Rosalind Krauss — LLMpedia

Rosalind Krauss
Name	Rosalind Krauss
Birth date	1929-10-17
Death date	2019-10-08
Birth place	New York City
Occupation	Art critic, art historian, curator, educator
Notable works	The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths; Passages in Modern Sculpture; The Optical Unconscious
Awards	MacArthur Fellowship

Contents

Rosalind Krauss was an American art critic, art historian, curator, and educator whose scholarship reshaped debates in modernism and contemporary art. Her work bridged institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Columbia University, and The New York Times Book Review with critical theories advanced at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, and the School of Visual Arts. Krauss's writing intersected with figures including Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Clement Greenberg, Michel Foucault, and artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Early life and education

Krauss was born in New York City and educated in institutions that connected her to major intellectual networks including Radcliffe College, Harvard University, and Columbia University. Her early formation involved engagement with scholarship and archives linked to scholars like Ernst Gombrich, Heinrich Wölfflin, and historians associated with the Frick Collection and Metropolitan Museum of Art. During graduate training she encountered theoretical currents coming out of Vienna, Paris, and Princeton through interactions with translations and seminars tied to Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Krauss held faculty and curatorial posts that situated her at the crossroads of major cultural institutions: she taught at Columbia University, curated at the Museum of Modern Art, and contributed to programming at venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Tate Modern. Her academic appointments placed her in departments and centers such as the School of Visual Arts, Princeton University, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Krauss collaborated with editors and institutions like October (journal), The New Yorker, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books while participating in conferences at Getty Research Institute, Centre Pompidou, and Smithsonian Institution.

Krauss authored influential books and essays including The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Passages in Modern Sculpture, and The Optical Unconscious, producing interventions in debates about modernism and postmodernism. Her essays in October (journal) engaged with theoretical frameworks of Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, and Semiotics, dialoguing with thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard. She reevaluated the work of artists including Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brâncuși, Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and Andy Warhol, and reframed discussions of sculpture, montage, and photographic practice in relation to writings by Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud. Krauss developed terminologies—drawing on structuralist and post-structuralist vocabularies—about the grid, sculpture’s locus, and the index that influenced critics such as Hal Foster, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Yve-Alain Bois, and Michael Fried.

Krauss curated and co-curated exhibitions that foregrounded theoretical readings of art history at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her projects often paired canonical figures like Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray with contemporary practices by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Eva Hesse. She collaborated on catalogues and exhibitions with curators from the Tate Gallery, Guggenheim Museum, and Centre Pompidou, and participated in symposia at the Venice Biennale and the Documenta exhibitions in Kassel. These curatorial undertakings integrated archival materials from collections like the MoMA Archives, the Getty Research Institute, and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Krauss's work generated debate across journals and institutions: supporters praised her rigorous readings in venues such as October (journal), Artforum, and The New York Times, while critics responded through essays in The Nation and publications connected to scholars like Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and T.J. Clark. Her adoption of theoretical methods from Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes provoked discussion among historians at Princeton University, Yale University, and Harvard University. Krauss influenced a generation of critics and curators including Hal Foster, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Yve-Alain Bois, Claire Bishop, and Thomas Crow, and her concepts continue to be taught in programs at Columbia University, NYU, and the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Krauss received awards including a MacArthur Fellowship and honorary associations with institutions such as Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art. Her archival papers and correspondence are housed in repositories like the Getty Research Institute and the Archives of American Art, informing scholarship on figures from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol. Her legacy persists in contemporary debates about historiography and criticism in collections and curricula at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Modern, and universities such as Columbia University and Princeton University.

Category:American art critics Category:20th-century art historians Category:Women art historians