Clement Greenberg and the Postwar Modernist Canon: Minimizing the Role of Germany and Northern Europe

Abstract

Clement Greenberg played a leading role in constructing a canonical narrative of modernism, and his views helped push German and Nordic contributions to the peripheries of many accounts of modern art.¹ Even though he started his career in 1939 as a literary critic who advocated German modernists to an American audience, his enthusiasms for modern poets and artists linked to Germany waned as World War II progressed. By the end of the war, he had gravitated to the emphatically formalist, French and cubist-centered aesthetic that he would make famous over the next decade. Greenberg always claimed that this aesthetic made use of a process that freed anyone employing it from social and cultural prejudices, but recent analysis of his writing has uncovered mounting evidence that mainstream, post—World War II, American, cultural values colored his judgments. Scholars in a number of fields have documented how his responsiveness to anticommunism and the postwar intensification of masculinist values in society helped shape his judgments. This chapter examines how Americans’ disquietude about German and Northern culture following World War II also informed his thinking and became a fixture in the modernist canon he played such an important role in forming.