Gablik, Suzi

Artist, art critic and art historian. Gablik was born to Anthony J. Gablik and Geraldine Schwarz (Gablik). She briefly attended Black Mountain College during the summer of 1951 before entering Hunter College (now part of the City University of New York) where she studied with Robert Motherwell. She received her B. A. in 1955. Gablik began as an artist working in college paintings. In 1966 held her first one-woman show in New York. She and the New York Times art critic John Russell wrote the exhibition catalog, Pop Art Redefined in 1969. Another solo show was held in 1972 in New York. In the late 1970s she ceased making art to devote herself to writing art history and criticism. She became a university lecturer. In 1977 she authored Progress in Art. Her writing became increasingly concerned with the social aspects. Her book Has Modernism Failed? appeared in 1984. In it she argued that the early modern art movement's commitment to social change ceased in the art of the 1980s. Gablik claimed she stopped being a visual artist because her writing was more satisfying and was more able to alter people's thinking through books than art. She was the London critic for Art In America for most of the 1980s. Her Re-Enchantment of Art, 1991 pitted a new "connective aesthetics" against what she termed "deconstruction and despair." The dominant art, she believed, was part of the problem. Re-Enchantment suggested a new "connective aesthetics" arguing against what she saw as the dominant trends of deconstruction and despair. Art should heal, she argued, something that contemporary art did not do.