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54-473: Neo-expressionism developed as a reaction against conceptual art and minimal art of the 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as the human body (although sometimes in an abstract manner), in a rough and violently emotional way, often using vivid colors. It was overtly inspired by German Expressionist painters, such as Emil Nolde , Max Beckmann , George Grosz , Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , James Ensor and Edvard Munch . It

108-570: A cause, while kitsch was ideal for stirring up false sentiment. Greenberg appropriated the German word " kitsch " to describe this low, concocted form of "culture", though its connotations have since been recast to a more affirmative acceptance of nostalgic materials of capitalist/communist culture. Greenberg wrote several seminal essays that defined his views on art history in the 20th century. In 1940, Greenberg joined Partisan Review as an editor. He became art critic for The Nation in 1942. He

162-435: A commonplace object (such as a urinal) as art because it is not made by an artist or with any intention of being art, nor is it unique or hand-crafted. Duchamp's relevance and theoretical importance for future "conceptualists" was later acknowledged by US artist Joseph Kosuth in his 1969 essay, Art after Philosophy , when he wrote: "All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually". In 1956

216-610: A different meaning when employed by Joseph Kosuth and by the English Art and Language group, who discarded the conventional art object in favour of a documented critical inquiry, that began in Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art in 1969, into the artist's social, philosophical, and psychological status. By the mid-1970s they had produced publications, indices, performances, texts and paintings to this end. In 1970 Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects ,

270-408: A distaste for illusion. However, by the end of the 1960s it was certainly clear that Greenberg's stipulations for art to continue within the confines of each medium and to exclude external subject matter no longer held traction. Conceptual art also reacted against the commodification of art; it attempted a subversion of the gallery or museum as the location and determiner of art, and the art market as

324-465: A machine that makes the art. Tony Godfrey, author of Conceptual Art (Art & Ideas) (1998), asserts that conceptual art questions the nature of art, a notion that Joseph Kosuth elevated to a definition of art itself in his seminal, early manifesto of conceptual art, Art after Philosophy (1969). The notion that art should examine its own nature was already a potent aspect of the influential art critic Clement Greenberg 's vision of Modern art during

378-416: A set of written instructions. This method was fundamental to American artist Sol LeWitt 's definition of conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print: In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes

432-572: A target for critics who labeled him, and the art he admired, "old-fashioned". In 1968, Greenberg delivered the inaugural John Power Memorial Lecture at the Power Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney, Australia. In his book The Painted Word , Tom Wolfe criticized Greenberg along with Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg , whom he dubbed the kings of "Cultureburg". Wolfe argued that these three critics were dominating

486-669: Is also related to American Lyrical Abstraction painting of the 1960s and 1970s, The Hairy Who movement in Chicago, the Bay Area Figurative School of the 1950s and 1960s, the continuation of Abstract Expressionism , precedents in Pop Painting , and New Image Painting: a vague late 1970s term applied to painters who employed a strident figurative style with cartoon-like imagery and abrasive handling owing something to neo-expressionism. The New Image Painting term

540-626: Is generally seen as continuing the modernist dialectic of self-criticism. In 2000, the Portland Art Museum (PAM) acquired the Clement Greenberg Collection of 159 paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture by 59 important artists of the late-20th century and early-21st century. PAM exhibits the works primarily in the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art; some sculpture resides outdoors. Most of

594-516: Is sometimes (as in the work of Robert Barry , Yoko Ono , and Weiner himself) reduced to a set of written instructions describing a work, but stopping short of actually making it—emphasising the idea as more important than the artifact. This reveals an explicit preference for the "art" side of the ostensible dichotomy between art and craft , where art, unlike craft, takes place within and engages historical discourse: for example, Ono's "written instructions" make more sense alongside other conceptual art of

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648-456: Is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time. For Greenberg, avant-garde art was too "innocent" to be effectively used as propaganda or bent to

