Kirk Varnedoe, ex-MOMA curator, 57
Scott Brady
Kurt Varnedoe, Modern Art's Athletic Mind
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 15, 2003; Page C01
Kirk Varnedoe, who died Wednesday night at age 57 after a long fight
with cancer, was a forceful guy. Though he was an important historian
of modern art from early on, and went on to public prominence as the
top curator at the Museum of Modern Art, he never had much of the
delicate aesthete about him. Over the dozen or so times I met Kirk --
he was one of my brother Adam's closest friends and a close
collaborator -- traces of his early love of college rugby always
seemed to linger. (At the very end of his life, he could still be seen
teaching football moves to 8-year-olds in Central Park.) I once got to
witness him tackle a senior colleague in absentia; that famous
scholar's obscure prose, Kirk was happy to insist, merely hid how
little sense there was behind it.
Kirk's athletic, virile manner made him an oddity in the art world,
and less than a favorite of a few of its inhabitants. His forceful
surface also contradicted the delicately subtle tenor of his work and
thought. His unique brand of art history always concentrated on the
close-up complexities of what artists really do, and rejected any
grand explanatory scheme that manhandled crucial details just to score
a point.
Kirk's last major public appearance was at the National Gallery in
Washington this past spring, when he gave the six Mellon Lectures, art
history's most prestigious series of public talks. He spoke about the
nature of abstraction and its recent history.
As usual, Kirk's delivery and energetic rhetoric were stunning, though
he spoke with a bare minimum of notes -- the scholar's equivalent of
working without a net. (The first time I heard him speak, years ago in
Montreal, the light on his lectern refused to work. Rather than keep
his audience waiting while it was fixed, Kirk claimed that he could
read well enough by light reflected from his slides. After a
brilliantly fluid talk, it turned out that even the few notes he'd
brought had been invisible to him throughout.) Record-breaking crowds
turned up at the National Gallery for Kirk's Mellon Lectures, and the
numbers only seemed to grow as the weeks passed and word of mouth
spread. By the end, fans were waiting hours in line for a chance to
hear him speak, and they gave him a standing ovation when the series
closed.
But for all his crowd-pleasing verbal fireworks, the content of Kirk's
talk was miraculously subtle, as he insisted that there could be no
single explanation for how abstraction works, that each piece had to
be understood on its own terms -- how it came to be made, what it
meant then and what it has gone on to mean to viewers since. Dour
works like Frank Stella's early gray-on-black canvases, or Richard
Serra's pours of molten lead, seemed to open up under Kirk's touch to
reveal a delicacy and complexity lost in less textured explanations.
After Kirk's lectures, there may have been some slight disappointment
at the lack of a single message to take home, but there was
exhilaration at the variety of meaning that his deliberate lack of
message opened up.
This is Kirk's legacy: a determination to favor the particular
realities of art over the shoehorning generalizations of scholarship.
February's blockbuster "Matisse Picasso" show was the last major
project that Kirk worked on for MoMA. (In 2001, he discovered that the
colon cancer he had thought was in remission had metastasized; he left
the museum in early 2002 to take up a pure research position at
Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where he wrote the Mellon
Lectures.) Despite being co-curated with five other scholars, "Matisse
Picasso" seemed to have a Varnedoe touch. In its most Kirkian moments,
the exhibition had a strong concentration on the documented
complexities of history -- on precisely when and how Matisse had
contact with Picasso, and vice versa -- rather than on larger ideas
about Picasso-hood and Matisse-ishness. (When it veered into
groundless speculation, I liked to imagine I was seeing other
curators' hands at work.)
Earlier MoMA exhibitions organized by Kirk showed his touch in purer
form.
A major Jackson Pollock retrospective in 1998 seemed a straightforward
survey of the painter's work -- Kirk often liked to let an artist's
pictures speak for themselves -- but it had moments of strong insight
into precisely how that work took shape. A full-size reconstruction of
Pollock's cramped studio, for instance, gave a clear idea of the
specific physicality involved in his act of painting. No wonder
Pollock loomed on top of his canvases; there was no room to back up
from them. (That reconstruction was often misread as a corny homage to
a space once inhabited by genius. Kirk admired artistic innovation,
but no one ever caught him canonizing its practitioners.)
