Harold Rosenberg; Born February 2, 1906 New York City, New York, U.S. The essay was reprinted in Rosenberg's book The Tradition of the New in 1959. Adobe Acrobat Reader DC software is the free global standard for reliably viewing. It's the only PDF viewer that can open and interact with all types of PDF. His famous 1. Harold Rosenberg The Tradition Of The New Pdf Files. Traditional property by same purchasing rings the tradition of the new harold rosenberg.pdf used so one the tradition of the new harold rosenberg.pdf is the. The Tradition Of The New pdf - Harold Rosenberg. Lawrence college of the essays of, traditions which you were. Harold Rosenberg. The Tradition Of The New [Harold Rosenberg] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Harold Rosenberg was undoubtedly the most important American art.

1. Harold Rosenberg

O ne of the more improbable geostrategic surprises of recent years has been the revival of the North Korean economy under the direction of Kim Jong Un. Just to be clear, that economy remains pitiably decrepit, horribly distorted, and desperately dependent on outside support. Recent estimates suggest that its annual merchandise exports do not reach even 1 percent of the level generated by its nemesis, South Korea. Even so, the economic comeback on Kim Jong Un’s watch has been sufficiently strong to permit a dramatic ramp-up in the tempo of his nation’s race to amass a credible nuclear arsenal and develop functional intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking the U.S. That is, of course, the express and stated objective of the program. Pyongyang today appears to be perilously close to achieving its aim—much closer now, indeed, than complacent Western intelligence assessments had presumed would be possible by this juncture. But then, North Korea is full of surprises for foreign observers.

Full disclosure: I am one of those who seriously underestimated North Korea’s resilience in the 1990s. Twenty years ago, I would have thought it almost unimaginable for the North Korean state to survive to this day. Needless to say, subsequent events have proved otherwise, and studying my own mistakes has led to the analysis under way here.

Joan Robinson, “Korean Miracle” Monthly Review, January 1965, Vol. Korea, the economic race between the north and the south: a research paper, ER 78-10008, January 1978, CIA. Kim Il Sung, Works, Vol. 31 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1987), p.76. Nicholas Eberstadt and Judith Banister, The Population of North Korea. (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1992). Kim Il Sung, Selected Works, Vol.

5 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1972), p. On this man-made, and completely unnecessary, tragedy, see Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid and Reform, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Hastings, A Most Enterprising Country: North Korea in the Global Economy. (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

Perhaps the best analysis of this transformation is Kim Byung-Yeon, The North Korean Economy: Collapse and Transition. (New York: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 2017). Woodward is Bob Woodward, of course. Every few years, for more than 30 years, Woodward has sent Washington reeling with a book-length, insider account of one administration after another, presenting government as high drama, with a glittering cast of villains and heroes. The sequence of the symptoms seldom varies. First comes the Buildup. We hear premonitory rumblings: Freshly minted Woodward revelations are on the way!

His publisher declares an embargo on the book, mostly as a tease. Another reporter writes an unauthorized report guessing at what the revelations might be. Washington can scarcely breathe. At last the first excerpts appear in a three-part serial in Woodward’s home paper, the Washington Post. We enter the Swoon. The excerpts tell of betrayals and estrangements, shouting matches and tearful reconciliations, tough decisions and disappointing failures of nerve, all at the highest levels of government.

Woodward goes on TV shows to explain his findings. Sources attack him; he stands by his book. The frenzy intensifies, the breathing is labored, until, at last, comes the Spasm, as all the characters from the book refuse to comment on a “work of tabloid fiction.” Then the newspaper excerpts end, there is a collapsing sigh, a dying fall, and the physical book, the thing itself, appears.

The text seems an afterthought, limp as a wind-sock and, by now, even less interesting. If there were more revelations to be found in its pages, after all, we would have read them already. We skulk back to the routines of what passes for normal life in Washington, slightly abashed at our momentary loss of self-control. This is the Woodward Detumescence. Shakespeare foresaw it in a sonnet: “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” The Fire and Fury frenzy omitted some of these steps, prolonged others. It was touched off by an excerpt in New York, appearing a week before the book’s original publication date. Running to roughly 7,000 words, the excerpt was densely packed and so juicy it should have come with napkins.

The article’s revelations about White House backbiting and self-loathing are by now universally known, and have been from the moment the excerpt hit the Web. One thing they make plain is that Michael Wolff bears little resemblance to Bob Woodward. Over a long career, our Bob has shown himself to be a tireless and meticulous reporter.

He is a creature of Washington, besotted by government; Woodward never found a briefing paper he wouldn’t happily read, as long as it was none of his business. Wolff, on the other hand, is an incarnation of Manhattan media. He’s a 21st-century J.J. Hunsecker, the gossip columnist in the great New York movie Sweet Smell of Success, although, unlike J.J., he has a pleasing prose style and a sense of irony. His curiosity about the workings of government and the shadings of public policy is nonexistent. “Trump,” Wolff writes with typical condescension, “had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare.” Neither does Wolff. Woodward would have given us blow-by-blow accounts of committee markups.

Wolff mentions Obamacare only glancingly, even though it was by far the most consequential failure of Trump’s first year. If you want to learn how Trump constructs that Dreamsicle swirl that rests on the top of his head, or the skinny on Steve Bannon’s sartorial habits, then Wolff is your man.

He tries to tell his story chronologically, but he occasionally runs out of things to say and has to vamp until the timeline lets him pop in a new bit of shocking gossip. Early in the book, for example, after he has established that Trump is reviled and mocked by nearly everyone who works for him, Wolff leads us into a tutorial on The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s doorstop on the 1960s White House wise men and whiz kids who thought it would be a great idea to get in a land war in Southeast Asia. He calls Halberstam’s book a “cautionary tale about the 1960s establishment.” Wolff’s chin-pulling goes on for several hundred words.

Apparently, Steve Bannon had had the book on his desk. This is interesting, I guess, and so are the excessive digressions about New York real estate, Manhattan’s media culture, the evolution of grande dames into postfeminist socialites, and many other subjects that are orthogonal to the book’s purpose. If you’ve bought Fire and Fury, chances are, you wanted to learn things you didn’t know about the first year of the Trump administration. The New York excerpt was chockablock with such stuff, told in sharply drawn scenes and vivid, verbatim quotes.

But the book dwells much more on general impressions, flecked here and there with scandalous asides. In these longeurs—most of the book—Wolff writes at an odd remove, from the middle distance. The prose loses its immediacy and becomes diffuse. He’s not so much padding his book as filibustering his readers, perhaps hoping to deflect a reader’s attention from another revelation: He really hasn’t delivered the goods. All of Wolff’s most scandalous material was filleted and packed into the New York excerpt. Listening to discussions among friends and colleagues, I keep hearing the same items, all from the magazine: Staffers think Trump might be (literally) illiterate, Steve Bannon thinks the Mueller investigation puts Trump’s family in legal jeopardy, the president uses vulgar language when talking about women. He is a child, Wolff wants us to know, and the disorder of his government is directly traceable to that alarming fact.

And it is indeed alarming, but nobody who has followed Trump’s Twitter feed or watched his news conferences will think it’s news. Wolff wrote a scintillating 7,000-word magazine article; the problem is that he spread it over a 328-page book. The rumor has gone around (hey, if he can do it, so can I) that before submitting his manuscript, Wolff warned his publisher that it didn’t contain much that was new. This explains a lot. Wolff clearly was unprepared for the explosion set off by the magazine article.

You could see it in his halting explanations of his journalism techniques. When his quotes were questioned, he let it be known that he had “dozens of hours” of tapes. (Other news reports inflated the number to hundreds.) When quotes continued to be questioned, he was asked, by colleagues and interviewers, to release the tapes.

Wolff said his book threatens to bring down the president—on evidence that he alone has and won’t produce. Spoken like a true journalist! Much has been made of this modern Hunsecker’s techniques. One explanation for the candor of his sources is that Wolff gained their confidence by misleading them about his intentions; they had concluded he was writing a book that would show the administration in a kinder light. “I said what I had to to get the story,” he proudly told one interviewer. Many of his colleagues in the press have shrugged at his willful misdirection—his deception, in fact—as a standard trick of the trade.

