Rosalind E.

Krauss
the Paula Cooper Gallery.[6][7] Although Benglis image
is now popularly cited as important example of gender
performativity in contemporary art, it provoked mixed
responses when it rst appeared.[8] Krauss and other Artforum personnel attacked Benglis work in the following
months issue of Artforum, describing the advertisement
as exploitative and brutalizing, and soon left the magazine
to co-found October in 1976.[9]

Rosalind Epstein Krauss (born November 30, 1941)

is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor
at Columbia University in New York City.[1] Krauss
is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting,
sculpture and photography. As a critic and theorist she
has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum, Art International and Art in America. She was associate editor
of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of
October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976.

October was formed as a politically-charged journal

that introduced American readers to the ideas of
French post-structuralism, made popular by Michel
Foucault and Roland Barthes.[2] Krauss used October as a way to publish essays on post-structuralist
art theory, Deconstructionist theory, psychoanalysis,
postmodernism and feminism.[2]

Early life

Krauss was born to Matthew M. Epstein and Bertha Luber [2] in Washington D.C. and grew up in the area, visiting art museums with her father.[3] After graduating from
Wellesley in 1962, she attended Harvard,[4] whose Department of Fine Arts (now Department of History of Art
and Architecture) had a strong tradition of the intensive
analysis of actual art objects under the aegis of the Fogg
Museum.

The founders included Krauss, Annette Michelson and

the artist Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Krauss was appointed as
its founding editor. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe withdrew after only a few issues, and by the spring of 1977, Douglas
Crimp joined the editorial team. In 1990, after Crimp
left the journal, Krauss and Michelson were joined by
Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
Denis Hollier, and John Rajchman.[10]

Krauss wrote her dissertation on the work of David

Smith.[5] Krauss received her Ph.D. in 1969. The dissertation was published as Terminal Iron Works in 1971.[4]

3 Academic career

In the late-1960s and early-1970s Krauss began to contribute articles to art journals such as Art International
and Artforum which, under the editorship of Philip
Leider, was relocated from California to New York.[5]
She began by writing the Boston Letter for Art International, but soon published well-received articles on Jasper
Johns (Lugano Review, 1965) and Donald Judd (Allusion
and Illusion in Donald Judd, Artforum, May 1966). Her
commitment to the emerging minimal art in particular set
her apart from Michael Fried, who was oriented toward
the continuation of modernist abstraction in Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland and Anthony Caro. Krausss article
A View of Modernism (Artforum, September 1972), was
one signal of this break.

3.1 Hunter College

Krauss taught at Wellesley, MIT and Princeton before
joining the faculty at Hunter College in 1974. She was
promoted to professor in 1977 at Hunter and was also
appointed professor at the Graduate Center of CUNY.
She held the title of Distinguished Professor at Hunter
until she left to join the Columbia University faculty in
1992. In 1985, a monograph of essays by Krauss, titled
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths was published by The MIT Press.

3.2 Columbia University

Founding October

Previously Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and

Theory at Columbia, in 2005 Rosalind Krauss was promoted to the highest faculty rank of University Professor. She has received fellowships from the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and has been a fellow of the Center
for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and of the Insti-

Krauss became dissatised with Artforum when in its

November 1974 issue it published a full-page advertisement by featuring the artist Lynda Benglis aggressively
posed with a large latex dildo and wearing only a pair of
sunglasses promoting an upcoming exhibition of hers at
1

tute for Advanced Study. She received the Frank Jewett

Mather Award for criticism from the College Art Association in 1973.[11] She has been a fellow of the New York
Institute for the Humanities since 1992 and was elected
a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. She recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of London.

