THE CRITIC REFLECTS

I COME FROM THE NORTH SIDE OF CHICAGO, a block from Evanston. My family was comfortable, with a background in Eastern Europe. Ours was a middle-class environment, hospitable to artistic doctrines and traditions. My parents enjoyed music particularly: Their taste encompassed songs of the Red Army Chorus and Brahms. There were four sons; I was the youngest.

For me, the Art Institute of Chicago became a kind of sacred spot, a sanctuary of inspirations, the cultural place that singled itself out for me. In the 1940s, I remember well, one walked through the doors of the Art Institute and, proceeding east, saw a huge equestrian statue of an Italian soldier named Bartolomeo Colleoni, who was a mercenary enlisted by the Venetian government to take charge of its aggressive fifteenth-century military affairs. The statue was a plaster cast of the original bronze by Andrea del Verrocchio in Venice. 

Over life-size and on a pedestal, it stood near the causeway leading toward the School of the Art Institute. It was a threatening presence and one that even now is unforgettable. It was a fierce image meant, propagandistically, to be intimidating, so one of my first experiences of the Art Institute was learning that in art there were “angrified” moments that became monumental.

In other halls of the Art Institute, there were works that could be called canonic in the culture of our country. One was Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks [1942], a painting of metropolitan solitude. Another was Grant Wood’s American Gothic [1930]. And a third was, rather spectacularly, Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte [1884]. Other than these three standouts, there was a huge supply of Monets, Pissarros, and their ilk. 

However, the main impetus for me continuing art studies dates to something that may have happened earlier than my first visits to the Art Institute. It must have been about 1945. I went to a movie, a black-and-white one, based on a novel, and I have to describe the shock I experienced at its explosive climax. The movie was The Picture of Dorian Gray, based on the novel by Oscar Wilde. A young dandy is behaving badly but concealing it by genteel manners. One of the things he does to maintain his status in society is to commission a portrait of himself, painted in a salon style.

The portrait was shown in the movie as something that organized and oriented this young man’s mendacious life and manners. As an adolescent, I was interested in a story about social malpractice concealing itself. The portrait began to change, growing more horrible-looking as Dorian’s behavior grew more vicious. The climactic moment came when the ghastly portrait is revealed to the artist who painted it, Gray’s acquaintance Basil. When the portrait now suddenly appears, it is in color and fills the whole screen. Gray murders Basil and blackmails another friend, Allen, to take the body away. I felt blown out of my seat because Dorian had become instantly “ancient,” lunatic, ferocious, and threatening, even though there were still some remnants in his appearance of the social life he had been maintaining. 

The object was to show that a portrait had its own animus, in that it could reveal what was covered up by elitist idioms. I got excited by that, after my initial scare calmed down. This experience of sudden color and radical change being conversant with each other was a fundamental experience. It elicited my tremendous involvement subsequently with art, all the more because the artist who made the painting shown in the film, Ivan Albright, was someone who lived nearby. He could have been considered a local talent! I mention this at some length because, in retrospect, I consider Albright to be a major visionary, a “visionarian,” in a way of speaking, for what was to come, which is called, modestly, “Chicago art.” Albright was transmitting his imagery in terms of texture. He invested painting with a ferocious tactility, a sense of tissue and surface, that got out of hand, if you’ll excuse the pun. This tactility infused later artistic developments in the city: An obsession with surfaces runs through works by a number of artists—think of Leon Golub—characterizing the kind of venomous subject matter that intrigued them and imparting feelings of imminent mortality and the morbid presence of disease.

Another artist with a lasting impact on my thinking is Diego Rivera. My earliest encounter with his work was in Detroit, the destination of a family trip we usually would make each year. There I saw the Detroit Industry Muralsby Rivera at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It was a knockout, and something that later impressed me about that work was how it was patronized and subsidized by Edsel Ford, the son of Henry Ford, who was not at all what you would call a liberal. But he didn’t interfere, regardless of his possible attitudes, so the work survived, although it was roundly criticized by locals in Detroit. It was an interesting foretaste of controversies today in many art museums. I later wrote a long piece for Artforum about the Rivera frescoes in Detroit, with the subtitle “Proletarian Art Under Capitalist Patronage” [1973]. 

My first piece of orthodox art criticism was written on a sculptor I encountered in the ’50s, a sculptor working in wrought iron named Richard Hunt. I thought his work was very strong. I submitted a review to Arts magazine, which was edited at the time by Hilton Kramer, who turned it down. Hunt went on to have a substantial career, including a mid-career retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1971, and he did major commissions. He may have been an anomaly in Chicago in the ’50s as a Black sculptor, not exactly a presence that people knew. Perhaps he was still a student somewhere when I came across examples of his work in local installations.

After graduating from the University of Chicago, before going into the army, I took classes part-time at the School of the Art Institute—where I met and was impressed by the teaching of people like Whitney Halstead and Kathleen Blackshear—and at the Institute of Design, where I encountered a photographer named Harry Callahan. This was before I had decided on some personal and permanent label to characterize what I was doing. I was looking around in a random way and being impressed, sometimes overly so, by impulses and icons that suggested a collective sensibility, if not yet one that could be called a “Chicago” school. 

I was close to a few of the artists in that moment, including Seymour Rosofsky, June Leaf, and Irving Petlin, who was my closest long-standing friend, as well as Cosmo Campoli, Golub, and Nancy Spero. They were politically committed votaries of protest at an early period in the history of such behavior. I sometimes joined them, and I understood that it was the atmosphere they created, not just the locale of their activities in Chicago, that made their art, which proved itself to be individual and singular. The European artist whose work most convincingly exemplifies this macabre, comical, absurd, ridiculous atmosphere—and transfuses it very thoroughly—is James Ensor, whom the Chicago artists loved. Without Ensor, there’s a lot in Chicago art that wouldn’t have been done. 

I don’t think that my regard for these innovative Chicago artists, some still unacclaimed, has been diminished by the passage of time. As a matter of fact, I regard them more highly now, as responders to a desperate situation that got worse. Take, for example, the Gigantomachies of Golub. He was showing not just gestures, as in Franz Kline, but murderous gestures. In his Vietnam paintings, he revealed—after the fact, but still “immediate-ized”—images of brutality, misery, disaster, committed by people on our side. But the Gigantomachies aren’t historically specific; they’re more allegorical, with a classical past that characterizes many traditions of Western art.

I think the job of criticism when dealing with local manifestations of art is to speculate responsibly about the relations of the image to the culture at the time, from a moral and political as well as taste and aesthetic standpoint. It makes things richer if you know when and how the artists were responding to their immediate situation. I’ve written that on no principle should an artist be accountable to critics’ politics because openness on both sides can facilitate a more jolting personification of the art in question. With the art that I’m talking about, I’d say a major impetus is what I call animalist desire—to infuse inert materialistic imagery with the sense, the immanent sense, that it could wake up, behave badly, and disturb our notions of reality. I think some of the art does that or tries to do that. Not always rhetorically, but poetically. 

When I came back from the service, I returned to the University of Chicago for graduate study. Joshua Taylor was my most important teacher, and we not only had a good teacher-student relationship but also became friends. Taylor wrote a little book on art criticism, Learning to Look: A Handbook for the Visual Arts. It would be fair to say that Taylor’s teaching encouraged paying close attention to the physical specifics of a work of art, formally, in terms of color, and so on. His approaches to art were mingled with his historian’s grasp. He responded to art with neutral but engaged commentary, which I respected and tried to emulate. Peter Selz also taught at Chicago and was later instrumental in helping me to obtain my first teaching position in New York, at Cooper Union. 

IN NEW YORK, I resumed graduate studies in art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1959. My professors included Robert Goldwater, the noted authority on non-Western art and the author of an influential book on primitivism in modern art. In the early ’60s, there was still a chasm between serious art history and recording the goings-on of contemporary artists. I recall running into Goldwater in 1961 and telling him proudly that I had just been named the art writer for The Nation magazine. Goldwater quickly deflated me, asking, “Is it for the money or the kicks?” I wrote for The Nation until 1970, and I also was the New York correspondent for Art International from 1961 to 1964, when I left NYU without a degree and began working at Artforum as an associate editor. I became a contributing editor for Artforum in 1967.

That year I wrote an essay for the magazine, “Venetian Art and Florentine Criticism,” in which I criticized my colleagues for not attending to color. I expressed my irritation with the, shall I say, bloodlessness of the critical scene. It was an obstacle to obtaining naturalistic commentary about objects created in our own culture and in the past. There was a kind of vacancy that announced itself unconsciously or subconsciously due to various prejudices and attitudes in the cultures—but also perspectives that go back almost to ancient times, undermining color as a constructive agent in imaginative productions. But what would you expect from a man who wrote his master’s thesis on Pierre Bonnard?

In the mid-’60s I even gave some thought to writing a history of criticism—a passing conceit and fancy of my more ambitious years. Writing a history of art criticism could only have tempted me as an idea when I was involved in a fracas with colleagues who were trying to figure out a sensible and productive approach to art criticism. None of us accepted the possibility that there was no history, but we didn’t know very much. 

What we’re talking about is a kind of a transition or a mutation from one thing to another.

This was a formative period for art criticism, which lacked convincing articulation in its early stages. The history of art criticism was a self-legitimizing topic, introducing itself through the efforts of onetime academics looking to be recognized as writers, observers, and intellectuals, attempting to clarify their status, their authority, their freelance ability, you might say. And they should be given a little bit of sympathy in retrospect for trying to find a stable occupation, or at least some stability, to continue in that occupation.

What we were dealing with in New York was an open-ended inquiry into socially created artifacts whose making required some rationale in their context, unlike objects with conspicuous usefulness. Artists were equivocal artificers in a questionable environment. We needed to assuage the skepticism of viewers and make it possible for them to enjoy or be instructed by these questionable objects called works of art. In a sense, we were trying to invent not merely a language of description, where it was needed, but also to imply that these objects were justified in their existence, which was a more difficult task and brought us back to the question of cause and effect in describing things that people produced under this rubric. It caused many discussions, as I said, but also a repositioning of observers who would be rewarded, if possible, by status as authorities. But they had to, as it were, prove their capacity and resources to enjoy whatever standing they got in retrospect when they did their work. I found this a very exciting environment and was glad to join the investigative part of it as well as the expeditionary aspects of the criticism.

For my part, I felt I had two constituencies. One was the reader of some social consciousness who wanted works of art, when considered, to be eloquent about something that was existing in people’s real lives, even in indirect and circuitous distillations of the problem. They were the lay readers. Then there were the schooled specialists, insider commentators who not only dealt with the evolution of a vocabulary that described the work but were analytic about the rationale of creating an idiom, or a style, an obstacle, a refrain, a dereliction, all kinds of possibilities running through what was shown in galleries and museums. 

And I can go further. One can look at an object—think of an early Frank Stella painting such as Die Fahne hoch! [1959]—and ask oneself, “What am I going to do with this? Why am I looking at it? What does it mean? Does it have any value?” These questions arise not as in a secure continuum, but as a fitful spectacle. And there’s a reason. When you look at a work of art—contemporary, let’s say—you see two things. You see what it looks like, how it shows itself, and the thing itself as an object. The Stella represented a closed system with familiar dimensions. Then suddenly you realize there’s something not quite familiar or expected about it: the thickness of the stretchers, about three inches. When the work is properly presented to the public, it’s thicker than it needs to be to have an impact; it has a sculptural presence. It didn’t have to have that thickness, that support, that structure, and once you perceive the difference, you are ingesting something of the content of the work. That is, it tries to partake of two perspectives in approaching objects: what one can do with it and what it looks like when it is contemplated by itself. They may not be convergent perspectives, but if they are considered by the public, the work begins to fulfill itself as an enigma, a deliberate, purposeful enigma: Is it a painting that has gotten a little bit egotistical? Or is it simply a more withheld proposition that is worth thinking about?

What we’re talking about is a kind of a transition or a mutation from one thing to another. If we looked around at other artists, we might see parallel appropriations of genres, ordinarily kept separate from each other, coalescing not necessarily as pictorial puzzles, but as imagistic enhancements of conception. This tendency became more widely embraced and problematic in twentieth-century modernism. I was particularly enchanted when I first perceived this binary overhaul of idioms in the work of Jasper Johns. I didn’t realize it at the time, in the way it’s possible to understand now, that Johns was a pioneer in juxtaposing rather than blending images and objects that had different statuses into the same integral work of art—painting, brushstrokes, gestures, brushy marks together with objects of common use. They shared the same invented metaphorical space. There was something radical and irrational about Johns. He insisted on two antithetical things: the reality of the common objects included in the work and the artistic embodiment around and next to the objects. That realization was for me the invitation to become more operative as an art critic.