They’re probably right. But they demonstrated again the utter detachment of journalists from normal life. Whole professions are generally and rightly maligned—trial lawyers, car salesmen, lobbyists—because ordinary people see that prevarication is built into their work. When it comes to the people who write the books they read, they have a right to ask how far the deception goes. If a writer will mislead his sources, how can we be sure he won’t he do the same to his readers? “My evidence is the book,” Wolff responds. I’m not sure what he means.

In any case, as the Detumescence recedes, it becomes clearer that his evidence is thin. The book isn’t particularly good journalism, but it’s a triumph of marketing.

Our Trump hatred has been targeted with such precision that we’ll lower any standard to embrace Fire and Fury, even if the tale as told signifies nothing, or nothing much. A t one point during his 2000 campaign, George W. Bush gave his listeners a folksy admonition: “Don’t be takin’ a speck out of your neighbor’s eye when you got a log in your own.” This amused Frank Bruni of the New York Times, who called it “an interesting variation on the saying about the pot and the kettle.” Bruni’s words in turn amused the substantial portion of Americans who knew that Bush was actually quoting Matthew 7:3. To them it was simply unimaginable that someone could graduate Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English and subsequently study at the Columbia School of Journalism, as Bruni did, without having once encountered the Sermon on the Mount. The anecdote revealed the extent to which, in the space of a few generations, America went from habitual Bible reading to biblical illiteracy, and of the most abject and utter kind. This is the justification for the Museum of the Bible.

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The building has one passage of real brilliance. The entrance portal on Fourth Street is flanked by a pair of immense bronze panels, nearly 40 feet high, that call to mind Boaz and Jachin, the mighty bronze pillars that guarded Solomon’s Temple. In fact, they are panels of text inscribed with the opening lines of Genesis, as printed in the Gutenberg Bible of 1454, the first mass-produced book to use moveable metal type. The letters are reversed, confusingly, until one realizes that this aids in making souvenir rubbings that themselves embody the printing process. The genesis evoked here is that of universal literacy and the cultural transformation wrought by the printed book.

I n September 2015, the New York Times ran a rather peculiar chart. It was designed to elucidate just why certain Democrats would or would not vote for President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal—and it organized Democratic lawmakers by whether they were Jewish while noting how many Jews resided in their congressional districts. The word “Jewish” was highlighted in yellow.

After brief but significant blowback online, the Times removed the “Jewish” indicator. The editor who supervised the chart’s publication was Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor for the newspaper. Now, two years later, Weisman has published a book about anti-Semitism—and, more specifically, about the supposedly grave threat to Jews springing from the alt-right and the Trump administration. (((Semitism))), for such is the book’s title, suffers from two grave ills. First, Weisman believes that political leftism and Judaism are identical.

Second, he knows little or nothing about the political right, in whose camp he places the alt-right movement. Combine these two shortcomings with a heavy dose of self-regard, and you get (((Semitism))): a toxic brew of anti-Israel sentiment, bagels-and-lox cultural Jewishness, and unbridled hostility toward mainstream conservatism, which he lumps together with despicable alt-right anti-Semitism.

According to Weisman, Judaism derives its present-day importance from the way it provides a religious echo to secular leftism. This is his actual opening sentence: “The Jew flourishes when borders come down, when boundaries blur, when walls are destroyed, not erected.” Thus does he describe a people whose binding glue over the millennia is a faith tradition literally designed to separate its adherents from those who are not their co-religionists. E very day, more than 500 newspapers publish “Hints from Heloise.” The column, stuffed with practical household advice about everything from stain removal to saving money, has been in syndication since 1961. It was launched at a time when running a household was considered a full-time profession (the tombstone of the original Heloise, who died in 1977, reads, “Every Housewife’s Friend”). But the column isn’t a throwback.

It has endured for more than a half-century because it continues to offer people useful advice and information about their everyday concerns even as times have changed dramatically. I was reminded of Heloise when I learned that the New York Times recently appointed a “gender editor” to oversee the newspaper’s coverage ofwell, of just about everything, evidently. The press release announcing the appointment of Jessica Bennett described her as leading a “multi-pronged initiative” that includes “pushing forward research into how tone, storyform, subjects, sources, and other elements of the report affect women’s consumption of it, and evangelizing best practices around the newsroom.” Indeed, the Times is going all-in on gender. Reporter Susan Chira was named “senior gender correspondent,” and the newspaper also created a gender editor for the op-ed page as well as another director of an internal Times Gender Initiative. In an interview with Teen Vogue, Bennett described her approach: “To me, what gender issues means is not simply coverage of feminism or issues related to women’s rights. Though of course that is important, and we’re committed to approaching those issues and approaching them from an intersectional lens. So whether that means stories about gender identity, or sexuality, or masculinity, or race and class and how that plays into gender identity, or simply the subjects that the Times already covers—politics, international affairs, science, health.” In short: everything.

