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WD_198/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0198 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"EDMONTON INTERVIEW" (1991) by CLEMENT GREENBERG.
THE EDMONTON CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS' SOCIETY NEWSLETTER Vol 3, Issue 2 & Vol 4 Issue 1
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Note: Continued from the preceding "page" as "WD_197".
GP How do you see Gonzalez in bringing forth Picasso?
CG Picasso was the inspired one. Gonzalez wasn't as good as Picasso.
GP He came first; he had the ideas; he pointed the way.
CG Gonzalez had the craftsmanship; Picasso had inspiration, not Gonzalez.
RB It's interesting when you say that Olitski is the best contemporary painter, but the second level of painters after him, the painters almost as good, don't live in New York, where Olitski is more or less based, and Caro is the best living sculptor but -- in my opinion -- aside from Caro, the best sculpture isn't in England
CG And then the next best is Peter Hide. And there's other good sculptors here. I tell people that it's extraordinary in Edmonton. And then Saskatoon next -- they've got sculpture there, too. Whereas in Syracuse they've just got painting.
RB What about the painting here in Edmonton ?
CG The painting, too. This is an extraordinary archipelago of 'formalism'. It is.
RB Do you see any stylistic similarities within the sculpture made here, or the painting made here?
CG I don't go into that. It's like calling David Smith an Abstract Expressionist. He was nothing of the sort. And the Abstract Expressionist painters couldn't see Smith -- they liked late Giacometti -- and he took their judgment seriously about sculpture. I wouldn't take Pollock seriously about sculpture. Pollock had a good eye for painting, but not when it came to sculpture. Let the artists in Edmonton and Saskatoon live long enough, that's all.
RB Do you think the best abstract painting is like Olitski's painting: close-valued...
CG No, No!
RB I'm playing devil's advocate, here...
CG The best abstract painting... Some of it is, some of it isn't.
GP What comes after Olitski?
CG I never predict.
GP No, but now, what exists after..
CG Painters here...
GP You spoke of Caro and Hide... Where does it go from there... Is sculpture easier, or...
CG Sculpture's easier because there are fewer sculptors and there are so few good sculptors. None of the great ones stand out like peaks. What I've noticed about the proliferation of good artists today is how many women there are. That's a new thing, the proportion of women. And I can't stand feminists, but it's a fact, that's all.
MS I've had this discussion with Peter Hide about sculpture today being more fertile ground than painting because there's more left to do in it. Do you think there's anything to that?
CG He's got a point, but so far the good sculptors are so few and far between, and the good painters are not so few and far between.
RB Are there any good figurative sculptors?
CG Yeah. Sort of. There's Robert Graham, and there are others. But it's like the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Once you got below the level of the best painters, then the better painting was representational, as I found out going on juries. And you found that little old ladies in tennis shoes doing flower pieces were better than the big attack abstract artists, the second generation Abstract Expressionists. Corruptio optima pessime, as the Catholics used to say about the Jews: 'the corruption of the best brings out the worst.' In abstract painting in the '40s and '50s, unless you were great you were lousy.
RB Is that still the way?
CG Not so much. Not so much.
RB There's better abstract painters now?
CG Better middle level... I haven't juried much lately. But on the whole, I'd say representational painting tends to be better once you get below the highest level. Like the landscape painting you see here, or you see wherever you go -- the representational painting. An abstract painter has to be damn, damn good.
MS Before, when you were talking about sculpture and painting and there being fewer sculptors... do you think you can compare across mediums that way? Can you compare how good a sculpture is to a painting?
CG You talk about level. I thought David Smith was on the level of Pollock, that's all. And David was so uneven but he needed his unevenness.
GP Do you think Cubism has sort of left a legacy for sculpture more than it has for painting?
CG No, I wouldn't say that. No. Picasso's bas relief sculptures started sculpture on a new trajectory, that's all I can say, and it's something extraordinary. I used to write 'post-cubism' and all that... I was wrong. Cubism is still the foundation of a good abstract picture -- somewhat. Kandinsky didn't go through Cubism and that's why his later abstract pictures when he finally departed from nature are no good.
