Clement Greenberg: A Life.

Clement Greenberg: A Life, by Florence Rubenfeld (Scribner, 336 pp., $30)

Mr. Teachout, Commentary's music critic, is writing a biography of H. L. Mencken.

A HALF-CENTURY ago, the art critic of Partisan Review, the house organ of the New York intellectuals, declared that the School of Paris had run its course, and that the greatest art in the world at that time was being produced by a group of obscure abstract painters in Greenwich Village whose work struck most critics as ugly and nonsensical. It was a breathtakingly audacious claim, one that could easily have wrecked the career of the man who made it. If Clement Greenberg had been wrong about Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and the other artists of the New York School whom he championed all but singlehandedly throughout the Forties, his seemingly bizarre pronouncements would simply have been dismissed as the work of a crank; instead, they threw the art world into a protracted convulsion, at the end of which the merits of abstract expressionism were acknowledged by critics, collectors, and connoisseurs everywhere.

As Florence Rubenfeld writes in her new biography of Greenberg: "He possessed an almost Baudelairean sense of his age, was so much in tune with the painting and sculpture of his time that, for a brief moment, it was as if the path along which American art would unfold had been revealed to him in advance."

For his pains, Greenberg became the most despised art critic in America, though there were plenty of other reasons to hate him: he was, Miss Rubenfeld claims, a vicious bully and a philandering husband who spent much of the last quarter-century of his life in a drugged and drunken stupor, surrounded by a dwindling band of sycophants who hung on his every sneer. No doubt she will be accused of exaggeration and distortion by at least some of those who knew Greenberg personally, but her book was written with his cooperation, and while Clement Greenberg: A Life is presumably no more than a partial portrait of a bristlingly difficult man, one suspects that it is largely accurate as far as it goes.

Miss Rubenfeld acknowledges at the outset that this is a "social biography," not an intellectual one, but she has nevertheless gone to considerable trouble to summarize the outlines of Greenberg's thought and describe the complex cultural milieu from which he emerged. The results are often superficial, but also well-meaning --the anti-Communism of the Partisan Review circle, for instance, is described without condescension or repugnance -- and readers unfamiliar with Greenberg's writings will come away from Clement Greenberg: A Life with a clear understanding of what he stood for, both as an art critic and as a cultural politician.

Though he would become one of the foremost anti-Stalinist intellectuals of the postwar era, Greenberg started out as a full-fledged Marxist, in the process acquiring a belief in the inevitability of history that played a central role in shaping his theory of modernism. Modern artists, he argued, were driven to abstraction by the lash of history, having found representation inadequate as a means of expressing their alienation from capitalist society:

The imperative comes from history, from the age in conjunction with a particular moment reached in a particular tradition of art. This conjunction holds the artist in a vise from which at the present moment he can escape only by surrendering his ambition and returning to a stale past. . . . The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch.

But Greenberg never allowed his ideology to prevent him from seeing clearly the paintings and sculpture about which he wrote, and though he believed devoutly that "the very best painting, the major painting, of our age is almost exclusively abstract," he was no less capable of responding sensitively to the work of such gifted representationalists as John Marin, Milton Avery, and Edward Hopper:

A special category of art should be devised for the kind of thing Hopper does. He is not a painter in the full sense; his means are second-hand, shabby, and impersonal. But his rudimentary sense of composition is sufficient for a message that conveys an insight into the present nature of American life for which there is no parallel in our literature, though that insight itself is literary. . . . if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.

Why, then, is Greenberg reviled by the vast majority of art critics and scholars? In 1961, he published Art and Culture, a collection of essays, most of them heavily revised, in which his nuanced critical positions were reduced to a parade of blunt obiter dicta. Not until the publication in 1986 of the first two volumes of his collected writings did it become possible for younger readers to acquaint themselves with Greenberg's groundbreaking reviews of the Forties; those readers had known him solely from Art and Culture, in which too much is asserted and not enough explained, and thus were unaware of how receptive and wide-ranging he had been in his earlier days as a working critic.

Around the time that Art and Culture came out, Greenberg became closely identified with a group of painters known as the "color-field abstractionists," whose work he believed to be the culmination of modernism. He praised the work of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski in disconcertingly lavish terms, curtly dismissing all competing artists as minor. Because of his track record as a trend-spotter, his new passion was taken seriously by collectors and curators: where Greenberg went, money followed.

This time, though, the prophet of abstract expressionism had bet on the wrong horse, for the high seriousness of late modernism was already in the process of being supplanted by the playful nihilism of the postmodern era, whose reigning god was not Pablo Picasso but Marcel Duchamp. "The practiced eye," Greenberg wrote in 1961, "tends always toward the definitely and positively good in art, knows it is there, and will remain dissatisfied with anything else." Such sentiments came increasingly to be viewed as elitist and reactionary, as did abstraction itself; by the Eighties, art was once again regarded as an instrument of radical social change, and Greenberg, who had seen it all before in the Thirties, simply stopped writing, perhaps out of disgust. He published nothing of significance in the two decades prior to his death in 1994, though his earlier work continued to be cited contemptuously by academics who never forgave him for turning his back on Marx.

Greenberg's critics were right about one thing -- his history-driven theory of modernism was too neat by half -- just as he himself was mistaken about a great many things, not least the long-term importance of the color-field painters, whose work he loved. But every critic makes mistakes, and Greenberg will be remembered in the long run not for overrating Morris Louis, but for having produced a body of writing about art that is fully worthy of comparison with the best work of the best critics of the twentieth century. Even now, it is impossible to read him without being stirred by the compelling force of his aesthetic convictions. That is why Clement Greenberg continues to make people angry to this day: critics are hated not for being wrong, but for being right.