Harold Rosenberg

In theory, the appeal of a “gender editor” is that she promises to help us navigate these revolutionary yet confusing times; in an interview with WNYC Radio’s “The Takeaway,” Bennett said as much, noting how the #metoo moment “feels like a tsunami” (she later added that it was also an “avalanche” and a “hurricane”). “There seems to be no end in sight,” she said, describing the flood of accusations and outings of harassers and sexual predators. “There is a sense of being overwhelmed.” Her message—echoed by others among this new breed of “woke” cultural-guidance counselors—is: Trust us! We will tell you what to think and how to behave in these turbulent times. Unfortunately, this new crop of intersectional Heloises do not inspire confidence, and their advice is more likely to come in the form of a shove rather than a hint.

Synopsis Harold Rosenberg is remembered as one of the most incisive and supportive critics of Abstract Expressionism. His famous 1952 essay, 'The American Action Painters,' effectively likened artists such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline to heroic existentialists wrestling with self-expression.

And his stress on the expressive and thematic content of their art ultimately made his writing more popular - at least in the 1950s - than the formalist criticism of his rival, Clement Greenberg. Originally a contributor to fringe, leftist magazines such as The Partisan Review, Rosenberg went on to the influential post of art critic for The New Yorker. His reading of gestural abstraction as 'action painting' also proved important for early promoters of happenings and performance art, such as Allan Kaprow. Harold Rosenberg was the most influential critic and supporter of the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s. His description of them as 'action painters,' and his stress on their dramatic and personal confrontation with the canvas, provided a compelling image of their creative process, and one that also proved popular with the artists themselves. He believed that the action painters worked almost without regard for conventional standards of beauty: their achievement was an authentic expression of individuality and humanity.

Rosenberg saw Abstract Expressionism as a major rupture within the history of modern art. As he put it, 'At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.' Rather than strive to produce a perfect finished picture, Rosenberg believed the new American painters threw all their energies into the charged moment of creation - what was registered on the canvas was merely a record of that moment.

Biography Childhood and Education Born Abraham Benjamin Rosenberg, Rosenberg spent his childhood in Brooklyn. For a brief time, he attended classes at City College (1923-24) before enrolling in St. Lawrence University (Canton, New York) from where he would graduate in 1927 with a law degree. Shortly thereafter, he contracted osteomyelitis, a bone infection that would force him to walk with the assistance of a cane for the rest of his life, and which also kept him from military service during World War II. Early Years Not long after law school, Rosenberg became a New York bohemian - studying the writing and philosophy of Karl Marx, writing poetry, and publishing in The Partisan Review.

He would later recall this early period by saying that he was 'educated on the steps of the New York Public Library.' During the Depression, Rosenberg found work writing about the arts for the government-supported Works Progress Administration (WPA).

It was during this time that he first met Willem de Kooning, with whom he often discussed abstract art. His encounter and ensuing friendship with de Kooning was a major turning point in his life and career.

Through the WPA, Rosenberg was able to keep working almost constantly, even though many of his writings were censured by the WPA early on. In 1938, he moved to Washington, D.C. To assume the arts editorship for the WPA American Guides, a series of books and pamphlets funded by the Federal Writers' Project, which were designed to supply travel guides to all 48 states, as well as various cities. The first major piece of writing to lend Rosenberg any notoriety was his 1940 essay 'The Fall of Paris.' Originally published in The Partisan Review, it announced the demise of Paris as the leading center of experimentation and innovation in modern art, and claimed that New York had moved into its place. As World War II continued, Rosenberg published a book of his poetry in 1943 titled Trance Above the Streets. At this time he was also working for the Office of War Information and the War Advertising Council.

