Kitsch, on the other hand, was the product of industrialization and the urbanization of the working class, a filler made for the consumption of the working class: a populace hungry for culture, but without the resources and education to enjoy cutting edge avant garde culture.
In this Marxist-influenced essay, Greenberg claimed that true avant-garde art is a product of the Enlightenment's revolution of critical thinking, and as such resists and recoils from the degradation of culture in both mainstream capitalist and communist society, while acknowledging the paradox that, at the same time, the artist, dependent on the market or the state, remains inexorably attached 'by an umbilical cord of gold'. Though his first published essays dealt mainly with literature and theatre, art still held a powerful attraction for Greenberg, so in 1939, he made a sudden name as a visual art writer with possibly his most well-known and oft-quoted essay, 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch', first published in the journal Partisan Review. It was then that Greenberg began to write seriously, and soon after began getting published in a handful of small magazines and literary journals.
In 1936, Greenberg took a series of jobs with the federal government, from Civil Service Administration, to the Veterans' Administration, and finally to the Appraisers' Division of the Customs Service in 1937. Greenberg married in 1934, had a son the next year, and was divorced the year after that. working for his father's dry-goods business, but the work did not suit his inclinations, so he turned to working as a translator. During the next few years, Greenberg travelled the U.S. After college, already as fluent in Yiddish as English since childhood, Greenberg taught himself Italian and German in addition to French and Latin. Greenberg attended Erasmus Hall High School, the Marquand School for Boys, then Syracuse University, graduating with an A.B. Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a young adult, when he began to focus on literature. His parents were middle-class Jewish immigrants, and he was the eldest of their three sons. Clement Greenberg was born in the borough of the Bronx, NYC, in 1909.
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