GP Yeah, he was a failed painter. A great writer. I mean, the writings are more interesting than the paintings.
CG Kandinsky? I don't read him. It's my fault -- it's no putdown. I don't read Paul Klee, either, who was a way better painter than Kandinsky.
MS Is Paul Klee major?
CG Yeah, in his funny way. In a pamphlet I called him a 'keinmeister.' He's major all the same.
RB What does 'keinmeister' mean?
CG "Small master", because he painted so small. When he went big in his last ten years he'd lost his stuff. Yeah, in the 30's. Bill Rubin touched on this... Picasso, Gonzalez, early Giacometti for abstract sculpture, which wasn't large scale but was major in spite of its size. After that there was a gap and then the next major push came from David Smith. He kept the line going. Only David. And after David came Caro and the 'good' Englishmen. And I don't include Reg Butler, Chadwick and Barbara Hepworth in this category. But Smith kept it going until Caro. One line, that tenuous line. Bill Rubin touched on that.
RB I want to change the subject. When many people talk about Goya, they often talk about the "content" of his art. I'm thinking particularly about "Horrors of War"
CG That's what they do about all the old masters, especially Goya. But Goya looks good; that's what makes him great.
RB You don't feel that the subject of them, or how the subject was expressed...
CG in his case I don't.
RB When I saw that Goya show at the Met, and that series of etchings, I was impressed by how originally he composed. In particular, I was struck by how he rendered these piles of bodies as massed forms.
CG He's so damn good, Goya
RB ...but I wasn't moved in an emotional way, or...
CG You're not supposed to be. You're supposed to get the aesthetic thing...
RB ... whereas people I was with told me that they were moved because of the way the content resonated on an emotional level.
CG They didn't have aesthetic distance. I'm not ready to pronounce, quite. I'm writing my book on home-made esthetics and I've been in "the middle of the ninth" for the last three years. I've got three more chapters to go. There's a thing called "aesthetic distance" and it's inhuman, almost
RB Inhuman?
CG When Nero watched Rome burn he said "What a spectacle." That's aesthetic distance. We don't have to drive it that far, though. But if the artist hasn't made a good picture, then
MS A good example of that is all the pictures of the crucifixion, and they're all the same subject and some are good and some are not.
CG Yes. They just have to look good, in the same way that a poem has to sound good.
RB Good opera is often very much about expressing emotional states, and all of this.
CG When it sounds great, when it sounds great, though
MS Opera's a funny hybrid art, though, isn't it?
RB I'm just wondering if modern art is more detached from those emotions, whereas art from a different time was more connected to them.
CG Well, we look at art of the past and we're totally aesthetic about it. Aren't we? Come on. These questions are journalistic questions... You're cold when you look at art; you're cold when you listen to opera; you're cold when you read poetry. And it hits you; it hits you aesthetically. So Wordsworth writes about daffodils: "I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high over hills and hills and all at once I saw a crowd" -- and then he corrects that -- "a host" he says, "of golden daffodils", ah, dancing in the breeze, hundreds of them. You like it. It hits you. It just hits you.
GP Aren't we made differently. I mean, some things hit some people; some things hit others?
CG As Kant said, when it comes to aesthetic experience we're all one. He implied that, I should say. He didn't have enough guts to come out and say it.
MS But what if some people don't have a sympathy for it, you know. It isn't for everyone, is it?
GP Like you don't have a sympathy for the Fauves...
CG I didn't say that! When they're good they're good. Did I say that? See how artists misunderstand you.
GP You find it difficult to talk about them...
CG Difficult because I have to figure out what went on. But I think they're damn good when they're good.
GP But you're more outspoken about the Cubists and you're more focused on them than you are on the Fauves
CG I find it easier to explain Cubism. That's all.
GP Uh huh, whereas I find my empathies more with the Fauves
CG I'm not talking about empathy! It's easy to see how you get misunderstood. I didn't say I prefer the Cubists. The Fauves are a problem, but not because I like them less, dammit! They're a problem to explain -- the genealogy, or whatever -- that's all.