In the late 1940s, Rosenberg, along with Robert Motherwell, Pierre Chareau and John Cage, edited and released the one and only issue of the journal Possibilities, which promoted many abstract artists known throughout Greenwich Village (such as Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning) and the bohemian getaway of East Hampton, New York. Middle Years It was in 1952 that Rosenberg really gained the art community's attention with the publication of 'American Action Painters' in the magazine Art News. The piece, which introduced the term ' action painting' to the American public, is still recognized as a seminal work. In 1959, Rosenberg's first collection of essays was published as The Tradition of the New, for which Willem de Kooning provided the cover art. In a sense, Tradition was Rosenberg's manifesto on modern art. The title of the book, along with the term action painting, quickly became part of the popular vocabulary of art.

The publication of The Tradition of the New garnered several awards for Rosenberg, and made the academic world take notice of him. After working as a lecturer on behalf of Princeton University and Southern Illinois University, Rosenberg was offered the position of Professor of Art at the University of Chicago in 1966. Despite his dislike for the convergence of modern art and academia - what he perceived as an old world's (the university's) attempts to grasp and theorize the new (modern art) - Rosenberg accepted the position. Rosenberg also ascended further in the world of journalism. He began writing for The New Yorker in 1962, and in 1967, the magazine made him their resident art critic.

Later Years and Death In 1973 Rosenberg resigned from his post on the Advertising Council (formerly the War Advertising Council) after nearly thirty years of being on the U.S. Government's payroll. Between 1969 and 1975 he published five different essay collections, with titles such as Artworks and Packages, Act and the Actor, and Discovering the Present. There are also various collections of his writings that were compiled posthumously. In 1978, shortly before his death, he completed a book-length study of the artist Barnett Newman, and helped curate a show at The Whitney Museum of American Art looking at the work of his friend and colleague on The New Yorker, Saul Steinberg.

Rosenberg continued writing for The New Yorker throughout the '60s and '70s. In 1978, he suffered a stroke and contracted pneumonia, which resulted in his death in his Long Island home that same year. Art Theory Introduction to Rosenberg's Art Theory Harold Rosenberg viewed modern art in the twentieth century as a giant laboratory where experiments took place, and like any good experiment, there must be trial and error.

Action painting as he saw it was a prime example of such experiment, since it was premised more on spontaneous, felt expression than on coldly preconceived designs. The experiment of abstract art was an occasion for spontaneous action. In this laboratory, Rosenberg proffers that 'The painter was no longer concerned with producing a certain kind of object, the work of art, but with living on the canvas.' This perspective, from his essay 'The American Action Painters,' marked a major turning point in how the art world viewed modern painting.

Rosenberg's theory challenged Clement Greenberg's belief that contemporary American art had evolved out of European modernism in a constant process of renewal. Rosenberg on Marxism and Abstraction Rosenberg was first introduced to theories of abstract art upon meeting Willem de Kooning. At first, he struggled with them because they ran counter to his Marxism, which advocated that art should be put in the service of society. But his friendship with de Kooning led to a change in his thinking. He continued to believe that art and society were interlinked, but he began to view art as a way of countering the values he deplored in wider society. And as he absorbed the Existentialism of writers such as John-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, he came to an understanding of abstract art as an urgent means to assert the authentic self, to express individual identity, in the face of the anonymity of the modern world. Indeed, Rosenberg eventually grounded his support for action painting in his belief that it represented a way of confronting what he saw as a crisis in culture, society, and politics.

Unlike his rival, Clement Greenberg, who believed artists needed to turn away from this crisis in order to preserve the values inherent in high art, Rosenberg argued that it was necessary to confront the crisis. Rosenberg on Paris, New York, and the 'New Globalism' One of Rosenberg's most famous early essays, 'The Fall of Paris,' (1940) argued that with the arrival of World War II, Paris's role as the 'laboratory of the twentieth century' had ended, and the job of cultural leadership had passed to New York.