Historically speaking, the work he produced in the ’60s was not without precedent in the tradition of collage initiated by the Cubists and later innovators, like Schwitters, for example. But when we come to an artist like Johns, something else happens in the tradition that we didn’t expect: his implied comment on common objects, that their real job was to function as receptacles of paint marks. The paint marks were separate from the kind of action going on in the same work. One felt that he was de- or reevaluating the status of things that could be handled and seen, replacing their evident locale with objects of intrinsic concentration and focus that had no motivation for being there.

Might his work itself be thought of as implicit art criticism? I think we have to credit him with a realization that this could be the case because of a work of his, The Critic Sees [1961], a Sculp-metal brick with one side of it made into a bas-relief, glasses with mouths behind them rather than eyes, suggested that criticism was really not an observant function of the art world, but a trait that could be dissociated and degraded for ironic purposes.

IF ONE IS ASKED, after a professional experience of some length, where you came from, what you admired, how you were influenced, it sometimes nets interesting responses. In my case, I was impressed by a small but nearby evolution of approaches, of which people with names that included “berg” were contributors. Leo Steinberg was one of them. Another was John Berger. And Harold Rosenberg was not without his pull in my environment. 

They were of an older generation, and they were in unison in a way that could not easily be detected, but you felt. They were narrative observers of artmaking, recent artists or old masters. I liked the idea of fashioning stories to fill out the implied content of the framed image. But I also couldn’t help noticing that these writers, self-conscious artists in their prose, were also either outright activists or supportive of political systems. They were people sometimes of the extreme left, and I was repelled by their reliance on systems analysis of human activity that included cultural activity in intolerant contexts. 

John Berger was a good example of that: sensitive in his storytelling interest to imagining human content, but at the same time, in dealing with art, extending too far the use of intolerant political systems as justification when his taste was already good enough for us. He was an unreconstructed Marxist, maybe a Stalinist. Far from being bashful or hesitant about it, he constantly worked out his own belief system, but he often transcended the narrowness and sterility of aesthetics under those conditions by his enthusiasm as a writer, a filmmaker, a pedagogue. 

I felt that I was in dissident territory when engaging with that tradition, as compared to just writing about what was pictured. I thought when I was reading these people for the first time that they were very positive, being constructive guides of public opinion into sophisticated matters, and that their politics were admirable coefficients of this mission they had assigned themselves. But I remembered that in 1953 something had happened that affected my outlook on these matters. It was the death of Stalin, and when I was first informed of it in the media, like everyone else, I felt grief was appropriate. Then suddenly I realized that I couldn’t mourn the death of a man who had caused so many deaths in his own right and had been so authoritarian. I had mistaken the whole presence of left-wing criticism as a monumental rebuke of capitalist excesses and therefore of a worldview. 

I think a lot of people were affected either negatively or positively by this endless fear of uncritical acceptance of tradition, you might say. These guys were votaries of that psychic temperament and I tried to imagine what a criticism would be like that was conscious of political difficulties but did not mindlessly stoop to advocating them. That was part of repudiating an element of our tradition. 

After a year spent teaching at the California Institute of the Arts during its first year, I returned to New York in 1971 and resumed working with Artforum. John Coplans had taken over the editorship from Phil Leider, and it was a new situation.* The writers were becoming polarized. I was seen as having a similar outlook to that of Lawrence Alloway, though he was more of a populist and more generous as a critic than I was. He came here from across the ocean and with a reputation already because he had coined the term “Pop art.” Lawrence and I did well together personally, although I was aware that a lot of the people in the Artforum office would be glad if he went away. But I thought he was more open, frank, liberal, polymathic than any of our fellow writers.

He developed an idea of the art world as a system, or a series of systems [see “Network: The Art World Described as a System,” Artforum, September 1972], which provided some clarity to our dialogue with each other. He meant that there was a structural mechanism that the artist took advantage of to obtain attention in hierarchies. Lawrence was not reactionary or terribly conservative politically, but he was disciplined in his own ideas of that structure and system. Some of this didn’t apply to American vicissitudes, so he was treated ambivalently by colleagues who had business with him.

Coplans was a social guy but on different levels than Lawrence. He was outspoken, opinionated, divisive, and self-discovering. He published a lot of work above his level of understanding, but he was adaptable and he had definite opinions about how people should behave. He was someone who had no tolerance for fools or pomposities or vague and arrogant pronouncements; he was a practical guy with resources and responsibilities. I liked that as a model. He was nonacademic and didn’t regard me as academic either; we were able to talk to each other without footnotes. 