702-408: The syntax of logic and mathematics, concept art was meant jointly to supersede mathematics and the formalistic music then current in serious art music circles. Therefore, Flynt maintained, to merit the label concept art , a work had to be a critique of logic or mathematics in which a linguistic concept was the material, a quality which is absent from subsequent "conceptual art". The term assumed

756-462: The 1950s. With the emergence of an exclusively language-based art in the 1960s, however, conceptual artists such as Art & Language , Joseph Kosuth (who became the American editor of Art-Language ), and Lawrence Weiner began a far more radical interrogation of art than was previously possible (see below ). One of the first and most important things they questioned was the common assumption that

810-695: The 1980s and particularly 1990s to date that derive from the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. These subsequent initiatives have included the Moscow Conceptualists , United States neo-conceptualists such as Sherrie Levine and the Young British Artists , notably Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin in the United Kingdom . Clement Greenberg Clement Greenberg ( / ˈ ɡ r iː n b ɜːr ɡ / ) (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994), occasionally writing under

864-620: The Appraisers' Division of the Customs Service in 1937. It was then that Greenberg began to write seriously, and soon after began getting published in a handful of small magazines and literary journals. Though his first published essays dealt mainly with literature and theatre, art still held a powerful attraction for Greenberg, so in 1939, he made a sudden name as a visual art writer with possibly his most well-known and oft-quoted essay, " Avant-Garde and Kitsch ", first published in

918-535: The Isouian movement, Excoördism, self-defines as the art of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. In 1961, philosopher and artist Henry Flynt coined the term "concept art" in an article bearing the same name which appeared in the proto- Fluxus publication An Anthology of Chance Operations . Flynt's concept art, he maintained, devolved from his notion of "cognitive nihilism", in which paradoxes in logic are shown to evacuate concepts of substance. Drawing on

972-521: The application of cybernetics to art and art pedagogy, "The Construction of Change" (1964), was quoted on the dedication page (to Sol LeWitt) of Lucy R. Lippard 's seminal Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 , Ascott's anticipation of and contribution to the formation of conceptual art in Britain has received scant recognition, perhaps (and ironically) because his work

1026-431: The artist, and definite brush strokes. He suggested this process attained a level of "purity" (a word he only used within scare quotes ) that revealed the truthfulness of the canvas , and the two-dimensional aspects of the space (flatness). Greenberg coined the term post-painterly abstraction to distinguish it from abstract expressionism , or painterly abstraction , as he preferred to call it. Post-painterly abstraction

1080-961: The artists represented are American, along with several Canadians and a handful of artists of other nationalities. Artists represented in the collection include Edward Avedisian , Walter Darby Bannard , Stanley Boxer , Jack Bush , Anthony Caro , Dan Christensen , Ronald Davis , Richard Diebenkorn , Enrico Donati , Friedel Dzubas , André Fauteux , Paul Feeley , Helen Frankenthaler , Robert Goodnough , Adolph Gottlieb , Hans Hofmann , Wolfgang Hollegha , Robert Jacobsen , Paul Jenkins , Seymour Lipton , Georges Mathieu , Kenneth Noland , Jules Olitski , William Perehudoff , Jackson Pollock , Larry Poons , William Ronald , Anne Ryan , David Smith , Theodoros Stamos , Anne Truitt , Alfred Wallis , and Larry Zox . Greenberg's widow, Janice van Horne, donated his annotated library of exhibition catalogues and publications on artists in Greenberg's collection to

1134-440: The conceptual artists used language in place of brush and canvas, and allowed it to signify in its own right. Of Lawrence Weiner's works Anne Rorimer writes, "The thematic content of individual works derives solely from the import of the language employed, while presentational means and contextual placement play crucial, yet separate, roles." The British philosopher and theorist of conceptual art Peter Osborne suggests that among

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1188-448: The concerns of the conceptual art movement, while they may or may not term themselves "conceptual artists". Ideas such as anti-commodification, social and/or political critique, and ideas/information as medium continue to be aspects of contemporary art, especially among artists working with installation art , performance art , art intervention , net.art , and electronic / digital art . Neo-conceptual art describes art practices in

