To read Clement Greenberg’s art criticism is to be brought immediately into the works themselves.

Pollock’s “drip” paintings, which began in 1947, eliminated the factor of manual skill and seemed to eliminate the factor of control along with it. Advanced painting had raised the question of the role of skill in pictorial art before Pollock’s time, but these pictures questioned that role more disturbingly if not more radically than even Mondrian’s geometrical art had. … [L]ike Mondrian, Pollock demonstrates that something related to skill is likewise unessential to the creation of aesthetic quality: namely, personal touch, individuality of execution, handwriting, “signature.” In principle, any artist’s touch can be imitated, but it takes hard work and great skill to imitate Hsia Kuei’s, Leonardo’s, Rembrandt’s, or Ingres’s. Mondrian’s touch can be imitated, or rather duplicated, with no effort at all, by anybody. So, almost, can Pollock’s touch in his “drip” period. With a little practice anybody can make dribbles and spatters and skeins of liquid paint that are indistinguishable from Pollock’s in point purely of handwriting. But Mondrian’s and Pollock’s quality can no more be duplicated than Leonardo’s or Rembrandt’s. Again, it is driven home that, in the last analysis, conception, or inspiration, alone decides aesthetic quality. Not that discipline, learning, awareness, and the conjunction of circumstances are less than indispensable to the making of important art. But without the factor of inspiration, these are as nothing.

This is Greenberg writing about Jackson Pollock in 1967, on the occasion of a retrospective at MoMA. The passage is typical of his criticism. To write about Pollock, he writes about Mondrian, and Leonardo, and Rembrandt. Greenberg did not shy away from comparisons between the avantgarde art of his own time and the art of the past – he once rated David Smith “higher than any sculptor since Donatello” – and he encouraged viewers to see the aesthetic traditions that united art from ancient Egypt all the way up to Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg knew that to be taken seriously all art – abstract or representational, ancient or contemporary – had to be held to the same standards, the highest standards of the established canon.

Greenberg (1909-94) introduced American abstract art to the mid-century public. Because of his advocacy, Abstract Expressionism was brought out of the studio and into the living rooms and museums of America. But he did far more than that; he gave this avant-garde art historical and cultural weight within the greater Western tradition. His writings formed a bridge between the art of the past and the present, between the representational art of the 19th century and 20th-century abstraction.

Extremely well read (he was fluent in seven languages), he wrote on literature and politics as well as art. He brought the critical, philosophical ideas of Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” and Dewey’s “Art as Experience” into the mid-20th century, applying them in a hands-on, matter-of-fact way. A sometimes-painter himself, Greenberg understood how artists think. He visited them in their studios, befriended and advised them; no other critic I am aware of was as admired and trusted by artists for his unfailing honesty – for his “brutally frank” assessments.

And Greenberg’s judgments could be harsh, on art and on himself. Using nothing but the work as a guide, he passed judgment on artists who were his friends, sticking to his principles even when he did not want to. In 1948 Greenberg wrote, “Now, as if suddenly we are introduced by William de Kooning’s first show, at the Egan Gallery, to one of the four or five most important painters in the country.” But, in 1950, “When I claim that Gorky, de Kooning, and Pollock have turned out some of the strongest art produced anywhere since 1940, it may be that I am insufficiently acquainted with the latest work done abroad.” Then in 1989, in his last interview, Greenberg said, “By the time [de Kooning] was discovered … he showed that he had lost his stuff by ’49, ’50 … I thought when I wrote that he had lost it that I was asserting the truth, protecting the truth, reestablishing the truth; I thought that’s what I had to do.”

Greenberg was essentially passing judgment on himself as a critic. He came back again and again to art, checking and rechecking his responses. After reviewing Mondrian’s “[Broadway] Boogie Woogie” (1942-43), on October 9, 1943, he published another review of the same painting on October 16, 1943, correcting his misreading of the grays in the picture, which he had remembered as moving in hue toward “impure” purples and oranges. He understood that to engage with art is to enter into an ongoing relationship – in which our perceptions do, indeed should, evolve. Greenberg was not afraid to admit he was wrong, that he had not seen something clearly the first time around. Honesty – to art and to oneself – was of the utmost importance. All else was folly.