John Coplans and I were seen by some of the magazine’s writers as wanting Artforum to be more explicitly concerned with art’s social context, and that was contentious.

My time there as executive editor, from 1975 through the end of 1976, was relatively brief but intense and memorable. I was given the strange and interesting role of scouting the scene, and if I found anyone who looked capable of writing art criticism who was interesting, I was permitted to introduce them to see what would happen if they wrote something. That happened a few times. Lucy Lippard was one of the writers whose presence in Artforum probably was owed to me. Another was Amy Goldin, a very good writer whose extraordinary range encompassed outsider creativity and revaluing the “decorative.” Both were outspokenly on the left. 

Coplans and I were seen by some of the mag­azine’s writers as wanting Artforum to be more explicitly concerned with art’s social context, and that was contentious. He found it very difficult to deal with his polarized and chaotically antagonistic staff writers. To put out monthly issues with some coherence became difficult. There were terrific fights in editorial meetings at his apartment. In one meeting, the debate became so heated that I got up in some irritation and moved my chair closer to his, away from my fellow writers and colleagues. Later he told me that that gesture meant a great deal to him. John was rather combative, and I was maybe more attentive to the details, but we were seen as together resisting those who were more focused on structure than on society. 

Artforum was always a trade publication in commercial terms, but it was possible at that time to reject the excesses of commercialism without being called sanctimonious. John and I were aligned against common practices in the art world. We wanted to reduce the influence that ad revenue gave to galleries wanting to highlight artists they represented. We also aimed to cut back on favoritism, where staff writers would give their friends or allies special attention. I discouraged monographic articles, which favored personal friendships, and commissioned pieces that were revisionist and critical of the system. 

All of this annoyed and angered Charlie Cowles, the magazine’s publisher. Finally he decided that he had had enough of the difficulties and the buffetings that Artforum was suffering due to its reformist positions. He told Coplans that he was being let go at the end of his contract. John announced to us in the office that he was obliged to leave within a few months. This affected me negatively because I needed his support to continue under fire from different sectors. I also thought that letting him go was indirectly aimed at me, because I was the essential author of many policies that were not exactly bringing in revenue or raising spirits in the gallery world. I had lunch with Cowles to announce that I would leave. 

He wasn’t expecting it, nor did anyone else when I made it public. People were taken aback, friends as well as inimical characters. Charlie wanted me to stay because I was knowledgeable about the continuities, and they had a drawer full of pieces we had commissioned. I knew how to press the buttons and so forth. But I didn’t think that was sufficient warranty for my staying because he was tacitly conveying the fact that he was going to have a different editorial staff, which he put into place shortly after I left. Our departures from Artforum caused a surprising uproar in the art community of that time. 

If I were asked what piece I would recommend to someone who wanted to know my thought about the political context of art, I would say “American Painting During the Cold War,” published in Artforum in 1973. It is something that I’m pleased with; it made a difference. It was partly inspired by Meyer Schapiro’s essay “Nature of Abstract Art,” originally published in Marxist Quarterly in 1937. There are worthwhile essays on artists—Joseph Cornell, Leon Golub—and my book on Jasper Johns, of course. The text of my first book on photography, Photography and Fascination, is a lengthy piece. It wanders, it’s speculative, it goes off the cliff at times. But all the same, it has some ideas, fresh thoughts; it provokes. 

I can think of my worst pieces, too, like a polemic against Clement Greenberg from the early ’60s. I was so pissed at Clem’s writings that I wrote a long, long essay, complaining, criticizing, instigating arguments, being angry. I sent it off to my publisher and editor, Jim Fitzsimmons at Art International. He then published it [in the June 1963 issue], not as an article, but as a letter. Very strange. Turns out he and Greenberg were buddies, and Fitzsimmons didn’t want to alienate Greenberg. So he let me do it as a condescending gesture, publishing it as a letter and writing, to me, “I want to relieve the congestion of your cortical area.” 