GP That's why I'm saying we can be made different in that I find it easy to deal with the Fauves and
CG We have differences but we're not made different. If you don't agree with me, you're wrong. (laughter)
GP Well I can accept that. (laughs)
MS But we can't be made that different when things that are two thousand years old and older are still relevant. People haven't changed.
GP Things that are distant from you are a lot easier to deal with than the things that are closer to you.
CG No. Proximity makes people overrate Jasper Johns. We know that. That's old history -- not ancient quite, but old -- and, sure, there are different temperaments. But if you don't like Titian when he's good you can't see art, you can't see painting. There are touchstones. If you don't like Shakespeare, you can't read English poetry.
GP So the consensus, you come back to the consensus.
CG Yes. We come together on these things. In liking Shakespeare we come together.
MS Many different temperaments appreciate Shakespeare.
CG Yes. Yes! And the sophisticated: the philosophers of aesthetics (who are usually sophisticated); they know that. They don't argue about personal differences; they argue about irrelevant things, too, but not that irrelevant.
RB Clem, you used to write about literature. What made you change to art?
CG Art got more interesting. Contemporary art got more interesting.
RB Was it better?
CG No. I won't say that. There was more life in it, I found.
RB Were you always interested in art?
CG I was a child prodigy. But I couldn't see worth a damn. I couldn't see. I could draw photographically, and people marveled at it. In visual arts, prodigies don't count. In music and literature, yes, but not in art.
MS Do you have any theory why that is?
CG No. Except Aristotle said the eye is the most intellectual of all the senses. And the eye has a tendency to conceptualize, to identify what it sees. The ear doesn't insist. And so children take to music, and they take to literature -- stories and rhymes. They like the stories they see in paintings and so forth, but they don't see paintings as art. And in my case, as a kid I drew and drew obsessively. I went to museums, but I wanted the story. I couldn't see the art.
RB When did you begin to see the art?
CG Late. In my twenties.
RB Was there any particular experience?
CG Experience? Yes. Paul Klee's "The Twittering Machine" in the Museum of Modern Art.
RB How old were you?
CG I'm ashamed to say, twenty-four, twenty-five. I couldn't see art before that. Well, I'm a slow developer, always came late.
RB I would think that's common. Now that I think of it a lot of people that make art started seeing art late.
CG That's a different story. Since the war visual artists have developed later than they used to. I think of Newman, Still, Rothko. They didn't reach the maturity of their art until they were past forty. And nowadays I don't believe any artist until he or she is past thirty. I don't care how good you are before then.
RB Let's talk about sculpture. Do you think that most of the good sculpture being made today is somehow grounded in pictorialism?
CG Oh, I won't say. It took off from pictorial art with Picasso's "Guitar" in the Museum of Modern Art, but
RB But volume and mass still haven't effectively found their way into modern abstract sculpture. Do you think?
CG Volume and mass: there's some, but it's minor compared to a Caro or Smith, now; alas, alas
RB And as much as Caro has tried to bring volume and mass to his sculpture, for example when he used these great big enormous parts, boiler ends and...
CG The grand manner, yes. He's a Jew, but he's so English; he's so damned English. The grand manner haunts English art.
RB What's the grand manner?
CG Edmund Burke was the one who started the thing. Looking at Michelangelo's painting he said, "this is the Grand Manner."
MS It's an effort at the sublime, or something...
CG It's an affliction of the English. It is. Francis Bacon is grand manner, and he's not much good. He's too packaged.
MS You told me before that Francis Bacon said that...
CG "Abstract art is incapable of grand feeling." Yes, that was a wonderful observation.
MS And it makes great sense. But doesn't that imply that he wants to express, or thinks he wants to express, something sublime?
CG Grand feeling. Grand feeling. Oh, lets leave out the sublime.
RB Clem, what about William Blake?
MS Well that's the grand manner isn't it?
RB The grand manner in miniature, wouldn't you say?
CG Well put! Well put! I'll have to quote you. Yes, the grand manner in miniature. The prophetic... the boring blank verse stuff that he wrote. And he was great in...