The essential Greenberg work will always be “Art and Culture,” published in 1961.The first book of his criticism to appear, it is an anthology of some of his best, and classic, essays (all chosen by the author), including “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” “The Plight of Culture,” and “Abstract, Representational, and so forth.” Most of the essays in “Art and Culture” were revised based on the critic’s taste at the date of publication, because, Greenberg wrote in the preface: “I would not deny being one of those critics who educate themselves in public, but I see no reason why all the haste and waste involved in my self education should be preserved in a book.” But between 1986 and 1993, a wonderful four-volume edition, “Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism,” edited by John O’Brian, was published. And more recently, two new books, “Homemade Esthetics” (1999) and “Clement Greenberg: Late Writings” (2003), added to his oeuvre. Together, they form one of the greatest collections of criticism of the 20th century.

To read Greenberg’s crystalline prose – simple, clear, and without poetic embellishment or artifice – is to encounter some of the most straightforward and lucid writing about art ever written. Here is Greenberg on Matisse

You found your path to Matisse, not because you were told he was a great painter – often, back then [the 1940s], you were told he wasn’t – but because the more you came to ask of painting as sheer painting, the more you were stopped and held by him. On Renoir: My reactions to Renoir keep changing. One day I find him almost powerful, another day almost weak; one moment brilliant, the next merely flashy; one day quite firm, another day soft.

On Paul Klee:

Klee’s line seems rarely to enclose a shape or mark a contour with definiteness; nor, as a rule, does it vary in width or color value along a single trajectory. That is, it has little plastic feel, so that it is hard to say whether it is heavy or wiry, cursive or stiff, inuous or angular; it is all these things and none. At most it is scratchy. At times it is feathery. Adjectives do not fit the case as well as verbs. Klee’s line indicates, directs, relates, connects. Unity is realized by relations and harmonies that play across neutral areas whose presence is more like an assumption than a fact.

Today Greenberg’s reputation is far from secure. He is accused of being polemic, dogmatic, and a disputant. He is dismissed as a relic of Modernism since as far back as the 1960s, when the New York School artists he had championed since the 1940s (among them Pollock, de Kooning, and Smith) were being displaced by the rise of Pop artists (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol), whom Greenberg dismissed. Later, Greenberg’s taste (which supported the allover, immediate impact experienced in Pollock’s paintings and in the Color Field paintings by Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitsky, and Morris Louis) was criticized as too “formalist” and reductive because it did not embrace Conceptual and Pop art.

Greenberg’s belief in the death of easel painting and his championing of art such as Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting spurred the art world itself to move on more often and more quickly. And move on it has. Many contemporary art theorists see Greenberg’s fierce position – which championed quality above all else and which claimed that “the first obligation of an art critic is to deliver value judgments” – as not merely antiquated and based in elitist snobbery, but verging on the dictatorial and, frankly, evil. These sorts of critics see Greenberg as the last stronghold of the Western, dead-white-male-dominated art world – one in which “aesthetics” had been a false god in whom artists were duped into believing and forced to worship.

“Taste” itself is today a dirty word: it implies that one thing might be better (more successful, complex, beautiful, worthy) than another. Its use invokes other dirty words: “comparison,” “judgment,” “exclusion,” “liking,” and “not liking,” which can lead not only to hurt feelings but to the questions of “greater than, less than, or equal to?” – to the embrace of hierarchies, dismissal, and intolerance.

Greenberg, by contrast, believed that a critic, no less than any human being who hopes to get the most out of life, has a responsibility to develop his taste, which has the power to help him not only to appreciate art but in all matters of experience. Life can be enriched only through quality. It must be zealously guarded and nurtured.

In his seminar “Esthetic Judgment,” presented at Bennington College in 1971, Greenberg said this:

Now it is precisely the subjective that, more than anything else immediate, gets in the way of the distancing that is essential to esthetic experience. The “subjective” means whatever particularizes you as a self with practical, psychological, interested, isolating concerns. In esthetic experience you more or less distance yourself from that self. You become as “objective” as you do when reasoning, which likewise requires distancing from the private self. … The greater – or “purer” – the distancing, the stricter, which is to say the more accurate, your taste or your reasoning becomes.

To become more objective in the sense just given means to become more impersonal. But the pejorative associations of “impersonal” are excluded here. Here, in becoming more impersonal, you become more like other human beings – at least in principle – and therefore more of a representative human being, one who can more adequately represent the species.

Certainly, art can survive without criticism; but great criticism – regardless of its subject – can elevate and enrich our engagement with all art. That is why great criticism is necessary. Greenberg’s unwavering commitment to, and belief in, the power of art and the unavoidable truth of one’s own experience is what gives his criticism its moral strength. He looked to art for the truth, and he would not be bullied.