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 A fifth volume of unpublished material is promised,