Kirk Varnedoe

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Kirk Varnedoe
Born
John Kirk Train Varnedoe

(1946-01-18)January 18, 1946
Savannah, Georgia, U.S.
DiedAugust 14, 2003(2003-08-14) (aged 57)
New York City, U.S.
OccupationArt curator
SpouseElyn Zimmerman

John Kirk Train Varnedoe (January 18, 1946 – August 14, 2003) was an American art historian, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from 1988 to 2001, Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and Professor of Fine Arts at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.[1]

Biography

Varnedoe was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, and attended

Lane Faison, and received his A.B. in 1967. He also played college football and, after graduating, returned to work as a coaching assistant and to lead art history discussion sections for a year.[2]

In 1972 Varnedoe earned a Ph.D. at

Rodin scholar Albert Elsen, with whom he collaborated on an exhibition and catalog, The Drawings of Rodin (1971), about the profusion of drawings falsely attributed to Rodin.[3] He married the artist Elyn Zimmerman, taught art history at Stanford for a year, then taught at Columbia University and at New York University Institute of Fine Arts. In 1987 he published a book about the French painter Gustave Caillebotte
, which helped to initiate a revival of scholarly and public interest in that little-known Impressionist. A 1982 exhibition Varnedoe curated, "Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting, 1880-1910" introduced American audiences to yet more unfamiliar artists.

In 1984, the same year that he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, he co-curated with

Rothko. "Varnedoe inherits his mantle in difficult times," one commentator observed.[4]

Varnedoe curated or co-curated a number of major exhibitions at MoMA during his tenure, some which were considered highly controversial. A list of the exhibitions he brought to MoMA also indicates the breadth of his interests: "Vienna: 1900" in 1986, "High And Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" (co-curated with the writer

Van Gogh's Postman: The Portraits of Joseph Roulin (2001). He was highly regarded as a public speaker and lectured frequently; among his most notable lecture series were the Slade Lectures at Oxford and the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, D.C.

Varnedoe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993.[5] In 2001, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[6]

Varnedoe left MoMA in 2001. His departure came, according to his wife and to Adam Gopnik, after a period of difficult relations with the museum's new director, Glenn Lowry.[7] He then became a scholar-in-residence at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies until his death two years later.

Kirk Varnedoe died of cancer in 2003 at the age of fifty-seven. Adam Gopnik, one of his graduate school protégés in the mid-1980s, wrote a tribute in The New Yorker in 2004, which was subsequently republished in Reader's Digest.[8]

Publications

  • Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art (1984)
  • Vienna 1900 (1986)
  • Gustave Caillebotte (1987)
  • Northern Light: Nordic Painting at the Turn of the Century (1988)
  • High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (1990)
  • A Fine Disregard (1990)
  • Cy Twombly (1994)
  • Jasper Johns (1996)
  • Jackson Pollock (1998)
  • Pictures of Nothing (2006)

High and Low, written with co-curator Adam Gopnik, was the catalogue that accompanied the MoMA exhibition of that same name. That exhibition was an examination of the overlap between "high culture" (i.e., painting, art works created for display in galleries and museums) and popular culture (i.e., caricature, graffiti, advertising, comic books) that gave rise to the Cubism of Picasso, Kurt Schwitters' collages, Miró's surrealism, the Pop Art of Ed Ruscha and Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns' paint brushes and coffee cans, Robert Rauschenberg's Rebus, and late Philip Guston. The exhibition was faulted by some critics for the small number of contemporary works it displayed in proportion to the large number of works by better-known artists whose relation to pop culture had been previously studied. The value of the catalogue, then, was in its thoughtful essays which also discussed, and illustrated, the work of more recent artists whose roots were in pop culture: e.g., Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ashley Bickerton, Roger Brown, Peter Halley, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Elizabeth Murray, David Salle, Peter Saul, Kenny Scharf, Cindy Sherman, among others.[citation needed]

Varnedoe's last book, Pictures of Nothing, was published posthumously and was based on notes from his

Abstract Expressionism. "What is abstract art good for? Why should we spend our time looking at 'pictures of nothing'?" Varnedoe accepted those as the fundamental questions that had to be addressed. He also acknowledged the gulf between those who revered the School of New York and those who embraced the un-painterly successors to Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, those artists who seemed to represent a repudiation of Abstract Expressionism. His lectures asked: "What have we gained in return for giving up the painterly beauty and sophistication of the art that Minimalism killed off?" Ultimately, he argued that Minimalism represented a profound gain, that it could be taken "both as a legitimate reflection of the way we think individually and as a valuable aspect of a liberal society."[9] He disputed the view that Minimalism was reductive, narrow, or mute: "Minimalism revives and renovates what it seems to kill...it is a radically new kind of art, not a sophisticated variation on traditional modernism."[10]

References

  1. ^ Michael Kimmelman (August 15, 2003). "Kirk Varnedoe, 57, Curator Who Changed the Modern's Collection and Thinking, Dies". New York Times.
  2. ^ Oral History Program, interview with Kirk Varnedoe, 28 Nov 2001, p. 14-20. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
  3. ^ Finding Aid for the Kirk Varnedoe papers, 1890-2006, at the Getty Research Institute. Retrieved on 5 December 2014.
  4. ^ William Grimes, "Kirk Varnedoe is in the Hot Seat as MoMA's Boy," New York Times, 3/11/90.
  5. ^ "John Kirk Train Varnedoe". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2021-10-18.
  6. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-10-18.
  7. ^ Martin Fuller, "MoMA: A Needless Act of Destruction," New York Review of Books, LX, 9 (May 23, 2013), p. 4.
  8. ^ Personal History, "Last of the Metrozoids," by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, May 10, 2004, p. 82
  9. ^ Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing, p. 29.
  10. ^ Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing, p. 121.
Obituaries

External links

  • Kirk Varnedoe papers, 1890-2006 (bulk 1970-2003). The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession No. 2003.M.46. Papers of critic and curator Kirk Varnedoe include student papers and lecture notes, research files for exhibitions and publications, typescripts and audio tapes of lectures, and a small amount of material related to his position at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
  • Oral History Program. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Includes a digitized transcript of an interview with Kirk Varnedoe in 2001.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kirk_Varnedoe&oldid=1217636699"