Clement Greenberg: the collected essays and criticism
Clement Greenberg, John O'Brian (Editor)
Publisher: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1986-
ISBN: 0226306208 DDC: 700 LCC: N7445.2
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue8/erasuregenteel.htm
"Photograph of Robert Rauschenberg seated on Untitled (Elemental Sculpture) with White Painting (seven panel) behind him at the basement of Stable Gallery, New York (1953).
© Photograph: Allan Grant, Life Magazine © Time Warner Inc/Robert Rauschenberg/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2006
Rauschenberg's moves in white are part of the grand gesture that his early work strove for and often achieved. His colleague John Cage recognised this when he wrote: "The white paintings were airports for the lights, shadows and particles." Rauschenberg was able to make nothing the subject of a painting in a way that Cage would, after him, make nothing the subject of a piece of music. Then everything could enter in. "Having made the empty canvases (a canvas is never empty), Rauschenberg became the giver of gifts." The timing of these acts was crucial; it was a different response to the Second World War and the atom bomb. Unlike the existentialism of Giacometti, which depicted man alone in the universe, Rauschenberg's emptiness has a positive tonality, and although he in part rejected the serious themes of his Abstract Expressionist predecessors, his White Paintings have nothing of the humour of the Surrealists." accessed 6/5/11
p.254 "Aesthetic surprise comes from inspiration and sensibility as well as being abreast of the artistic times."
p.255 "The best of Monet´s lily pad paintings... are not made any less challenging and arduous ...by their nominally sweet colour. Equations like these cannot be thought out in advance, they can only be felt and discovered."
http://annetruitt.org/work/sculpture/
p.256 "That presence as achieved through size was aesthetically extraneous, I already knew. That presence as achieved through the look of non-art was likewise aesthetically extraneous, I did not yet know. Truitt´s sculpture had this kind of presence but did not hide behind it."
