Krauss, Rosalind E., 1940-

Rosalind Epstein Krauss is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a critic and theorist she has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum, Art International and Art in America. She was associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976.

Krauss was born to Matthew M. Epstein and Bertha Luber in Washington D.C. and grew up in the area, visiting art museums with her father. After graduating from Wellesley in 1962, she attended Harvard,[4] whose Department of Fine Arts (now Department of History of Art and Architecture) had a strong tradition of the intensive analysis of actual art objects under the aegis of the Fogg Museum.

Krauss wrote her dissertation on the work of David Smith. Krauss received her Ph.D. in 1969. The dissertation was published as Terminal Iron Works in 1971.

In the late-1960s and early-1970s Krauss began to contribute articles to art journals such as Art International and Artforum — which, under the editorship of Philip Leider, was relocated from California to New York.[5] She began by writing the "Boston Letter" for Art International, but soon published well-received articles on Jasper Johns (Lugano Review, 1965) and Donald Judd (Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd, Artforum, May 1966). Her commitment to the emerging minimal art in particular set her apart from Michael Fried, who was oriented toward the continuation of modernist abstraction in Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland and Anthony Caro. Krauss's article A View of Modernism (Artforum, September 1972), was one signal of this break.

Krauss became dissatisfied with Artforum when in its November 1974 issue it published a full-page advertisement by featuring the artist Lynda Benglis aggressively posed with a large latex dildo and wearing only a pair of sunglasses promoting an upcoming exhibition of hers at the Paula Cooper Gallery. Although Benglis' image is now popularly cited as an important example of gender performativity in contemporary art, it provoked mixed responses when it first appeared. Krauss and other Artforum personnel attacked Benglis' work in the following month's issue of Artforum, describing the advertisement as exploitative and brutalizing, and soon left the magazine to co-found October in 1976.

October was formed as a politically-charged journal that introduced American readers to the ideas of French post-structuralism, made popular by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Krauss used October as a way of publishing essays on post-structuralist art theory, Deconstructionist theory, psychoanalysis, postmodernism and feminism.

The founders included Krauss, Annette Michelson and the artist Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Krauss was appointed as its founding editor. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe withdrew after only a few issues, and by the spring of 1977, Douglas Crimp joined the editorial team. In 1990, after Crimp left the journal, Krauss and Michelson were joined by Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Denis Hollier, and John Rajchman.

Krauss taught at Wellesley, MIT and Princeton before joining the faculty at Hunter College in 1974. She was promoted to professor in 1977 at Hunter and was also appointed professor at the Graduate Center of CUNY. She held the title of Distinguished Professor at Hunter until she left to join the Columbia University faculty in 1992. In 1985, a monograph of essays by Krauss, titled The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths was published by The MIT Press.

Previously Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia, in 2005 Rosalind Krauss was promoted to the highest faculty rank of University Professor. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and of the Institute for Advanced Study. She received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for criticism from the College Art Association in 1973.[10] She has been a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities since 1992 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. She recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of London.

Krauss has been curator of many art exhibitions at leading museums, among them exhibitions on Joan Miró at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1970–73), on surrealism and photography at the Corcoran Museum of Art (1982–85), on Richard Serra at the Museum of Modern Art (1985–86), and on Robert Morris at the Guggenheim (1992–94). She prepared an exhibition for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris called "Formlessness: Modernism Against the Grain" in 1996.