Clement Greenberg
American essayist and visual art critic (1909-1994)
Clement Greenberg () (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994), occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formalist aesthetician. He is best remembered for his association with the art movement abstract expressionism and the painter Jackson Pollock.
Early life
Clement Greenberg was born in the Bronx, New York City, in 1909. His parents were middle-class Jewish immigrants, and he was the eldest of their three sons. Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a young adult, when he began to focus on literature. He attended Erasmus Hall High School, the Marquand School for Boys, and Syracuse University, graduating with an A.B. in 1930, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. He also attended classes at the Art Students League. After college, already fluent in Yiddish and English since childhood, Greenberg taught himself Italian and German in addition to French and Latin. Over the next few years, he traveled the U.S. working for his father's dry-goods business, but the work did not suit his inclinations, so he turned to working as a translator. Greenberg married in 1934, had a son the next year, and was divorced the year after that.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clement Greenberg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.