Beyond the Return to Figuration : Clement Greenberg and Figurative Artists in the 1950s

This paper investigates the ways in which American art critic Clement Greenberg transformed his art criticism in relation to the revival of figurative paintings among young artists in downtown New York in the 1950s. Greenberg has been considered to be a lifelong advocator of abstract art. In his early stage, Greenberg contended that advanced art should be abstract through emphasis on its own medium rather than on what it represents. The 1950s, however, saw the emergence of figurative painters who were inspired largely by Willem de Kooning\u27s Woman I, the painting that broke away from the burden of abstraction. Their popularity urged Greenberg to reconsider the significance of abstract art, discovering the important role of visuality as a common ground between abstract and representational art. He thus came to recognize the importance of abstract art once again because it tells us more clearly how to apprehend the visual features of works of art than representational art does. Greenberg\u27s propagation of abstract art in the 1960s should be considered not to be the extension of his reductionist position in the 1940s but rather to be the consequence of his attention to the visual function of abstract art which he discovered through his experience of figurative paintings in the 1950