Full Name: Kozloff, Max
Other Names:
- Max Kozloff
Gender: male
Date Born: 1933
Place Born: Chicago, Cook, IL, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period) and photographs
Career(s): art critics
Overview
Historian and critic of modern art; photographer. Kozloff graduated from the University of Chicago in 1953. Between 1954-1956 he served in the U.S. Army and then returning to the University of Chicago for his A. M. in 1958. He entered New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1959 for his Ph.D. He taught at NYU, joining the Nation as art critic in 1961 (remaining until 1968) and Art International. Kozloff was awarded a Fulbright fellowship for the, 1962-1963 year winning a Pulitzer Prize for critical writing for the same time period. He left NYU without a degree in 1964 and began contributing to Artforum as an associate editor. In 1965 he earned the Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., Award for art criticism from College Art Association of America. He married the artist Joyce Blumberg in 1967 and became a contributing editor to Artforum the same year. Kozloff was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for 1968-1969. He wrote the volume on Jasper Johns for the Abrams artist series in 1968. In 1972 he was named an associate editor of books at Artforum. He published his book Cubism/ Futurism in 1973. Kozloff was executive editor of the magazine between 1975 and 1977. A second Jasper Johns book appeared in 1986. In 1989 he joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts. Kozloff switched careers, becoming an art photographer in 1976. He held numerous shows, initially photographing store windows, and then to the people of New York, intentionally following the path of Jewish itinerant photographers of the city. His subsequent notions of photography were criticized, especially the notion that Jewish photographers has a special way of making images.
Selected Bibliography
Photography & fascination: Essays. Danbury, NH: Addison House, 1979; The Privileged Eye: Essays on Photography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987; Duane Michals: Now Becoming Then. Altadena, CA: Twin Palms Publishers, 1991; Lone Visions, Crowded Frames: Essays on Photography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994; Cultivated Impasses: Essays on the Waning of the Avant-Garde, 1964-1975. New York: Marsilio, 2000; New York: Capital of Photography. New York: Jewish Museum/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002; Cubism/Futurism. New York: Charterhouse 1973.
Sources
“Max Kosloff.” Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974. Newman, Amy, ed. New York: Soho Press, 2000, pp. 474-475; Halasz, P. “Art Criticism (and Art History) in New York: the 1940s vs the 1990: Part Three: Clement Greenberg.” Arts Magazine 57 (April 1983): 84-85.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen