Balls and Strikes

Charles Reeve

  • Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg by Alice Goldfarb Marquis
    Lund Humphries, 321 pp, £25.00, April 2006, ISBN 0 85331 940 5

Enrico Donati’s small painting White to White features an aggressively encrusted pale rectangle with a second rectangle – black, white and brown – in its top left corner. Dated 1953, fairly early for such deliberately coarse abstraction, the painting landed in the collection of the famously plain-spoken art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg never published on the relatively obscure Donati, so one might wonder if he liked White to White. This isn’t a trivial issue in the bid to assess Greenberg’s legacy: true to the way he lived, the art that he owned might be his most evocative biography.

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[*] Clement Greenberg: A Critic’s Collection, edited by Karen Wilkin and Bruce Guenther (Princeton, 180 pp., £37.95, 2001, 978 0 691 09049 8).

[†] Writing Back to Modern Art: After Greenberg, Fried and Clark (Routledge, 288 pp., £19.99, July 2005, 978 0 415 32429 8); Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratisation of the Senses (Chicago, 544 pp., £28.50, September 2006, 0 226 40951 1).

Vol. 29 No. 7 · 5 April 2007 » Charles Reeve » Balls and Strikes (print version)
Pages 27-28 | 3027 words