Rosalind Krauss

Rosalind Krauss (born November 30, 1940, Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an American art critic and historian of 20th-century art who first came to prominence when she accused the art critic Clement Greenberg of mishandling the estate of sculptor David Smith.

Krauss first became interested in 20th-century art criticism as an undergraduate at Wellesley College (B.A., 1962). She attended graduate school at Harvard University, where she wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the sculpture of David Smith. At the time, Krauss was influenced by Greenberg’s equation of pure formalism with high Modernism. In the mid-1960s Krauss’s art criticism began appearing in Artforum, and in the 1970s she was an editor of the magazine.

In 1974 Krauss published a controversial article in the magazine Art in America condemning Greenberg’s mismanagement of Smith’s estate. She claimed that he had willfully failed to respect the artist’s intentions regarding the proper constitution of a finished work, letting many important works fall into partial decay because he himself preferred them in that state. This was a watershed moment in her own development as a critic, for soon thereafter she began distancing herself from strictly formalist analyses.

In 1976 Krauss cofounded October, a journal that became an influential vehicle for the debate surrounding the emergence of postmodernism and New Historicism in 20th-century art-historical studies. October also contributed greatly to Anglo-American academics’ adoption of French theoretical innovations, especially those pertaining to the analysis of cinema. Krauss’s major writings include The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985); The Optical Unconscious (1993), a focused study of nontraditional modernist work; with Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (1997); and Bachelors (1999), a collection of essays on the work of nine female artists. Among her later books are Perpetual Inventory (2010) and Under Blue Cup (2011).