Janice Van Horne, author of A Complicated Marriage: My Life with Clement Greenberg, on tour May 2013

About A Complicated Marriage: My Life with Clement Greenberg

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint Press

Love, marriage, the New York art world, and a wife’s self-discovery.

A rare opportunity to experience the explosive and history-making New York art world of the 1950s thru the eyes of the young bride of Clement Greenberg, America’s most influential art writer. In 1955, after meeting Clem at a party, 21-year-old Janice—who knows nothing about art—is soon catapulted into the inner circle of her husband’s world where she is surrounded by such larger-than-life personalities as Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline…. More a witness than a participant, in time Janice begins the slow struggle to regain her sense of self as she steps beyond the ‘50s traditions of wife and mother in search of worlds of her own. Her journey takes us inside the experimental theater of OOB and the Actors Studio in the ‘60s, into the Madison Avenue men’s world of advertising, and the feminist movement of the ‘70s, to bi-coastal playwright in the ‘80s, to caregiver and widow in the ‘90s, and currently to book editor and writer.

Even as the country was changing during these heady decades, Janice was changing, and the marriage as well–from monogamy to a mutually compatible open marriage, and in the late ‘70s from a mutually compatible divorce to remarriage (to each other). Beautifully written with humor and deeply felt honesty, A Complicated Marriage is an enduring love story that, as it draws back the curtain on the art scene and its iconic players, explores a woman’s self-discovery and redefines the meaning of a “good marriage.”

About Janice Van Horne

JANICE VAN HORNE was born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Rye. She graduated from Bennington College in 1955 and moved to New York where she met and married the well-know art writer, Clement Greenberg, in 1956. After their daughter was born, Janice began her career path in the 1960s as an actress, performing with a multitude of the OOB theaters and performance groups of that time, and studying with the renowned Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. In 1974 she co-founded and was editor-in-chief of the successful Madison Avenue Magazine. Later, in the 1980s, she returned to the theater, this time as a playwright. Her work has been seen in many productions, primarily in Los Angeles and New York.

After her husband’s death in 1994, Janice focused on editing two volumes of his work which she assembled from materials in his archive at the Getty Research Library in Los Angeles: Homemade Esthetics (New York Times 1999 Notable Book of the Year); and in 2000, The Harold Letters (1928-1943): The making of a young intellectual, based on letters from Clem to his best friend from college as he struggled to follow his passion through the depths of the Depression. In 2004, Janice began to tell her own story in her memoir, A Complicated Marriage: My life with Clement Greenberg, which was published in 2012.

Today, Janice lives in the apartment on Central Park West in New York City that she and her husband moved into in 1960. Her daughter Sarah, son-in-law Matthew, and two granddaughters, Clementine and Roxanna, live in Brooklyn, NY.

Find out more about Janice at her website, www.acomplicatedmarriage.com.