Max Kozloff (1933–2025). Courtesy School of Visual Arts New York.
A towering figure in postwar American art criticism, Kozloff’s penetrating insights and dual life as both observer and creator left a mark on modern and contemporary art discourse.
Born in Chicago in 1933, Kozloff’s early immersion in the Art Institute of Chicago shaped his lifelong devotion to visual culture. After moving to New York in 1959, he emerged as a formidable voice, serving as an art critic for The Nation (1961–1968) and later as a contributing and executive editor at Artforum (1963–1976). His 1973 essay, “American Painting During the Cold War,” remains a seminal critique, boldly linking Abstract Expressionism to the era’s political currents.
Kozloff was never content to merely analyze; he was also an artist of uncommon sensitivity. His street photography and portraiture—exhibited at Holly Solomon Gallery, Marlborough, and the Art Institute of Chicago—revealed an acute awareness of the fragile, fleeting exchanges between photographer and subject. Less public was his profoundly personal painting practice, where he explored the emotive power of color and atmosphere.
His 2018 exhibition at DC Moore Gallery, The Atmospherics of Interruption: Paintings 1966–2018, unveiled a body of work shaped by a profound sensory shift—his hearing loss, which he transformed into a visual lyricism, where brushstrokes hummed like music and faces emerged unbidden from the ether.
A scholar as much as a critic, Kozloff’s writings spanned centuries and mediums, from Cubism/Futurism (1973) to The Theatre of the Face (2007), and monographs on artists like Jasper Johns and Saul Leiter. His photographic works, collected in New York Over the Top (2013) and A Carnival of Mimics (2020), are testaments to his restless, roving eye.
Kozloff’s unwavering curiosity—a mind that analyzed the political significance of art without losing sight of its personal, intimate pulse.
