A single sentence sufficed to seal my veneration for Harold Rosenberg. It comes in the midst of the bravura conclusion of “The Intellectual and His Future,” an essay from 1965. “One does not possess mental freedom and detachment,” it reads, “one participates in them.” Here was a dictum worthy of adoption as a creed. “Intellectual” is not a title, an honorific, or a job description. It is a daily aspiration. Rosenberg is remembered, if he is remembered at all, as one of the leading American art critics of the twentieth century, the coiner of the term “action painting” to describe the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and other Abstract Expressionists, and it was for that reason, several years ago, that I turned to his work. What I discovered was not an art critic but a full-spectrum intellectual who thought about art. He also thought about poetry, politics, theater, fiction, society, sociology, Marx, Marxism, Judaism, the media, and the nature of the intellectual himself. And he did it all better than just about anyone I had ever encountered. He was Trilling without the solemnity, Kazin with a wider, more ironic mind (to name two earlier infatuations among the New York intellectuals). His point of view was comic in the deepest sense. An outsider by temperament as well as conviction, he looked at everything from the outside, accepting nothing — no movement, no figure, no social fiction, no educated formula — at its own estimation. His most potent rhetorical weapon was satire — the whiff of caricature, the gust of common sense. “Far from being goaded to their parts by police agents hidden in the wings”—this in reference to the vogue of self-confession among postwar ex-radicals — “the guilty here had to force their way onto the stage. [Whitaker] Chambers himself, that witness of witnesses…describes how close he came to breaking under the ordeal of getting the notice of people whose vital interests he was determined to defend.” But Rosenberg wasn’t merely a debunker. He believed in things: in art, in the struggle to come to terms with reality, in the individual. He was skeptical of “thought,” but he believed in thinking. Other intellectuals saw through collective illusions. Rosenberg saw through the illusions of other intellectuals. The criticism of kitsch art or popular culture, a highbrow hobby in the new age of mass entertainment, was nothing, he wrote, but another form of kitsch — kitsch ideas. “There is only one way to quarantine kitsch: by being too busy with art.” Notions of the “other-directed” “organization man,” promulgated in the 1950s as descriptions of the new American type (and clichés of thought to this day), were in reality projections, he explains, on the part of the new caste of intellectual placemen who were swarming the postwar bureaucracies. “Today Orgmen reproduce themselves like fruit flies in whatever is organized, whether it be a political party or a museum of advanced art.” As for “alienation,” that great midcentury bugaboo and talking point, not only does Rosenberg not deplore it, he sees it as a virtue, a failure “to participate emotionally and intellectually in the fictions and conventions of mass culture.” He was fearless in the face of reputation. T.S. Eliot (then at his zenith), having made an idol of “tradition,” had led American poetry into a cul-de-sac of academicism. 1984, all but sacred at the time, was marked by “frigid rationality and paranoiacally lifeless prose.” Auden and Spender, darlings of the cultural left for their politically “responsible” poetry, avoided responsibility for individual experience and social reflection alike. “When I first encountered the gravity of Lionel Trilling,” Rosenberg writes, “I did not get the joke; it took some time to realize that there wasn’t any.” Upon his death in 1978, Hilton Kramer, the chief art critic of the New York Times and himself a prominent figure in intellectual New York, eulogized him as “the quintessential New York intellectual.” For the essayist Seymour Krim, reflecting on the same occasion, Rosenberg had been the most intelligent critic writing in English. As for his physical presence, Krim reported, “Harold looked and shone like the Lion of Judah. He was about 6’4,” a really heroic-looking prince among the bookish intellectuals…a sort of matinee idol of the intellectual underground” who had passed “a lot of lean years bucking all the Establishments.” His passing, Krim observed, “sweeps a period with it.” 
Harold Rosenberg was born in Brooklyn in 1906. He spent a year at City College, then three at Brooklyn Law School, but he would later say that he’d received his education on the steps of the New York Public Library. After graduation, he plunged into Village bohemia, befriending artists (de Kooning was an early and crucial encounter) and inheriting the twin legacies of the New York intellectuals: Marxism and modernism. He joined the League of American Writers, a radical organization, wrote for New Masses and Art Front, and dreamed of becoming a poet. (A small volume, Trance Above the Streets, appeared in 1942.) During the Depression, he kept himself afloat by writing for the WPA, moving to Washington in 1938 to become the art editor of its American Guide Series, then staying after Pearl Harbor to work for the Office of War Information. After the war, and back in New York, Rosenberg became a stalwart of the little magazines: Commentary, Encounter, Dissent, and, of course, Partisan Review. He found an apartment on Tenth Street, a rotting Village block that sheltered tramps, a poolroom, and a collection of obscure American painters who were in the process of transforming art. “The Herd of Independent Minds,” an essay whose title became a catchphrase, appeared in 1948; “The American Action Painters,” which birthed another, in 1952. His first collection, The Tradition of the New (its title soon a third), appeared in 1959. Within a few years, he was lecturing at Princeton and writing for Esquire, Vogue, and the New Yorker. “The beggarly Jewish radicals of the 30s,” Kazin wrote in 1963, “are now
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence