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London Review of Books

Balls and Strikes subscriber-only content

Charles Reeve

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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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Charles Reeve is a curator at the Ontario College of Art and Design, where he also teaches in the faculties of liberal studies and art.