ART AND CULTURE

These pieces collected in this book are essays on art and culture which appeared originally in Partisan Review, The Nation, Commentary and other publications. They express the author's views on avant-garde painting in general and such figures as Renoir, Cezanne, Braque, Kandinsky in particular. The last section of the book is devoted to comments on literature. These essays, while always intelligent and showing a deep concern for art and culture, are not always illuminating. It is hard to say what is right or what is wrong. It is perhaps that Greenberg is both didactic- and muzzy: i.e. ""Jackson Pollock's problem has never been one of authenticity; rather it is to find the means to cope with the literalness of his emotion, which is of a kind that seems foreign at first to pictorial art. And though he may overpower his means at times, he rarely falsifies them."" Some will be confused by this type of commentary; others, more used to the peculiar dialect of the avant-garde, may find it clarifying and communicative.