But the impact of Greenberg’s writing is something we’re still dealing with. He had a good eye in the ’40s—there’s no question about that. But then what happened? He became more rigid, more doctrinaire. He divided works of art into right and wrong. The ones he liked were considered right. The ones he didn’t like he was indifferent to, was uninterested in them, they were “wrong.” That was an appeal to a notion of truth that didn’t apply. It was irrelevant to my story, even though he influenced a lot of my colleagues. I knew I wanted to deal with why something was pictured and why the picture held sway over us who are in contact with it or would want to deal with it. And such questions, I think, are not yet answered, but we try to do what we can.

Our departures from Artforum caused a surprising uproar in the art community of that time.

WHAT TRIGGERED MY SHIFT to a focus on photography in the ’70s was, on an elemental level, an emotional response to pictorial language in photography because of its credibility, its decisiveness in framing, and its ubiquity as a communicative news medium, which elevated it, in my opinion, to something that deserved—but wasn’t getting—the treatment of a full-time observer with professional aims. 

There were not many writers on photography at the time. John Szarkowski at MoMA was a major—not the sole, but a major curator of photographic production, so his treatment of it got automatic high marks because of his authoritative position. I undervalued his writing style and his curatorial acumen, so I was not exactly friendly with him. But we did have some contact, and he bore my cool manner, I might say, with good grace. 

In May 1967 I reviewed in The Nation an exhibition at MoMA called “New Documents,” organized by Szarkowski, which featured three young photographers, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Gary Winogrand. There was no catalogue, but fifty years later, MoMA produced one with my original review and essays by their curators. The book is called Arbus Friedlander Winogrand: New Documents, 1967.

I knew Friedlander, and we had some conversations. I suspect without real knowledge that he regrets I didn’t pay more attention to his work. I discussed it but not with ultimate enthusiasm. But his was a better position to be in than how I treated Winogrand, who was a kind of omnivorous gatherer of inconsequential systems of unexpected notice. I didn’t respond to his pictures, but he became a major character in photographic aesthetics. There was a genius in Szarkowski’s perspective, though—Diane Arbus. I was caught up in her work like everyone else. It seemed to me contemporary and challenging in a human way about modes of life and being that were native and unstable in our existence: physical disfigurement, minority status, economic woes.

Let me interject here that a photograph has a very different relationship than a painting does to its originating context. When we view a painting or an actual photograph, there is typically an isolating element called a frame. The frame of a painting is a statement, a declaration pertaining to the work’s origin, a statement that what is outside the frame is excluded. Whereas for photographs, frames are necessary containers of subject matter but are more arbitrary, typically intimating an extension of space beyond the frame. Photography is helplessly candid in the intimation of what lies beyond the frame. The relationship of the photographic image to an appearance is conditional and binary, so that we can have a sense of the world as our eyes expose it. 

By the mid-’70s there was a surge of interest in the medium; among the outstanding writers were A. D. Coleman, Vicki Goldberg, Susan Sontag, and Colin Westerbeck, Jr. I was writing more frequently about photography in Artforum, and in September 1976 I devoted an entire issue to it, with a portrait by the intrepid French photographer Félix Tournachon, called Nadar, on the magazine’s cover. In my feature essay on Nadar in that issue, I found one of my sustained interests in that medium, the photographic portrait. Photography offered me the chance to be subversive once again because of the lack of color in photographic practice at that time. My favorite photographers were those with a greater palette, ones who excited me pictorially. 

I think photographs also attracted me at that time with some power because they dealt with events often enough and in a much more direct way than painters or sculptors, which was the founding function of photography. And that made a difference to me at a time when I was feeling discouraged or shortchanged by obscure practices in the art world that were beginning to irritate me. Irritating art. It was possible to be irritated by arrogance, self-righteousness, gullibility, opportunism.

Does an active critic have a sell-by date? Is there a limit to how long one can write authoritatively about the art of one’s time? There is a limit, which could be discussed as a temporal one. That is to say, the amount of time that an idiom takes to reach its apogee or its apex of attention and approval before it descends into something blindsided and immaterial and irrelevant and out of date. Different types of art have different life spans in terms of those criteria. And then you discover much more abundantly in photography than in art that there are merits and virtues, overlooked careers that no one knows about or has heard of. And so, for me, the possibilities of discovery became an incentive to look around, find out things for myself. I liked that.

* The following recollections of Artforum in the 1970s include comments by Kozloff in an interview conducted by Annette Leddy (Oral history interview with Max Kozloff, May 19, 2014–Jan. 20, 2015. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).