Word: greenbergs
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...Since Clement Greenberg considers his mutilation of David Smith's work an improvement, presumably Mr. Greenberg is willing to purchase the sculpture from the estate at more than their valuation prior to desecration...
...changes seem to have been made because Greenberg thought Smith's use of color in his late sculptures unsuccessful, and preferred plain steel to the white primer coats. "Clem never made any secret of his dislike of Smith's painted work," recalls former Guggenheim Museum Curator Edward Fry, who organized a major Smith retrospective...
...back to raw steel. If he had wanted them raw, he would not have begun to paint them. Indeed, the vitality and open-endedness of his work largely stemmed from his refusal to entertain the kind of narrow imperatives about painting as painting and sculpture as sculpture that Greenberg, in the days when he was writing criticism, proposed...
...counterpoint between steel and paint did not always come off, but Smith's effort to make it work was an integral part of American art history. Greenberg's decision to posthumously destroy the evidence of what he considered Smith's "failure" was, one must in charity assume, directed by sincere aesthetic motives - just as John Ruskin's posthumous burning of "pornographic" watercolors by J.M.W. Turner in the 19th century was sincerely meant to protect Turner's moral reputation...
...Greenberg sticks by his guns. "I can answer to my conscience," he declares. "Were I to have known that this fuss would come up I would still have done the same thing, and I'm only sorry I didn't do it earlier." But conscience is not the point. The point is that altering the work of a dead artist - especially one of Smith's eminence - is an arrogant intrusion that borders on vandalism. We are entitled to the work as it left Smith's hand, warts and all. Perhaps the best thing to be said...