1242-619: The early conceptualists were the first generation of artists to complete degree-based university training in art. Osborne later made the observation that contemporary art is post-conceptual in a public lecture delivered at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota in Como on July 9, 2010. It is a claim made at the level of the ontology of the work of art (rather than say at the descriptive level of style or movement). The American art historian Edward A. Shanken points to

1296-403: The essence of painting, and ought to be removed. Some have argued that conceptual art continued this "dematerialization" of art by removing the need for objects altogether, while others, including many of the artists themselves, saw conceptual art as a radical break with Greenberg's kind of formalist Modernism. Later artists continued to share a preference for art to be self-critical, as well as

1350-504: The essential, formal nature of each medium. Those elements that ran counter to this nature were to be reduced. The task of painting, for example, was to define precisely what kind of object a painting truly is: what makes it a painting and nothing else. As it is of the nature of paintings to be flat objects with canvas surfaces onto which colored pigment is applied, such things as figuration , 3-D perspective illusion and references to external subject matter were all found to be extraneous to

1404-654: The example of Roy Ascott who "powerfully demonstrates the significant intersections between conceptual art and art-and-technology, exploding the conventional autonomy of these art-historical categories." Ascott, the British artist most closely associated with cybernetic art in England, was not included in Cybernetic Serendipity because his use of cybernetics was primarily conceptual and did not explicitly utilize technology. Conversely, although his essay on

1458-476: The first dedicated conceptual-art exhibition, took place at the New York Cultural Center . Conceptual art emerged as a movement during the 1960s – in part as a reaction against formalism as then articulated by the influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg . According to Greenberg Modern art followed a process of progressive reduction and refinement toward the goal of defining

1512-479: The founder of Lettrism , Isidore Isou , developed the notion of a work of art which, by its very nature, could never be created in reality, but which could nevertheless provide aesthetic rewards by being contemplated intellectually. This concept, also called Art esthapériste (or "infinite-aesthetics"), derived from the infinitesimals of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – quantities which could not actually exist except conceptually. The current incarnation (As of 2013 ) of

1566-475: The greatest painter of his generation, commemorating the artist's "all-over" gestural canvases . In the 1955 essay "American-Type Painting", Greenberg promoted the work of Abstract Expressionists, among them Pollock, Willem de Kooning , Hans Hofmann , Barnett Newman , and Clyfford Still , as the next stage in Modernist art, arguing that these painters were moving toward greater emphasis on the " flatness " of

1620-548: The group Figuration Libre was formed in France in 1981. In Toronto, the group known as ChromaZone/Chromatique Collective was formed in 1981 and existed till 1986. Conceptual art Conceptual art , also referred to as conceptualism , is art in which the concept (s) or idea (s) involved in the work are prioritized equally to or more than traditional aesthetic , technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art may be constructed by anyone simply by following

1674-457: The group's work. He was particularly impressed by the potential of painters William Ronald and Jack Bush , and later developed a close friendship with Bush. Greenberg saw Bush's post-Painters Eleven work as a clear manifestation of the shift from abstract expressionism to color field painting and lyrical abstraction , a shift he had called for in most of his critical writings of the period. Greenberg expressed mixed feelings about pop art . On

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1728-696: The illusion of depth commonly found in painting since the Renaissance and the invention of pictorial perspective. In Greenberg's view, after World War II the United States had become the guardian of "advanced art". He praised similar movements abroad and, after the success of the Painters Eleven exhibition in 1956 with the American Abstract Artists at New York's Riverside Gallery, he traveled to Toronto in 1957 to see

1782-540: The journal Partisan Review . In this Marxist-influenced essay, Greenberg claimed that true avant-garde art is a product of the Enlightenment's revolution of critical thinking, and as such resists and recoils from the degradation of culture in both mainstream capitalist and communist society, while acknowledging the paradox that, at the same time, the artist, dependent on the market or the state, remains inexorably attached "by an umbilical cord of gold" . Kitsch, on

