ABSTRACT
The case of Harold Rosenberg is an exceedingly strange one. Here is a writer of extraordinary intelligence, with an uncommon gift for rhetoric and a wide acquaintance with the materials that form his ostensible subject matter. To account for the disjunction, it is essential that one understand the place which Mr. Rosenberg's criticism occupies in the development of recent American painting, for his writings on art belong to a distinct phase in the history of the New York School. The Anxious Object, consisting of essays written in the sixties and subtitled "Art Today and Its Audience," is in the main an attempt to sustain the values of the fifties in the face of the radically altered situation at the present time—a situation in which the hegemony of Abstract Expressionist painting has been breached, at least in the mind of its audience, by a variety of countervailing styles.
