The prescience of a cranky critic

Once upon a time, in faraway Manhattan, there lived an evil art critic named Clement Greenberg. He hurled opinions like lightening bolts. He amassed power that covertly dominated battles over who would rise in the art world. He skipped across ethical lines between his work as a critic and that of power broker.

At the same time, there was another figure: Clement the Good. He befriended artists. They invited him to their studios, where they welcomed his canny advice. He cared little for riches and gave himself to a lifelong dance with art and ideas.

It's difficult to believe that both Greenbergs shared one life, to read the sharply differing accounts of him published over recent decades. He was regarded as the most provocative, if not the most influential, art critic of the 20th century. He made the intellectual case for American abstraction after World War II. He became the most forceful early champion of Jackson Pollock. Still, for much of the time since his death in 1994 at 85, and sustained in part by a 1997 biography, memories of the evil Clem have prevailed.

Lately, that has been changing as art historians focus less on his Janus-faced persona and more on his writing about the evolution of Modernism. In books, essays and university courses, scholars, writers and even artists say they are finding new ways to understand the critic. Meanwhile, Greenberg's critical path is gaining an unusual kind of exposure as his personal collection of artwork makes its way across the country. The 65 pieces in "Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection" will be on view at the Palm Springs Desert Museum through Jan. 2, before completing a two-year, seven-stop journey at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, N.Y.

Three scholars engaged in the reexamination of Greenberg are art historian Robert Hobbs, who has been teaching an art theory seminar at Yale University this fall; James Meyer, an Emory University art historian who recently wrote about a previously unpublished Greenberg essay; and Caroline Jones, who teaches at MIT. In the spring, the University of Chicago Press will publish Jones' book "Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses," a theoretical study of Greenberg's life and ideas.