“The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cézanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.”

—  Clement Greenberg

"On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting" (1949), p. 171
1960s, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (1961)

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Clement Greenberg photo
Clement Greenberg 17
American writer and artist 1909–1994

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