Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War

Description

Since the 1970s, it has been argued that Abstract Expressionism was exhibited abroad by the post-war US establishment in an attempt to culturally match and reinforce its newfound economic and military dominance. The account of Abstract Expressionism developed by the American critic Clement Greenberg is often identified as central to these efforts. However, this book rereads Greenberg's account through Theodor Adorno and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to contend that Greenberg's criticism in fact testifies to how Abstract Expressionism opposes the ends to which it was deployed. With reference not only to the most famous artists of the movement, but also female artists and artists of colour whom Greenberg himself neglected, such as Joan Mitchell and Norman Lewis, it is argued that, far from reinforcing the capitalist status quo, Abstract Expressionism engages corporeal and affective elements of experience dismissed or delegitimated by capitalism, and promises a world that would do justice to them.

Daniel Neofetou completed his PhD at Goldsmiths in 2018. He has taught at Birkbeck, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, and the Fordham University London Center. He is the author of Good Day Today: David Lynch Destabilises the Spectator (2015) and is a regular contributor to Art Monthly and The Wire.

The scope and ambitions of Rereading Abstract Expressionism is very different, but also very clear and powerful ... Rereading Abstract Expressionism is an important contribution to the study of abstract expressionism and its one-sided reception in post-Greenbergian years. It is now time to go back to the paintings themselves and to check the validity of his very stimulating new interpretations of the discourses that have "made" abstract expressionism what it was and today no longer is, namely the promise of an absolute and absolutely liberating art. * Leonardo Reviews *