Greenberg’s Marxism: Clement Greenberg’s Unfinished Essay Draft on André Breton’s “Political Position of Surrealism” (1935)

Abstract

This previously unpublished transcript of an undated and incomplete handwritten essay on surrealist doyen André Breton by American art critic Clement Greenberg is illuminating in terms of the otherwise somewhat oblique connection between politics and avant-garde art for the younger Greenberg, the precise nature of whose professed Marxism has long been contested. It was composed in response to Breton’s “Political Position of Surrealism” (1935). In his text, Greenberg argues that Breton is correct in his claim that radical artists should not let questions of politics distract them from autonomous work. However, unlike Breton, he does not contend that this is the case because such artists will be vindicated by future audiences and should, accordingly, work in defiance of a mass audience. Rather, Greenberg argues that no other mode of working opens up new fields of aesthetic experience while bemoaning the state of affairs where such art is inaccessible to the working class, ultimately calling for revolution to rectify the situation.