An Unreleased Laocoon: The First Draft of Clement Greenberg's “Towards a Newer Laocoon”

The paper focuses on the first draft of Clement Greenberg's essay “Towards a Newer Laocoon”, published on Partisan Review on July-August 1940, and on various documents related to it, as the critic's personal correspondence and his notebook, held by the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, California). The article's aim is to shed light on Greenberg's essay from a different perspective: the first draft, with its lucid arguments and pragmatic prose, deals with a variety of issues, including the roles in society of abstract painting and the relationship between perception, psychology and art. Due to the editors' dissatisfaction with this new essay, Greenberg was forced to rewrite it, and as the critic himself reported, his “Laocoon” was not only edited down but distorted. A deep analysis of the draft's main thesis, as well as of the other documents concerning it, provides a truthful insight into the critic's intellectual formation.