RB But his paintings wouldn't have been good if they had not been small.
GP The same thing's true of the Pre-Raphaelites, too. That's an attempt at the grand manner.
CG No, I wouldn't say that they tried for the grand manner. Maybe Hunt did, but the others didn't. We can argue about that; we can have a discussion. Oh, the grand manner. Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, and...
GP Jasper Johns?
CG Oh, he's an American. But no, he didn't try for the grand manner.
GP Who would you say among the modern painters? Rauschenberg?
CG No, no! Over here we don't do the grand manner the way you British do
RB Is Rothko grand manner?
CG I think it's an attempt at it.
MS Do you?
CG Yes. But they didn't think they were grand manner. They thought the were... Newman and Still were megalomaniacs, both a little crazy. Rothko wasn't. He was the most decent of the bunch. He was very much influenced by Still. Still was good in the late forties and in the early fifties; he painted some good pictures when he painted small. As long as they stayed small, usually vertical, narrow. After that he was blasting off these blustery pictures, and you saw him being influenced by Gottlieb and by Louis, you know?
RB Would you say that Still was an original painter?
CG Sure was.
RB Where was his originality?
CG He had this ragged leaf drawing, but he made it work because he kept everything dark so you didn't mind the bad drawing. That darkness, which Ad Reinhardt caught on to, became a drug on the market; it's still around. I saw it here in Edmonton. When I had to criticize a painter today I said get close-valued, high up. That was the chance Vuillard took in the early l900's: he stayed close-valued, high up with pinks and yellows. Nobody has the gutsto do that. They're afraid of looking too pretty and it goes against the grain of anyone who knows how to paint.
RB Looking decorative?
CG Looking pretty. You can't bring yourself to put a yellow next to a pink, or a light red. You can't. And when that's done consistently by the next painter, he'll be the great one. It's very easy to go close in darks. Go close when you're high, light.
GP I had a pink and yellow one but I put green in it
CG You would. You would. You don't follow your gift. You don't follow your gift
GP Maybe it comes with age and time, we hope.
CG It comes with I don't know what. If I knew what I'd go into business and write about how to be a great painter.
RB Olitski makes dark paintings that are pretty good.
CG It doesn't matter with Olitski. He transcends the whole thing.
(The discussion In Greenberg's hotel room ended here, but continued alone with Russell Bingham on Wednesday, April 3)
RB The question I wanted to ask was, when abstract art hit in the forties and fifties did people at that time speak about art in what we call formalist terms?
CG Nothing but, nothing but. Jacob Kainen, a Washington painter, said he ran into Gorky and John Graham at a show of old masters at Knoedler, and he noticed that they talked just about the form -- I won't say technique -- of what they saw, and not about meaning or anything like that. And you didn't... it was considered pretentious and irrelevant to talk about "meaning" and "spiritualism" and all that.
RB what about Barnett Newman?
CG Well he could gas... He had a great eye by the way, and when I talked with him it was nothing but good and bad, good and bad.
RB So the talk about spiritualism was saved for the ...
CG Oh yes... saved for print.
RB The last time, when we did an interview at the Edmonton Art Galley, you said that Gorky had a good eye.
CG He did... and then when he saw Pollocks for the first time in the mid forties he said that's not art, that's not painting.
RB He didn't like it?
CG No. He snorted. I wasn't there, but I was told. And Pollock's stuff at that time... Oh it's a story. All abstract painting had been hard-edged more or less up till that time with a few exceptions -- early Kandinsky -- and after synthetic Cubism... flat, hard--edged. But here was Pollock smearing paint in the context of abstract art... It looked a mish-mash, chaos. Speaking for myself, there were people back then whose eyes I respected. When I disagreed with them, I was given pause. I've known few such people since then, except some people who I'm close to more-or--less personally.
RB Who are some of the people...
CG The artists; the ones who are called "formalists". People like Michael Steiner, Ken Noland, like ...
RB Any critics?
CG Valentin Tatransky; Ken Moffett, certainly; Michael Fried; Terry Fenton; and Darby Bannard, who writes very little now.