1836-441: The many factors that influenced the gravitation toward language-based art, a central role for conceptualism came from the turn to linguistic theories of meaning in both Anglo-American analytic philosophy , and structuralist and post structuralist Continental philosophy during the middle of the twentieth century. This linguistic turn "reinforced and legitimized" the direction the conceptual artists took. Osborne also notes that

1890-468: The movement was hotly debated. From the point of view of the history of Modern Art , art critic Robert Hughes dismissed Neo-Expressionist painting as retrograde, as a failure of radical imagination, and as a lamentable capitulation to the art market . Critics such as Benjamin Buchloh , Hal Foster , Craig Owens , and Mira Schor were highly critical of its relation to the marketability of painting on

1944-541: The next few years, he traveled the U.S. working for his father's dry-goods business, but the work did not suit his inclinations, so he turned to working as a translator. Greenberg married in 1934, had a son the next year, and was divorced the year after that. In 1936, he took a series of jobs with the federal government, in the Civil Service Administration, the Veterans' Administration, and finally

1998-516: The one hand he maintained that pop art partook of a trend toward "openness and clarity as against the turgidities of second generation Abstract Expressionism." But Greenberg claimed that pop art did not "really challenge taste on more than a superficial level". During the 1960s, Greenberg remained an influential figure on a younger generation of critics, including Michael Fried and Rosalind E. Krauss . His antagonism to " postmodernist " theories and socially engaged movements in art caused him to become

2052-404: The other hand, is the product of industrialization and the urbanization of the working class, a filler made for consumption by the working class: a populace hungry for culture, but without the resources and education to enjoy avant-garde culture. Greenberg writes: Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It

2106-403: The owner and distributor of art. Lawrence Weiner said: "Once you know about a work of mine you own it. There's no way I can climb inside somebody's head and remove it." Many conceptual artists' work can therefore only be known about through documentation which is manifested by it, e.g., photographs, written texts or displayed objects, which some might argue are not in and of themselves the art. It

2160-414: The picture plane. Greenberg helped to articulate a concept of medium specificity . It posited that there are inherent qualities specific to each artistic medium, and part of the modernist project involved creating artworks that are more and more committed to their particular medium. In the case of painting, the two-dimensional reality of the medium led to an increasing emphasis on flatness, in contrast with

2214-474: The problem of defining the term itself. As the artist Mel Bochner suggested as early as 1970, in explaining why he does not like the epithet "conceptual", it is not always entirely clear what "concept" refers to, and it runs the risk of being confused with "intention". Thus, in describing or defining a work of art as conceptual it is important not to confuse what is referred to as "conceptual" with an artist's "intention". The French artist Marcel Duchamp paved

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2268-485: The pseudonym K. Hardesh , was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formalist aesthetician. He is best remembered for his association with the art movement abstract expressionism and the painter Jackson Pollock . Clement Greenberg was born in the Bronx , New York City, in 1909. His parents were middle-class Jewish immigrants, and he

2322-778: The rapidly expanding art market, celebrity, the backlash against feminism , anti-intellectualism , and a return to mythic subjects and individualist methods they deemed outmoded. Women were notoriously marginalized in the movement, and painters such as Elizabeth Murray and Maria Lassnig were omitted from many of its key exhibitions, most notoriously the 1981 New Spirit in Painting exhibition in London which included 38 male painters but no female painters. The movement became known as Transavanguardia in Italy and Neue Wilden in Germany, and

2376-791: The rise of Modernism with, for example, Manet (1832–1883) and later Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). The first wave of the "conceptual art" movement extended from approximately 1967 to 1978. Early "concept" artists like Henry Flynt (1940– ), Robert Morris (1931–2018), and Ray Johnson (1927–1995) influenced the later, widely accepted movement of conceptual art. Conceptual artists like Dan Graham , Hans Haacke , and Lawrence Weiner have proven very influential on subsequent artists, and well-known contemporary artists such as Mike Kelley or Tracey Emin are sometimes labeled "second- or third-generation" conceptualists, or " post-conceptual " artists (the prefix Post- in art can frequently be interpreted as "because of"). Contemporary artists have taken up many of