4
4.1

Critical approach
Greenbergian tradition

Krausss attempts to understand the phenomenon of modernist art, in its historical, theoretical, and formal dimensions, have led her in various directions. She has, for example, been interested in the development of photography, whose history-running parallel to that of modernist
painting and sculpture-makes visible certain previously
overlooked phenomena in the high arts, such as the role
of the indexical mark, or the function of the archive. She
has also investigated certain concepts, such as formlessness, the optical unconscious, or pastiche, which organize modernist practice in relation to dierent explanatory grids from those of progressive modernism, or the
avant-garde.
Like many, Krauss had been drawn to the criticism of
Clement Greenberg, as a counterweight to the highly subjective, poetic approach of Harold Rosenberg. The poetcritic model proved long-lasting in the New York scene,
with products from Frank O'Hara to Kynaston McShine
to Peter Schjeldahl, but for Krauss and others, its basis
in subjective expression was fatally unable to account for
how a particular artworks objective structure gives rise
to its associated subjective eects.
Greenbergs way of assessing how an art object works,
or how it is put together, became for Krauss a fruitful resource;[12] even if she and fellow Greenberger,
Michael Fried, would break rst with the older critic,
and then with each other, at particular moments of judgment, the commitment to formal analysis as the necessary if not sucient ground of serious criticism would
still remain for both of them. Decades after her rst
engagement with Greenberg, Krauss still used his ideas
about an artworks 'medium' as a jumping-o point for
her strongest eort to come to terms with post-1980 art in
the person of William Kentridge. Krauss would formulate this formalist commitment in strong terms, against
attempts to account for powerful artworks in terms of
residual ideas about an artists individual genius, for instance in the essays The Originality of the Avant-Garde:
A Postmodernist Repetition and Photographys Discursive Spaces. For Krauss, and for the school of critics who
developed under her inuence, the Greenbergian legacy
oers at its best a way of accounting for works of art using public and hence veriable criteria.

CRITICAL APPROACH

4.2 Translating ephemeralities into prose

Whether about (Cubist collage, Surrealist photography,
early Giacometti sculpture, Rodin, Brncui, Pollock) or
about art contemporaneous to her own writing (Robert
Morris, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman),
Krauss translates the ephemeralities of visual and bodily
experience into precise, vivid English, which has solidied her prestige as a critic. Her usual practice is to make
this experience intelligible by using categories translated
from the work of a thinker outside the study of art, such as
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques
Lacan, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Georges
Bataille, or Roland Barthes.[13] Indeed, she participated
in the translation of Lacans key text "Television" which
was published in October and later reissued in book form
by Norton. Her work has helped establish the position
of these writers within the study of art, even at the cost
of provoking anxiety about threats to the disciplines autonomy. She is currently preparing a second volume of
collected essays as a sequel to The Originality of the Avant
Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986).
In many cases, Krauss is credited as a leader in bringing
these concepts to bear on the study of modern art. For
instance, her Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) makes
important use of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology (as she
had come to understand it in thinking about minimal art)
for viewing modern sculpture in general. In her study of
Surrealist photography, she rejected William Rubin's efforts at formal categorization as insucient, instead advocating the psychoanalytic categories of dream and
automatism, as well as Jacques Derrida's grammatological idea of spacing. See The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism (October, winter 1981).

4.3 Picassos collages

Concerning Cubist art, she took Picasso's collage breakthrough to be explicable in terms of Saussure's ideas
about the dierential relations and non-referentiality of
language, rejecting eorts by other scholars to tie the
pasted newspaper clippings to social history. Similarly,
she held Picassos stylistic developments in Cubist portraiture to be products of theoretical problems internal to art, rather than outcomes of the artists love life.
Later, she explained Picassos participation in the rappel l'ordre or return to order of the 1920s in similar
structuralist terms. See In the Name of Picasso (October, spring 1981), The Motivation of the Sign (in
Lynn Zelevansky, ed., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, 1992), and The Picasso Papers (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1998).

4.4

Freudian theory

surrealism and photography at the Corcoran Museum of

Art (198285), on Richard Serra at the Museum of Modern Art (198586), and on Robert Morris at the Guggenheim (199294). She prepared an exhibition for the
Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris called Formlessness:
Modernism Against the Grain in 1996.

From the 1980s, she became increasingly concerned with

using a psychoanalytic understanding of drives and the
unconscious, owing less to the Freudianism of an Andr
Breton or a Salvador Dal, and much more to the structuralist Lacan and the dissident surrealist Bataille.[5]
See No More Play, her 1984 essay on Giacometti, as
well as Corpus Delicti, written for the 1985 exhibi6 Bibliography
tion L'Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, Cindy
Sherman: 19751993 and The Optical Unconscious (both
1993) and Formless: A Users Guide with Yve-Alain Bois, 6.1 Selected books by Krauss
catalog to the exhibition L'Informe: Mode d'emploi (Paris:
Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith.
Centre Pompidou, 1996).
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971.

