Guest Speaker: Norman L. Kleeblatt

No two critics have been more closely associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement in America than Greenberg and Rosenberg. Their pitched battles over formal purity versus existential meaning were played out in art magazines, galleries, and museums nationwide. Their rivalry was so intense that satirist Tom Wolfe dubbed them the "Bergs.” Norman Kleeblatt, chief curator of the Jewish Museum in New York, offers an opportunity to reconsider Abstract Expressionism’s evolution through the contradictory explanations of these two major critics and tastemakers.