RB I wanted to know if you've ever made any big mistakes as far as your take on art, or anything you've seen in studios, or the art you saw in galleries.
CG Yes indeed! One of the first ones was underrating Stamos -- Theodoros Stamos -- in the mid-forties. I recognized that mistake when I saw the paintings again in a show four or five years ago at the Whitney called The Formative Years, about American art in the forties. He had some of the best pictures there. That was a mistake, wow! And I wrote about Stamos' show at the time and scorched him. Now I'm eating my words. Another mistake was more positive: I overrated Mondrian's "boogie-woogie" pictures. I was cowed, and it was a lesson. Everybody was in awe of Mondrian, the people whose eyes I respected at that time. And the "boogie woogie" pictures -- "Broadway Boogie Woogie," and "Victory Boogie Woogie" -- they were bad. I saw that Mondrian's art had been going downhill since the mid-thirties, but it wasn't said. We thought, "Maybe we're wrong in not liking them." You must never look at art that way; you have your take and that's it. I consider that one of my big mistakes. I didn't put it in print, but I still over-praised them. Mistakes that I don't mind were when I praised artists who didn't come to much in the end. That's all right... You learn more from your mistakes than from your non-mistakes cause you take -your mistakes to heart when you recognize them, and that helps.
RB When you go to the artist's studio, what do you feel is your role? What do you say to the artist or what do you tell them?
CG I don't have a formula or a program when I visit an artist's studio. I give myself a rule based on my first studio visit back in '44-45 with the Pollocks, Lee and Jackson. We visited a painter who was living on, I think, 8th Street in Greenwich Village... I've forgotten his name; I didn't keep a diary in those days. He took his pictures out one by one and showed them to us, and I wouldn't take the lead expressing my opinion. I waited for the Pollocks. And they greeted each picture with dead silence and that was that; I didn't speak up. When we left I didn't take the trouble to notice the expression on the artist's face, but when we got downstairs my imagination began to run and I said God, he must feel awful I resolved, later, that when you go to an artist's studio you can't greet the art with silence. If you don't like anything you must find something -- you can always find something -- that you like more than anything else in the studio. You point to that and say you like it best and then you talk. What you have to watch out for, especially with younger artists, is the tendency to think, "if you don't like what I'm showing you you're more or less concluding that I'm no good; you're summing up my capacity as an artist." You must not leave that impression. I want to more-or-less convey that if I haven't liked what I've seen, that that -doesn't necessarily define the artist's potentiality. Who knows what's going to happen next? You've got to leave the artist thinking it's open. Say I haven't liked anything here -- that doesn't mean I have an idea what you amount to as an artist or are going to amount to.
RB Do you ever give advice, do you ever tell an artist to try this or do that?
CG Yes... Like twice, or I've seen artists painting abstractly and because I've seen some of their figurative work I've decided they're better there than they are in abstract art. I tell them that, and that's a form of giving advice. That's happened here. I hadn't seen an artist's representational figurative work, but I had a notion that she was being abstract against her deepest inclination and I said that. Now she's working from nature, and I was gratified to hear her say that now she enjoys painting again.
RB So when people accuse you of telling artists what to paint they're misunderstanding the process...
CG Yes they are, and it's bad faith. They haven't been there in the studio. Oh, maybe one or two artists have said, "Oh Clem wants me to do this, or..." The artist is talking out of bad faith too, or he's misunderstood. I'll give you an example. I was alone- with deKooning in the studio (Fairfield Porter reported it as though he had been there); deKooning had done a painting where he had introduced the face of a woman -- this was, oh, a couple of years before his "women" series -- and I said to him that in that context you can't do this any more, because it was a bad picture. I didn't explain myself well enough, and Bill's appreciation of English wasn't that good, so according to Fairfield Porter he had me saying that you can't paint from nature any more. Well, how do you explain that I've praised representational artists all along? When you visit an artist's studio, you see where he or she's strongest and you go along from there. Your remarks follow from what you see, not because you're coming in with preconceived ideas of what art should do or what this particular artist should do. No. You see where he or she is going, and that's about it.
RB Thank you.
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