4.5

Interpreting Pollock

Years after her time at Artforum in the 1960s, Krauss

also returned to the drip painting of Jackson Pollock as
both a culmination of modernist work within the format
of the easel picture, and a breakthrough that opened
the way for several important developments in later art,
from Allan Kaprow's happenings to Richard Serra's leadinging process art to Andy Warhol's oxidation (i.e. urination) paintings. For reference, see the Pollock chapter
in The Optical Unconscious, several entries in the Formless catalog, and Beyond the Easel Picture, her contribution to the MoMA symposium accompanying the
1998 Pollock retrospective (Jackson Pollock: New Approaches). This direction provided intellectual validation for the explosive Pollock markets; but it exacerbated
already tense relations between herself and more radical currents in visual/cultural studies, the latter growing steadily impatient with the traditional western arthistorical canon.
In addition to writing focused studies about individual
artists, Krauss also produced broader, synthetic studies
that helped gather together and dene the limits of particular elds of practice. Examples of this include Sense
and Sensibility: Reections on Post '60s Sculpture (Artforum, Nov. 1973), Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism (October, spring 1976), Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America, in two parts, October spring and
fall 1977), Grids, You Say, In Grids: Format and Image in 20th Century Art (exh. cat.: Pace Gallery, 1978),
and Sculpture in the Expanded Field (October, spring
1979). Some of these essays are collected in her book
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths.

The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue

Raisonn. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 73. New York: Garland, 1977.
Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge Mass:
The MIT Press, 1977.
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 1985.
L'Amour fou: Photography & Surrealism. London:
Arts Council, 1986. Exhibition at the Hayward
Gallery, London, July to September 1986.
Le Photographique : Pour une thorie des carts.
Translated by Marc Bloch and Jean Kempf. Paris:
Macula, 1990.
The Optical Unconscious (1993)
Formless: A Users Guide (with Yve-Alain Bois)
(1997)
The Picasso Papers (1999)
A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the
Post-Medium Condition (1999)
Bachelors (2000)
Perpetual Inventory (2010)
Under Blue Cup. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 2011.

6.2 Selected essays and articles by Krauss

Curator

Krauss has been curator of many art exhibitions at leading museums, among them exhibitions on Joan Mir at
the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (197073), on

MIT Press: selected articles by Rosalind Krauss

Contemporary Criticism. Markham, Ont.: Audio
Archives of Canada, 1979. 1 sound cassette: 1 7/8
ips.

6 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Critical Perspectives in American Art, pp. 2527. 6.5 Reviews of Krausss work
Introduction by Hugh M. Davies. Amherst: Fine
Arts Center Gallery, University of Massachusetts, 6.5.1 The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Amherst, 1976. Rosalind Krauss text is followed
Modernist Myths
by illustrations of works by Donald Judd, Robert
Artschwager and Joel Shapiro. An Exhibition se Bois, Yve-Alain. Art Journal (Winter 1985), pp.
lected by Rosalind Krauss, Sam Hunter and Mar369.
cia Tucker. Fine Arts Center Gallery, University of
Massachusetts/Amherst, April 10, 1976 May 9,
Carrier, David. Burlington Magazine (November
1976, American Pavilion, Venice Biennale, summer
1985), 127(992): 817.
1976.
Owens, Craig. Analysis Logical and Ideological.
Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materialization
Art in America (May 1985), pp. 2531. Reprinted
of the Sign in the Work of Peter Eisenman. In Peter
in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and
Eisenmans Houses of Cards, pp. 166184. New
Culture, pp. 268283. Berkeley: University of CalYork: Oxford University Press, 1987.
ifornia Press, 1992.

6.3

Book reviews by Krauss

List of reviews of The Originality of the Avant-Garde

Man in a Mold. Review of James Lord, Gia- 6.5.2 The Optical Unconscious
cometti: A Biography. In The New Republic, Dec.
16, 1985, pp. 2429.
Roger Kimball, Feeling Sorry for Rosalind
Krauss, New Criterion 1993
Post-History on Parade. Review of three books by
Arthur Danto. In The New Republic, May 25, 1987,
Reviews of The Optical Unconscious
pp. 2730.
Only Project. Review of Richard Wollheim, Paint- 6.5.3 The Picasso Papers
ing as an Art. In The New Republic, September 12
& 19, 1988, pp. 3338.
Marilyn McCully, The Fallen Angel?" review of
The Picasso Papers in New York Review of Books,
April 8, 1999.