While the observation would later be proven true that New York came to dominate post-war art - his opinion was typical of the chauvinism that infected many American critics at this time, and Rosenberg later modified his attitude. In a 1963 New Yorker review, subtitled 'International Art and the New Globalism,' he wrote: 'The early-twentieth-century internationalism in art has been dead for thirty years - since the ending of the Paris art movements and the closing down of its capital by the Depression, the War, and the Occupation. It has been superseded by a global art whose essence is precisely the absence of qualities attached to any geographical center. In the present globalism, there is no opening for a 'new Paris.' ' On the significance of 'American Action Painters' Rosenberg's essay 'American Action Painters' (originally published in Art News in 1952, then republished in his essay collection The Tradition of the New in 1959) introduced a new theory on how and why abstract artists made their art. The title 'Action Painting' was used in place of the less-favored 'Abstract Expressionism,' which he derided because he believed what was expressed on the canvas wasn't exactly abstract, but something deeply personal and familiar.

Rosenberg's label became a favored alternative to 'Abstract Expressionism,' most likely due to the fact that it made modern art feel more accessible to the public. 'Action painting' was far more descriptive and gave the viewer a clearer idea of what the artist was doing. Interestingly enough, Rosenberg makes no mention of specific artists to whom the term action painting would apply (in fact, it's still debated to this day whether Pollock or de Kooning was the inspiration for the term). The essay and its title were designed to emphasize the art world's need to look at each action painting as an individual event. De Kooning's Woman series or Pollock's drip paintings, for example, are not depicting specific images or scenes from the artists' minds, but rather the events of their consciousness. Just as the reader of a novel develops a relationship with the characters within, the action painters have a similar relationship with the canvas on which they paint, and if this is true, then the viewer will develop a relationship with the canvas as well.

Onveying an image or picture of the world, but striving for the most authentic expression of their individuality and humanity: this, as Rosenberg put it, 'is not a picture but an event.' It also suggests a new way to look at pictures: rather than meaning arising from the way the artist has carefully arranged the forms and figures, Rosenberg suggests we should think about the flurry of activity that produced those forms, and the artist's state of mind when he went to work.

Rosenberg on the Academy of Art While he held several professorships and college lecturing posts throughout his later career, Rosenberg was generally distrustful of academia. He saw great value in the study of art history since it could help inform artists and art lovers alike about where great art comes from; but he believed the relationship should end there.

According to Rosenberg, the academy's attempt to define art, particularly abstract art, was in itself a crime, because it sought to pigeonhole artistic achievements into specific contexts - be they social, political, psychological, geographic or otherwise. Rosenberg believed these attempts undermined the individual achievements of the artists, who in all likelihood had no grand political or social aspirations, but just wanted to paint something profound. Rosenberg on Color Field and Hard-Edge Painting Unlike his key critical rival, Clement Greenberg, Rosenberg was not supportive of some of the developments in painting in the late 1950s and '60s, namely those associated with Color Field and hard-edge painting, such as the work of Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. Rosenberg viewed these artists' work as simply trying to capitalize on earlier modes of abstraction; worse, he believed them to be taking an academic approach to more important work of predecessors like de Kooning, Pollock and Rothko. Rosenberg and Existentialism Although the roots of Existentialism can be traced back to the 17th century, it became a particularly voguish movement in the 1940s and '50s. Essentially the philosophy insists on the importance of personal, individual experience.

It prizes human experience and all its profundities, and sees it as constantly at odds with an otherwise absurd and meaningless world; the course of one's life is completely dictated by individual choices, and there are no invisible outside forces that determine the course of events. It also supposes that nothing in the world of mankind can be viewed objectively. Rosenberg's understanding of Abstract Expressionism was closely tied to these ideas. When de Kooning or Pollock approached a canvas, he saw them as entering an encounter with the canvas, and the marks they left on the canvas were the traces of that supremely personal encounter.

There is an existential drama occurring for such artists, because the style of action painting reveals the very process of painting (drips, heavy brush strokes), and this process is synonymous with the painter's personality. According to Rosenberg, the act of creating these paintings is an existential exercise, a brutally honest form of self-expression.

Writing Style The art critic Jed Perl has written of Rosenberg: 'out of his powerful body emerged an endless stream of words. Rosenberg began his essays with grand assertions and aimed to keep them so much to the fast-talking, big-thinking level that the reader, gulping for air and a little relief, may have felt assaulted by an almost scattershot intellectual grandeur.' Rosenberg was an emotional writer, yet his style is philosophical without becoming too academic or bogged down by theoretical meandering. With each essay or review he wrote, Rosenberg's aim wasn't so much to draw conclusions about art, but to raise questions about the importance of art and its history.