Donald Kuspit

Donald Kuspit (born March 26, 1935, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American art critic and art historian widely regarded as the foremost practitioner of psychoanalytic art criticism.

After receiving doctorates in philosophy (University of Frankfurt) and art history (University of Michigan), Kuspit began a career as an art critic in the 1970s, writing primarily for Artforum and Art in America as well as in several specialized philosophical journals. In 1979 he published his study of Clement Greenberg, one of the first book-length analyses of the work of a 20th-century art critic. In addition to criticizing Greenberg’s “exclusively positivist explanation [which] seems to betray the richness of effect in the art, and to vulgarize its existence,” the book serves as a manifesto for Kuspit’s own approach to criticism, which seeks to analyze and differentiate the psychosocial dimensions of art. This interest led Kuspit to cofound the journal Art Criticism with his colleagues in the art department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1979. The journal became a vehicle for dialectical critical writing that was at odds with both Modernist and Marxist schools of thought.

Throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Kuspit exhibited a great deal of enthusiasm for the movement of figurative painting known as Neo-Expressionism. After l985 he became interested in describing the motivational particulars that lie behind a wide variety of artworks and resorted to the descriptive terminology of such theorists as psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. This interest led him to complete psychoanalytic training at the New York University Medical Center.

Kuspit’s major writings included Clement Greenberg: Art Critic (1979), The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist (1993), Health and Happiness in Twentieth Century Avant-Garde Art (1996), Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries (2000), and The End of Art (2004). He is also the author of Britannica’s article on the history of art criticism. In addition to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Kuspit taught at Cornell University.