"The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in order to replace it with his own history"
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Harold Rosenberg frames artistic authenticity as a struggle for freedom rather than a respectful continuation of tradition. A leading voice of postwar American criticism and the champion of action painting, he understood the studio as an existential arena where the artist risks identity on the canvas. To release oneself from the history of art is not to ignore it or deny its influence, but to loosen its grip so that inherited styles and criteria do not dictate the next move. The task is to convert memory into action, study into decision, and lineage into a springboard for invention.
Replacing history with ones own history captures his belief that a genuine artist forces the narrative of art to adjust to a singular trajectory. When Jackson Pollock poured and flung paint, he neither revered nor refuted the Renaissance; he made a personal method and tempo that demanded critics and museums rethink what a painting could be. Willem de Koonings oscillations between figure and gesture, or Rothkos vaporous fields, did not conform to a lineage so much as carve out private mythologies that subsequently became part of the public story. The personal, enacted intensely enough, becomes historical.
Rosenbergs stance pushes against academicism and also against a purely formal, impersonal view of art. Where Clement Greenberg emphasized optical purity and progress in form, Rosenberg emphasized will, risk, and the artists ethical commitment. The canvas records decisions, revisions, failures, and breakthroughs, a biography of making that cannot be prescribed by the past. There is a paradox here: liberation from history eventually reshapes history, which later generations might then treat as doctrine. But for Rosenberg, authenticity resides in the perpetual act of breaking open norms so that a new necessity reveals itself. The imperative is not to repeat what art has been, but to make work so alive to its moment and maker that art must be redefined to include it.
Replacing history with ones own history captures his belief that a genuine artist forces the narrative of art to adjust to a singular trajectory. When Jackson Pollock poured and flung paint, he neither revered nor refuted the Renaissance; he made a personal method and tempo that demanded critics and museums rethink what a painting could be. Willem de Koonings oscillations between figure and gesture, or Rothkos vaporous fields, did not conform to a lineage so much as carve out private mythologies that subsequently became part of the public story. The personal, enacted intensely enough, becomes historical.
Rosenbergs stance pushes against academicism and also against a purely formal, impersonal view of art. Where Clement Greenberg emphasized optical purity and progress in form, Rosenberg emphasized will, risk, and the artists ethical commitment. The canvas records decisions, revisions, failures, and breakthroughs, a biography of making that cannot be prescribed by the past. There is a paradox here: liberation from history eventually reshapes history, which later generations might then treat as doctrine. But for Rosenberg, authenticity resides in the perpetual act of breaking open norms so that a new necessity reveals itself. The imperative is not to repeat what art has been, but to make work so alive to its moment and maker that art must be redefined to include it.
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| Topic | Art |
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