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A Complicated Marriage
Post #1525 • February 28, 2012, 9:48 AM
![[Image: ]](http://www.artblog.net/static/posts/2012/02/a-complicated-marriage/acm_cover.png)
Last week I put up a website for Janice Van Horne's memoir of her marriage to Clement Greenberg.
1955. Janice (Jenny) Van Horne is a 21-year-old, naïve Bennington College graduate on her own for the first time in New York City. At a party, she meets 46-year-old Clement Greenberg who, she is told, is “the most famous, the most important, art critic in the world!” Knowing nothing about art, she soon finds herself swept into Clem’s world and the heady company of Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, David Smith, and Helen Frankenthaler, among others. Seven months later, as a new bride, Jenny and Clem spend the summer in East Hampton near Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, and she feels even more keenly like an interloper in the inner circle of the art scene. Disowned by her anti-Semitic family for marrying a Jew, her deep, loving bond with Clem would remain strong through many years, even as their relationship evolves into an open marriage.