Max Kozloff, a critic who influentially collapsed the divide between art and politics that was erected by formalists who came before him, died on April 6 at 91. His death was announced this week by his wife, the artist Joyce Kozloff.
Kozloff made his name during the 1970s on essays that addressed Cubism, Futurism, and other modernist movements. But rather than rehashing the same ideas about form, style, and artistic innovation put forward by Clement Greenberg and others of his ilk, Kozloff set out to understand the ideological undercurrents of modernism. He showed that artworks are produced not just by the brains of artists but also by the world surrounding them.
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He rose quickly during that era, publishing criticism with the Nation, Art International, ARTnews, Art in America, and other top publications before ascending to the upper ranks of Artforum, where he served as executive editor from 1975 to 1976. After a bitter dispute over the magazine’s direction, Kozloff struck out on his own with a new focus on photography.
His most famous work remains “American Painting During the Cold War,” which first appeared in Artforum in 1973. That essay addressed the rapid expansion of the US art scene during the postwar era, something Kozloff attributed not to a burst of formalist innovation, as many critics before him did, but to a larger quest to build a more concrete sense of Americanness that could be projected internationally.
“Professional avant-garde ideology exhibits a great distaste for the mixing of political evaluations with artistic ‘purity,’” Kozloff wrote in that essay. “Yet however convenient, they dam up the continuing psychological resonance of American art and reinforce the outdated piety with which it is regarded.” He sought to undermine that sense of piety by taking on a more sobering, more socially aware gaze.
In a 2014 oral history for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Kozloff said he had been emboldened to write the essay after considering the 1936 map of modern art devised by Alfred H. Barr, the first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. That chart asserted modernism as linear and predominantly European, eliding many movements that are now seen as important to the progression of 20th century art.
“When I read his setting forth that history, in terms of coherent movements and concrete blocks of leading personalities and of stylistic formal analyses, I kept on feeling that something very serious had been omitted,” Kozloff said, adding, “I kept on feeling, somehow, left out in the cold and missing certain things that I felt when I looked at modern art.” Through his criticism, he ensured that others wouldn’t be left out in the cold either.
Max Kozloff was born in 1933 in Chicago. His father, a Ukrainian immigrant, owned a leather factory; his mother, whose family was of Ukrainian descent, was a housewife. Together, they had four sons, of which Kozloff was the youngest.
His first experience of art came when he was in grammar school, where he began drawing battleships from memory. A viewing of the 1945 film The Portrait of Dorian Gray furthered his interest in art, as did repeated visits to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he marveled before a plaster cast of an equestrian statue of an Italian soldier by Andrea del Verrocchio. “It was a fierce image meant, propagandistically, to be intimidating,” he told Artforum in 2023, “so one of my first experiences of the Art Institute was learning that in art there were ‘angrified’ moments that became monumental.”
He attended the University of Chicago’s art history program as an undergraduate, then took classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1954, he was drafted into the US Army. After two years, he returned to Chicago, getting an MA from the University of Chicago before heading to New York in 1959 to study at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University’s art history graduate program.
At the IFA, Kozloff’s teachers included the art historian Robert Goldwater, who stewarded Nelson Rockefeller’s extensive collection of African and Oceanic art before it was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1961, Kozloff was offered a job as art writer at the Nation. He recalled Goldwater asking him: “Is it for the money or the kicks?”
Kozloff left the IFA in 1964 without a degree and joined Artforum as an associate editor. He became a contributing editor in 1966 and executive editor in 1975. By that point, he had already published a book on Cubism and Futurism. Not everyone was buying what Kozloff was selling. Writing in the New York Times, art critic Hilton Kramer, formerly Kozloff’s editor at the Nation, quibbled with Kozloff’s “ideological bias” in that book.
At Artforum, Kozloff sought to publish critical writings that didn’t necessary flatter acclaimed artists, something that rankled some of his coworkers. “John [Coplans, Artforum’s editor] and I were aligned against common practices in the art world,” Kozloff said in 2023. “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.” When Coplans’s contract was not renewed, Kozloff tendered his resignation.
Later in the ’70s, Kozloff turned his attention to photography, a medium that few other art critics were thinking much about at the time. He told Artforum, “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.”
His essays on photography were assembled for the 1987 book The Privileged Eye. He also wrote books on Jasper Johns and Johannes Vermeer.
All the while, Kozloff continued creating his own art, making abstract paintings that he continued to produce well into his final years. (The New York gallery DC Moore memorably mounted a show of them 2018.) He also took photographs of his own, turning his lens on New York streets and the beaches of Coney Island that he said could be situated in a French tradition that included Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
But he was always, first and foremost, a critic. When he was asked in 2014 about what it was like to be reviewed as an artist after penning criticism about others for so long, he said, “Well I put myself in the mental position as it were, or as best I could, of the writer.”