Rosalind Krauss

Rosalind Krauss is University Professor in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, where she formally held the Meyer Schapiro Chair in Modern Art and theory (1995-2006). A specialist in 20th-century art, she has published Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (MIT Press l97l), Passages in Modern Sculpture (Viking, l977), David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné (Garland Press, l977), The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (MIT Press, l985), Le Photographique (Editions Macula, 1990), Cindy Sherman (Rizzoli, 1993), The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press, 1993), Formless: A User's Guide (Zone, 1997), The Picasso Papers (Farrar, Straus, 1998) Bachelors (MIT Press, 1999), A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Thames & Hudson, 1999, and Under Blue Cup (MIT Press, 2011).

As guest curator she organized the exhibition Joan Miro: Magnetic Fields for the Guggenheim Museum in l971, originated L'Amour fou: Surrealism and Photography at the Corcoran Museum (l985), curated Richard Serra/Sculpture for the Museum of Modern Art (l986), and the Guggenheim's retrospective Robert Morris: the Mind/Body Problem. With Yve-Alain Bois she organized L'Informe: Mode d'emploi for the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 1996. Having held the conviction that the history of modern art could not be pursued apart from its theory and criticism, Rosalind Krauss joined the editorial board of Artforum in the l960s. In 1975, along with Annette Michelson, she left Artforum to start a new journal, October Magazine, published by MIT Press. There too, the task of writing and publishing is understood as forging a relationship between contemporary concerns and scholarship, for October has, from its inception, conceived of criticism as an act of opening the history of modernism to theory, that is, to an examination of its fundamental premises.