ABSTRACT
Unlike poets, painters and sculptors rarely practice criticism; and perhaps partly as a consequence of this, the job of writing about art has tended to pass by default to men and women who are in no way qualified for their profession. Nowhere in Art and Culture does its author appear to have forgotten that history, works of art and essays in art criticism are all made by men who live at a particular moment in history and whose perceptions and values are, therefore, no more than relative. There is, in a sense, 'an inner artistic logic' in Greenberg's view of the history of modernist painting in France and America. Moreover, the element of internal 'logic' in the development of modernist painting can be perceived only in retrospect. The chief function of the dialectic of modernism in the visual arts has been to provide a principle by which painting can change, transform and renew itself.
