The art historian Max Kozloff has died at the age of ninety-one. Kozloff was at the coalface of criticism as modern art turned towards conceptualism, working as the critic for The Nation from 1961 to 1968 and contributing editor to Artforum from 1963 to 1974.
Though perhaps best known for his essay ‘American Painting During the Cold War’, published in 1973, which linked Abstract Expressionism to the establishment of postwar U.S. political hegemony, and was a harbinger for the move away from formalism, from the mid 1970s onwards Kozloff concentrated on photography and started taking and showing his own photographs.
The curator David Campany paid homage, saying: ‘Nothing in the arts was alien to him and he wrote on many aspects, but his essays on photography are really a model of clear, thoughtful, counter-intuitive and elegant writing.’
He taught widely, most notably at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, where he developed the Master’s programme in photography and related media. Kozloff’s own work was shown at Holly Solomon Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, Steven Kasher Gallery, and at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 with the exhibition Max Kozloff: Critic and Photographer.
