Clement Greenberg

 Art critic and essayist Clement Greenberg was born January 16, 1909. I found this quote about him: 

"Greenberg’s writings mostly dealt with non-objective art, Abstract Expressionism, and other forms of formalist and abstract styles, such as color field painting. The crucial importance in a painting for him was in lines, shape and color, while emotional content was considered secondary. Throughout his writings his focus is on a formal purity and dissolution of a subject as the necessary qualities of modernism. Among the creatives he praised early on was Hans Hofmann whose paintings he saw as the highest level of contemporary art, executed in a “radical and uncompromising way.” He also ‘discovered’ Jackson Pollock, and was the first critic who mentioned the most famous figure of action painting in print. It was in his essay for the Nation in 1943. Greenberg described Pollock as “the first painter I know of to have got something positive from the muddiness of color that so profoundly characterizes a great deal of American painting.” Flatness of the picture plane came from the evolution of modernism which started with Manet, and was of utmost importance to Greenberg, who observed it as the unique and exclusive pictorial trait." https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/clement-greenberg

Photo copied under fair use principles from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clement_Greenberg.jpg