical discussion of what works and what doesn’t that is familiar to anyone who has spent time with practicing painters or sculptors. Greenberg frequently acknowledged how much he owed to Hans Hofmann’s ideas, which he first encountered in the lectures the painter delivered in 1938 and 1939.

Which brings me to Rubenfeld’s discussion of influences on Greenberg’s criticism, included presumably under the heading of the “intellectual forces that shaped his character, personality, and intellect.” Quite simply, she doesn’t seem up to the task. It is impossible to write about formative precedents for Greenberg’s approach without taking into account Immanuel Kant, Julius Meier-Graefe, and Roger Fry. To oversimplify, even though Greenberg never shared Kant’s faith in the transcendent, universal qualities of value judgments, Kant’s insistence on the priority of formal issues in aesthetic judgments of taste was fundamental to Greenberg’s construction of what he called his “home-made aesthetics.” So was Meier-Graefe’s exhaustive, firsthand scrutiny of works of art as the basis upon which to form opinions of worth. And so was Fry’s passionate attention to the verifiable, visible formal manifestations of the artist’s intent.

Rubenfeld does not probe deeply—if at all—into these connections; neither does she explore Greenberg’s debt to Hofmann, which is dealt with in a couple of sentences and (wrongly) connected solely to a reading of Cubism. She does, however, attempt a lengthy comparison of Greenberg and T. S. Eliot. That Greenberg admired and learned greatly from Eliot’s criticism is obvious, despite the equally obvious differences in their prose, among other things. (I remember Greenberg once showing me his heavily underlined and annotated copy of a collection of Eliot’s critical essays.) There are clear connections between the ideas about the poet’s relationship to the past in Eliot’s seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and Greenberg’s notion of modernism as a holding action for the continuation of past excellences, rather than as a rejection of tradition. But Rubenfeld’s equation of the two men is unconvincing and rather sophomoric. She maintains, for example, that, while Eliot created a language with which to write about modern literature and identified the standards by which it could be judged, no one had yet done this for modern painting and sculpture when Greenberg first began to write. This notion is impossible to sustain for anyone who has read Fry or Meier-Graefe or the published statements of many of the modernist artists whom Greenberg most admired—or Diderot on Chardin, if it comes to that. Rubenfeld fails to make the more convincing point, made by William Phillips, that part of Greenberg’s strength as an art critic came from his background in literary criticism—which is not to discount the paramount importance of his eye. “Greenberg,” Phillips has said recently, “brought a breadth of experience and references to what he looked at—like a literary critic.”

Rubenfeld also runs into trouble when she addresses the world of the New York Intellectuals and when she tackles the early days of Partisan Review—which published “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and then gave Greenberg his start as an art critic. As she does elsewhere in the book, Rubenfeld reprises questionable anecdotes, stringing them together with explanations that are often impenetrably confusing. A quick look at the footnotes goes a long way to explaining the problem. Although elsewhere she has made use of her interviews (still no guarantee of accuracy), in these chapters Rubenfeld has relied almost entirely on secondary sources rather than on original research. Once we are alerted to this, it becomes obvious that there’s less firsthand material in the foundations of Clement Greenberg: A Life than we might have hoped. Rubenfeld seems to have ignored Greenberg’s letters entirely. Much of her material on Pollock comes from a sensationalized interview-based biography of the artist published a few years ago, while her principal source for the section on Eliot appears to be Terry Eagleton’s book on literary theory. Greenberg deserves better. Read the four volumes of his writings in preference to Rubenfeld. They provide a much better picture of the critic in action, and the prose is vastly better.