Greenberg’s connoisseurship in Mondrian’s space

In ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), Clement Greenberg famously wrote that ‘flatness alone was unique and exclusive to pictorial art’. However, in a less cited passage, he admitted to exaggeration: there ‘can never be an absolute flatness’, and an artist like Mondrian pursued ‘a pictorial, strictly optical third dimension’, a perceived turn to opticality for which the critic was later faulted. Closer readings of drafts for this and other seminal texts such as ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ (1940) show that Greenberg was himself a close reader or connoisseur of the spatial and optical (i.e. ‘plastic’) modalities of Mondrian’s ‘Neo-Plasticism’. An underlying tension thus emerges between the familiar Greenberg as ideologue-theorist and a lesser-known Greenberg as connoisseur-critic. The former constructed powerful dogmas of modernism that constituted his primary, lasting influence, yet his greatest contribution may lie precisely in his close readings of specific artists, above all within the orbit of Mondrian’s space.