2430-651: The role of the artist was to create special kinds of material objects . Through its association with the Young British Artists and the Turner Prize during the 1990s, in popular usage, particularly in the United Kingdom, "conceptual art" came to denote all contemporary art that does not practice the traditional skills of painting and sculpture . One of the reasons why the term "conceptual art" has come to be associated with various contemporary practices far removed from its original aims and forms lies in

2484-408: The support—and color-field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis , who stained first Magna then water-based acrylic paints into unprimed canvas, exploring tactile and optical aspects of large, vivid fields of pure, open color. The line between these movements is tenuous, however, as artists such as Kenneth Noland used aspects of both movements in his art. Post-painterly abstraction

2538-520: The time. Language was a central concern for the first wave of conceptual artists of the 1960s and early 1970s. Although the utilisation of text in art was in no way novel, only in the 1960s did the artists Lawrence Weiner , Edward Ruscha , Joseph Kosuth , Robert Barry , and Art & Language begin to produce art by exclusively linguistic means. Where previously language was presented as one kind of visual element alongside others, and subordinate to an overarching composition (e.g. Synthetic Cubism ),

2592-551: The way for the conceptualists, providing them with examples of prototypically conceptual works — the readymades , for instance. The most famous of Duchamp's readymades was Fountain (1917), a standard urinal-basin signed by the artist with the pseudonym "R.Mutt", and submitted for inclusion in the annual, un-juried exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York (which rejected it). The artistic tradition does not see

2646-449: The world of art with their theories and that, unlike the world of literature in which anyone can buy a book, the art world was controlled by an insular circle of rich collectors, museums and critics with outsized influence. Eventually, Greenberg was concerned that some abstract expressionism had been "reduced to a set of mannerisms" and increasingly looked to a new set of artists who abandoned such elements as subject matter, connection with

2700-460: Was a term given to myriad abstract art that reacted against gestural abstraction of second-generation abstract expressionists. Among the dominant trends in post-painterly abstraction are hard-edged painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella , who explored relationships between tightly ruled shapes and edges—in Stella's case, between the shapes depicted on the surface and the literal shape of

2754-574: Was associate editor of Commentary from 1945 until 1957. In December 1950, Greenberg joined the government funded American Committee for Cultural Freedom . He believed modernism provided a critical commentary on experience. It was constantly changing to adapt to kitsch pseudo-culture, which was itself always developing. In the years after World War II, Greenberg pushed the position that the best avant-garde artists were emerging in America rather than Europe. Particularly, he championed Jackson Pollock as

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2808-543: Was given currency by a 1978 exhibition entitled New Image Painting held at the Whitney Museum . Neo-expressionism dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. The style emerged internationally and was viewed by many critics, such as Achille Bonito Oliva and Donald Kuspit , as a revival of traditional themes of self-expression in European art after decades of American dominance. The social and economic value of

2862-587: Was the eldest of their three sons. Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a young adult, when he began to focus on literature. He attended Erasmus Hall High School , the Marquand School for Boys, and Syracuse University , graduating with an A.B. in 1930, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa . After college, already fluent in Yiddish and English since childhood, Greenberg taught himself Italian and German in addition to French and Latin. Over

2916-567: Was too closely allied with art-and-technology. Another vital intersection was explored in Ascott's use of the thesaurus in 1963 telematic connections:: timeline , which drew an explicit parallel between the taxonomic qualities of verbal and visual languages – a concept that would be taken up in Joseph Kosuth's Second Investigation, Proposition 1 (1968) and Mel Ramsden's Elements of an Incomplete Map (1968). Proto-conceptualism has roots in

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