ABSTRACT
The structure falls today upon the ambitious abstractionist that he cannot longer provoke or scandalize by being non-objective. His amorphous and geometric forms cannot sing the tunes of home-soil nationalism or of proletarian discontent—much less combine them as present American "social realists" seem to. Therefore, perhaps in a new sense, the elimination of the subject offers a survival value. The catalyst for Morris's attack on Greenberg was the author's now classic essay "The Decline of Cubism," which appeared in the March 1948 issue of Partisan Review. Despite Morris's assertions to the contrary, Greenberg did in fact recognize the pioneering role that American abstractionists had played in the 1930s, even if he viewed their work as a foil against which the new generation had to react. In 1957 he reminisced about the decade in which he had come to prominence as an art critic: Abstract and quasi-abstract Cubism reigned at the annual exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists.
