Mondrian vs. Greenberg
Art in any form has a way of becoming something that evolves with the times whether it is liked by anyone or not. There are various genres of art and each of those have started somewhere completely different then where it has settled. Even artists have been known to experiment or completely adapt to a different style of art. In the case of Piet Mondrian, who started his painting career with Impressionism and moved to what he calls, Neo-Plasticism. Clement Greenberg was an art critic who believed in the power of the avant-garde and extremely dislikes “kitsch” art. Although Mondrian was born almost forty years before Greenberg, I feel that they would have known each other in the art world for the years that they overlapped and with Mondrian moving to New York where Greenberg was born. Greenberg and Mondrian have similar ideas about what art has become in their times and what makes art “good”.
Piet Mondrian is a world-famous painter who started his career in Impressionism but was not happy with how his works didn’t make his audience delve deeper into their reactions to his work. His earlier work had lost its purpose to him because it his audience wasn’t understanding what he wanted so he started to take out all of the “unnecessary” parts. He took his art to a new level that some like Greenberg would consider avant-garde. This new avant-garde art had been ultimately reduced down to just grid lines and colored rectangles. The new abstract style that Mondrian had adopted is mentioned in his essay “Dialogue on the New Plastic” it says that this style started to come about after meeting the founders of the Cubist movement in Paris. He was inspired by the line work prevalent in Cubists work and was inspired to get his paintings to the grid construction that a painting is built on. Mondrian states in his dialogue essay “the straight line tells the truth; and the significance you want it to have is of no value of painting…Painting has to be purely plastic, and in order to achieve this it must use plastic means that do not signify the individual. This also justifies the use of rectangular color planes” (AiT 287). His work had definitely become something that no one had really seen in that time and Greenberg had actually commented on one of Mondrian’s transitional pieces Composition in Brown and Gray “Here, Mondrian is playing with space, color and shapes in a new way, and therefore avoids painting something that is predictable. According to Greenberg, something like Composition is daring and esoteric (avant-garde), not mechanical or formulaic (kitsch)” (The ArtStory.org, n.d.).
Clement Greenberg was a renowned art critic with a different take on art in the world. His critiques have caught the eye of many supporters and many who think he is crazy. Greenberg’s essay on “Avant-garde and kitsch” shows that he prefers the art of the avant-garde and any art like “Pop Art” would be considered “kitsch” and should have never existed. His concept of the “avant-garde” means that all art should strive to become the newest and greatest in the art scene. Unlike Mondrian, artists like Warhol who strayed towards the Pop Art style in which Greenberg describes as being “kitsch” or as the dictionary defines it as, “art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way”. Clement Greenberg has been known to make artists he critiques mad because he does not like the style of art in which they create which makes his critique bias. Greenberg lets his personal taste in art take control of some of the critiques he makes but when it’s an artist who paints in the avant-garde, he could rave about it. In regard to the Dutch painter Mondrian, he loved his transitional work into his Compositions paintings. Greenberg states in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” that, “Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinksy, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cezanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors” (AiT 541). His fascination with avant-garde artists, in my opinion, helped to fuel other artists to try to paint in a new style even though he publicly denounces Pop Art in his essay.
In the years that the lives of Mondrian and Greenberg overlapped I would hope that they were friends who helped to fuel each other’s artistic abilities by encouraging and pushing to the limits. But I feel that Mondrian would have liked the idea of Pop Art which Greenberg does not. I think Mondrian would have enjoyed seeing Warhol using everyday household items and making them the main focus of his art. The avant-garde concept in art just means that an artist is doing something new and no one has ever seen it before, wouldn’t that make Pop Art avant-garde? To Greenberg that is a firm NO, but I think that Mondrian would have appreciated this style and might have started to dabble in it and see what ways he could use his grids.
In both essays it was interesting to see how they viewed art in general and how Mondrian viewed his own art. Mondrian was looking for a way to describe his new art and said that it is Plastic while Greenberg enjoys art that no one has seen unless its Pop Art. Mondrian’s essay was in the form of a dialogue in which the conversation is between a painter and a singer. Both are in the art world but have different views of art. The singer preferred Mondrian’s early Impressionist work because they were able to see what he “wanted” the audience to see. When in reality Mondrian had always wanted his audience to dig a little deeper into the meaning of his art even during the Impressionist days because he wanted to show his audience a deeper meaning. Mondrian’s solution to this was to get rid of all of the unnecessary bits and just keep the basic structure of his paintings. Greenberg loved Mondrian’s transition work into his Compositions because, again, it was something no one has done before, and it had fascinated him. Greenberg’s essay about avant-garde and kitsch is, in my opinion, not a true critique because it has too much emotional bias towards the art genres involved. In the end they both did what made them happy and told their audiences what they wanted them to know, whether or not the audience is accepting of it.
Works Cited
Charles Harrison, P. W. (2002). Clement Greenberg "Avant-Garde and Kitsch". In Art In Theory (pp. 539-549). Blackwell Publishing.
Charles Harrison, P. W. (2003). Piet Mondrian "Dialogue on the New Plastic". In Art in Theory (pp. 284-289). Blackwell Publishing.
The ArtStory.org. (n.d.). Retrieved from Clement Greenberg: https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ARTH208-5.2.1-Clement-Greenberg.pdf