Michael Fried

In the remarks that follow, I challenge the interpretation of modernism put for-
ward in T. J. Clark's provocative essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art."
As will become clear, my aim in doing so is not to defend Greenberg against
Clark's strictures. On the contrary, although my own writings on recent abstract
art are deeply indebted to the example of Greenberg's practical criticism (I con-
sider him the foremost critic of new painting and sculpture of our time), I shall
suggest that Clark's reading of modernism shares certain erroneous assumptions
with Greenberg's, on which indeed it depends. I shall then go on to rehearse an
alternative conception of the modernist enterprise that I believe makes better
sense of the phenomena in question than does either of theirs, and, in an attempt
to clinch my case, I shall conclude by looking briefly at an interesting phase in the
work of the contemporary English sculptor Anthony Caro, whose achievement
since 1960 I take to be canonical for modernism generally.

At the center of Clark's essay is the claim that the practices of modernism in the
arts are fundamentally practices of negation. This claim is false.

Not that there is nothing at all to the view he espouses. In the first place, there
is a(Gramscian?) sense in which a given cultural expression may be thought of as
occupying a social space that might otherwise be occupied by another and,
therefore, as bearing a relation to that other that might loosely be characterized as
one of negation. Furthermore, particular modernist developments in the arts have

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