Rating
The Pequod Review:
Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture is a series of critical essays on primarily visual art and literature, as previously published in Partisan Review, The Nation, Commentary, Arts, Art News, and The New Leader. Greenberg takes an expansive view of culture:
One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T.S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end.
Greenberg has a perceptive eye, as he profiles a diverse range of artist and writers (Renoir, Cezanne, Chagall, Kandinsky, Pollack, Winslow Homer, T.S. Eliot, and Bertolt Brecht). But he has a frustrating inability to reach firm conclusions or express clear judgments.