Collection reveals more about Clement Greenburg than his artists

THIS IS NOT an art show. "Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection," now on display at the Portland Art Museum, is more like a snapshot, a collection of trace evidence, a souvenir. Although it's made up of paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture, what this exhibit really consists of is the cultural footprints of one of the most powerful art critics - perhaps the most powerful - of the 20th century. That alone may make it worth driving to Portland to see.

"A Critic's Collection" is just that - the personal art collection of Clement Greenberg, the only critic whose name you'll find mentioned in many art history books, the erudite and enthusiastic man who defined and explained and promoted and justified modernism and its ultimate flowering in abstract expressionist painting and sculpture.

It was Greenberg who championed the ebullient drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the circle paintings of Kenneth Noland and the whole collection of messy, outrageous canvases that would embody American post-war energy and prompt a generation of skeptics to sniff, "My child could do that."

Before Greenberg, art represented something. After Greenberg, art was something. `Content," he wrote in an essay titled "Art and Kitsch" in 1939, "is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced, in whole or in part, to anything not itself." The medium, he might have written, is the message. There never was an art critic before Greenberg with his kind of power and authority to charm and vex artists, collectors and scholars alike. There might not be another.

For contemporary theorists, giddy with postmodern irony, Greenberg and his insistence on formal standards represent all that was wrong with modernism. But for one moment in history - roughly the middle of the last century - Greenberg stood at the cultural center of the art world, describing all he saw with precision and clarity. (It helped, of course, that most of that world lay within a few miles of his Manhattan apartment.)

Greenberg died in 1994. Now, an entire continent away from New York, more than 150 art works - most of them given to him by the artists he wrote about - have found a home at the Portland Art Museum in what is the largest acquisition of modern art in the museum's history. Greenberg's widow, Janice Van Horne, has explained that she wanted the collection to be made available to the public in a museum setting.

Bruce Guenther, Portland's curator of modern and contemporary art and himself a recent acquisition of the museum's, knew Greenberg and visited his Upper West Side apartment, where he saw many of the works in place. "It's a classic pre-war apartment," he says. "Your first impression was, there was art everywhere. Between windows, over doors, every surface, sooner or later, had books or art." A Noland circle painting hung in the dining room, Guenther explains, gesturing to the same painting on the museum gallery wall. Turn around from it, he says, and you're looking at a view of Central Park.

This is not an art exhibit, the curator agrees. "It's a thumb print, a palimpsest, of this moment in the 20th century and the art scene. This is not a curated exhibit. Rather, it represents the accumulation of 30 years by one individual." The museum acquired the Greenberg collection to fill major gaps in its collection, Guenther said, forming a bridge between its 19th century European and American works and its collection of contemporary Northwest art. The names of the artists make a glamour catalog of mid-20th century art. Pollock, Hans Hofmann, David Smith, Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski and Anthony Caro are among them.

"In our analysis, it was also a unique opportunity to preserve the art that the major art critic of the 20th century owned and lived with," Guenther said.

The collection also has special significance for Northwest contemporary art, which has been heavily influenced by New York and abstract expressionism. All that said, "A Critic's Collection" can be a frustrating show for the casual viewer. There are no knock-your-socks off celebrity pieces to add to your must-see-in-life list of great paintings of the art world. The only Pollock is a small ink sketch on paper, inscribed to Greenberg on his birthday.

In one important sense, this isn't even an art "collection." Greenberg didn't buy paintings. Rather, he accepted them from grateful beneficiaries of his power as a critic - or from artists hoping to impress him. That fact alone robs the collection of strength. Some artists, such as Noland, were more than happy to donate their best work to the cause. Others - Pollock, notably - offered but a polite and grudging minimum. Wandering among the galleries, I was struck with a feeling of emptiness, an inability to focus on any particular work. This really is a show about Greenberg, not the pieces of painting and sculpture, but he's represented only in passing, in a handful of quotations on the gallery walls. This lack of coherence makes many of the paintings difficult to grasp. All art depends on context, but abstract art especially so. An abstract painting that might be brilliance itself - when seen as a result of artistic development - can look, in isolation, remarkably like nothing but a blank canvas.

(Greenberg addressed this conundrum of modernism. When the modernist urge to simplify is allowed to run amok, you can wind up with nothing but a dull, gray expanse of paint. Asked whether that would still be art, the critic said it certainly would be - it just wouldn't necessarily be good art.)

Another problem is, of course, that abstract expressionism is no longer new or revolutionary. In 1960, it inspired awe and vexation. In 2001, you find it lithographed and framed in cheap motel rooms, stenciled on beach towels, imitated by the same Sunday painters Greenberg once ridiculed. It is as safe and tame and overexposed as French impressionism. We can't look on these paintings with fresh eyes, for we've seen them all before - or at least their lesser offspring.

Still, this exhibit is fascinating as a collection of historical artifacts. That circle painting over there is the exact canvas that Noland drove, the paint still wet, in his taxi-cab from Washington. D.C., to New York to show Greenberg. This one over here is signed by Caro "for Clem, with gratitude and affection." One of Greenberg's legendary talents was his ability to stand in an artist's studio and critique the art, both honestly and generously. That helped him gain the affection of many of the artists of whom he wrote, substantially boosting the number of paintings given and dedicated to him.

The star of this show is not the art, but the man behind it.

Aug. 5, 2001