6.4

About Krauss

David Carrier. Rosalind Krauss and American

philosophical art criticism. Greenwood Publishing
Group, 2002. ISBN 0-275-97520-7, ISBN 978-0275-97520-3
Rosalind Krauss. In Judy K. Collischan Van Wagner, Women Shaping Art: Proles of Power, pp.
149164. New York: Praeger, 1984
Janet Malcolm, A Girl of the Zeitgeist, Part II, The
New Yorker, October 27, 1986.
Scott Rothkopf, Krauss and the Art of Cultural
Controversy, The Harvard Crimson, May 16, 1997.
Anna C. Chave, Minimalism and Biography, Art
Bulletin March 2000.
David Raskin, The Shiny Illusionism of Krauss and
Judd, Art Journal Spring 2006.
Eddie Yeghiayan: Articles About Rosalind Krauss
Yve-Alain Bois. Rosalind Krauss with Yve-Alain
Bois.The Brooklyn Rail, 2012

Harry Cooper and Marilyn McCully, The Picasso

Papers: An Exchange, New York Review of Books,
October 7, 1999.

6.5.4

Art Since 1900

Claire Bishop, Artforum.com, Apr. 9, 2005

Matthew Collings, The Guardian May 14, 2005
Martin Gayford, arts.telegraph Apr. 24, 2005
Eric Gibson, OpinionJournal.com Mar. 11, 2005
Barry Gewen, New York Times Dec. 11, 2005
Dan Hopewell, Iconoduel Apr. 9, 2005
Pepe Karmel, review of Art Since 1900, in Art in
America, Nov. 2005, pp. 6163.
Barry Schwabsky, The Nation Dec. 8, 2005
Frank Whitford, Times Online (UK) Mar. 20, 2005

6.6

General material about Krauss

David Cohen, review of Challenging Art in Art Bulletin, Sept. 2002

Columbia University: Rosalind Krauss
MIT Press: Rosalind Krauss
Robert Storr, letter to the editor, Artforum Nov.
2002

References

[1] Columbia Faculty directory

[2] Rosalind E. Krauss biography
[3] Rosalind Krauss. The Art Story. The Art Story Foundation. Retrieved October 5, 2012.
[4] The Real Thing: An Interview with Rosalind E. Krauss
by David Plante at: http://www.artcritical.com/
[5] Chilvers, Ian & Glaves-Smith, John eds., Dictionary of
Modern and Contemporary Art , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 384
[6] Cohen, David; Newman, Amy (September 2002). Challenging Art: Artforum 19621974. The Art Bulletin 84
(3): 535538. doi:10.2307/3177317. JSTOR 3177317.
[7] Doss, Erika (2002). Feminist Art and Black Art.
Twentieth-Century American Art. Oxford History of Art.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 184. ISBN 0-19284239-0.
[8] Richmond, Susan. "" Sizing Up the Dildo: Lynda
Benglis Artforum Advertisement as a Feminist Icon,
n.paradoxa 15 (January 2005): 24-34.
[9] Chilvers, Ian & Glaves-Smith, John eds., Dictionary of
Modern and Contemporary Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 384
[10] Mathias Danbolt, Front Room Back Room: An Interview with Douglas Crimp. Trikster Nordic Queer Journal #2, 2008. Retrieved 2008-09-26.
[11] Awards. The College Art Association. Retrieved 11
October 2010.
[12] Hughes, Robert (21 October 1993). The Medium Inquisitor. The New York Review of Books 40 (17). Retrieved 4 June 2013.
[13] Chilvers, Ian & Glaves-Smith, John eds., Dictionary of
Modern and Contemporary Art , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 385

8 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

8.1

Text

Rosalind E. Krauss Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_E._Krauss?oldid=660427945 Contributors: Zoicon5, Topbanana,

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8.3

Content license

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