A HALF-CENTURY ago, the art critic of Partisan Review, the house organ of the New York intellectuals, declared that the School of Paris had run its course, and that the greatest art in the world at that time was being produced by a group of obscure abstract painters in Greenwich Village whose work struck most critics as ugly and nonsensical. It was a breathtakingly audacious claim, one that could easily have wrecked the career of the man who made it. If Clement Greenberg had been wrong about Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and the other artists of the New York School whom he championed all but singlehandedly throughout the Forties, his seemingly bizarre pronouncements would simply have been dismissed as the work of a crank; instead, they threw the art world into a protracted convulsion, at the end of which the merits of abstract expressionism were acknowledged by critics, collectors, and connoisseurs everywhere.
Clement Greenberg: A Life, by Florence Rubenfeld (Scribner, 336 pp., $30)
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