Greenbergian

Greenbergian refers to a school of art criticism associated with Clement Greenberg, a prominent mid-20th-century American critic. The term denotes a formalist, medium-specific approach to evaluating art, in which the primacy of the artwork’s form over its subject matter or social context is emphasized. Central to Greenbergian thought is medium specificity: each art form has a defining set of formal constraints, and the highest achievements arise when artists reveal and refine those intrinsic properties rather than engaging in decoration, narrative, or external references.

In painting, Greenberg argued for the superiority of the flat picture plane and the autonomy of painting as a medium, promoting abstract, non-representational work that foregrounded color, line, and surface treatment while minimizing illusionistic depth, ornament, or rhetoric. This led to praise for modernists such as Pollock, de Kooning, and Newman, whose work was seen as illustrating the logic of painting itself. Greenberg also extended formalism to other media and held that high art should resist mass culture and kitsch.

The Greenbergian program influenced gallery practice, exhibitions, and art education, shaping postwar American criticism and the reception of Abstract Expressionism until critics began to challenge its limits. Later writers, including Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss, argued that Greenbergian formalism either overemphasized visual autonomy or neglected social, historical, and political dimensions of art. The term remains a convenient shorthand for a broader family of formalist, medium-focused analyses associated with Greenberg’s writings and their legacy.