A Complicated Marriage: My Life with Clement Greenberg, A Wife's Story

An engaging and deeply honest book about how a young woman's love for America's most influential and important art critic shapes her life. In 1955, after meeting Clem at a party, Janice, a 21-year-old Bennington graduate, knowing nothing about art, soon marries and is catapulted into New York's explosive and history-making art world. Through her eyes, we experience the intimate daily life of the art scene and such icons as Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline … Always a witness, seldom a participant in this man's world, Janice, now a new mother, seeks to regain her sense of self and begins a life-long search for worlds of her own, a search that will mirror the changing role of women in the second half of the 20th century. Throughout the decades, though their lifestyle changes, Janice and Clem live compatibly in an open marriage, and their bond remains strong. Deftly written with humor and insight, A Complicated Marriage is an unusual love story that, as it draws back the curtain on the art world and its players, explores a woman's self-discovery, and redefines the meaning of a "good marriage."