Janice van Horne

Janice van Horne (1934 - October 14, 2015) was an American writer, editor, and playwright. She is best known as the spouse of the art critic Clement Greenberg. She served as literary executor of Greenberg's estate, editing two posthumous collections of his writing from the Getty Research Library archives.

Early life and education Van Horne was born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Rye, New York. She graduated from Bennington College in 1955. Seven months later, the couple married. Van Horne's family disowned her for marrying a Jewish man.

The marriage brought van Horne into contact with the leading figures of postwar American art. The couple spent summers in East Hampton, where they were neighbors and friends of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. They also knew Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, David Smith, and Helen Frankenthaler.

Career After the birth of her daughter Sarah Dora, van Horne pursued a career in the theater, acting in numerous Off-Off-Broadway productions and studying at the Actors Studio.

Following Greenberg's death in 1994, van Horne bequeathed his papers to the Getty Research Institute and arranged the sale of the remaining works in his art collection to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. The second, The Harold Letters, 1928–1943: The Making of an American Intellectual (Counterpoint, 2000), presented Greenberg's correspondence with his college friend Harold Lazarus. Van Horne also entrusted a collection of Greenberg's late writings, consisting largely of talks and interviews, to the critic Robert C. Morgan, who edited them for the University of Minnesota Press.

Van Horne's memoir, A Complicated Marriage: My Life with Clement Greenberg, was published by Counterpoint Press in 2012.

Death Van Horne died on October 14, 2015, of COPD.