Clement Greenberg

The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms.

— Clement Greenberg

The peasant finds no "natural" urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end…

— Clement Greenberg

The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction…

— Clement Greenberg

It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling — or new. The…

— Clement Greenberg

Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other…

— Clement Greenberg

Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it…

— Clement Greenberg

Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of…

— Clement Greenberg

For every good art critic there may be ten great artists.

— Clement Greenberg

The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.

— Clement Greenberg

A large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best re-create the instantaneous unity of nature…

— Clement Greenberg

The reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience.

— Clement Greenberg

You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read…

— Clement Greenberg

Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because…

— Clement Greenberg

Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is -…

— Clement Greenberg

The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and…

— Clement Greenberg

One is also reminded of how, in art, the tortoise so often overtakes the hare...

— Clement Greenberg

A poor life is lived by any one who doesn't regularly take time out to stand and gaze, or sit and listen,…

— Clement Greenberg

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

— Clement Greenberg

Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because…

— Clement Greenberg

With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.

— Clement Greenberg

The precondition for kitsch, is the availability of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries kitsch can take advantage of for its…

— Clement Greenberg

Decoration is asked to be 'merely' pleasing, 'merely' embellishing, and the 'functional' logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such 'mereness.'…

— Clement Greenberg

Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.

— Clement Greenberg

I don't get into 'becauses.' When you come into a studio you see a number of works. My habit is to go…

— Clement Greenberg

The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present…

— Clement Greenberg