And Kirk's first major MoMA show, the hugely controversial "High and
Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture," co-curated with my brother in
1990, was Varnedoe art history at his purest. From Picasso through pop
art, it had always been obvious that modern artists had borrowed from
the everyday world around them -- but no one had ever bothered to
spell out all the specificities of how that borrowing actually came
about, and what it might have meant. "High and Low" set out to do just
that. In the process it discovered, for instance, that Max Ernst's
famous collages were glued together from advertising imagery that was
already old-fashioned by Ernst's day; when they were made, Ernst's
collages were more about nostalgia for the past than current
consumerism.
The show also discovered that pop artist Roy Lichtenstein wasn't just
influenced by the style of comic book art, as had always been assumed;
his paintings are precise blow-ups of particular panels from a small
roster of favored artists and comics. They come closer to homage than
to satire.
"High and Low" was savaged from all sides: Right-wingers thought it
heresy to pollute sacrosanct great art by showing it alongside ads and
comics; the art world's militant left thought the pollution went the
other way.
And Kirk just wanted to do away with all such hierarchies, and get at
precisely what had happened on the ground when someone like Picasso
borrowed the typeface from a newspaper or the graphics from an ad.
In "A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern," a book-length
essay published the year of "High and Low," Kirk staked out his
territory: "Innovation is a kind of secular miracle; secular, because
it happens amid the humdrum machinery of life getting along, and
virtually everything about it is comprehensible without recourse to
any notion of supernatural mystery or fated destiny; miraculous, not
only because it can change things dramatically, but because none of
that machinery suffices to explain why it had to happen this way. . .
. The raw material here is not random change, but personal initiative:
The individual decisions to be an outsider within one's own world, to
try new meanings for old forms, and attack old tasks with new means,
to accept the strange as useful and to reconsider the familiar as
fraught with possibility."
And he chose his metaphor: "The exploit of William Webb Ellis, who
with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time,
first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the
distinctive feature of the Rugby game."
Kirk had that kind of fine disregard.
PirateJohn
>and less than a favorite of a few of its inhabitants.
You aren't a bit homophobic there, now are you Scott?
Kind of an odd phrase and an odd mindset for the author. You aren't hiding
anything, are you? ;)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pirat...@aol.com
Keeper of the Humour List at http://members.aol.com/PirateJohn/pirate1.html
"Mother, mother ocean... I have heard your call" - Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate
Looks At Forty.
Hyfler/Rosner
"PirateJohn" <pirat...@aol.comNOSPAM> wrote in message
news:20030815141921...@mb-m02.aol.com...
> >Kirk's athletic, virile manner made him an oddity in the art world,
> >and less than a favorite of a few of its inhabitants.
>
> You aren't a bit homophobic there, now are you Scott?
>
> Kind of an odd phrase and an odd mindset for the author. You aren't
hiding
> anything, are you? ;)
What the hell is wrong with you these days? The obituary was written by
Blake Gopnik at the Washington Post. Now we have to take responsibility for
the tone of the obits we post?
And here's the NY Times obit. My hard copy of the Times, like 9/12, the
*only* one delivered to my building. Did you get one, Louis?
Kirk Varnedoe, 57, Curator Who Changed the Modern's Collection and Thinking,
Dies
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Kirk Varnedoe, the articulate, courtly and wide-ranging art historian who as
chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art helped
to reshape the museum's collection and philosophy and in so doing created a
broader public understanding of modern art, died yesterday at Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. He was 57 and lived in Manhattan
and Princeton.
The cause was colon cancer, said his wife, the sculptor Elyn Zimmerman. Mr.
Varnedoe had been fighting cancer for seven years, during which he had left
the Modern to accept a position on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton. That gave him time to write the Mellon Lectures for the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, which he delivered this spring. His
subject was abstraction since 1945, not the most popular topic ordinarily,
but overflow crowds lined up hours beforehand to hear him speak.
"He loved life in its most tangible forms, and so for him art was as
physical and pleasurable as being knocked down by a wave," said Adam Gopnik,
the writer and a former student of his who collaborated on Mr. Varnedoe's
first big show at the Modern, "High & Low." "Art was always material first -
it was never, ever bound by a thorny crown of ideas. His incredible faith in
real things for him found its highest expression in art, but extended way
beyond to include everything from an Elvis record to a bottle of Krug, and
it brought to life, every day, the ordinary existence of everyone around
him."
Chuck Close, the painter, said yesterday: "As an artist, it was thrilling to
have Kirk describe your work. He was a dazzling speaker, but it was not just
wordsmanship. He got to the heart of things fast. He had a genuine rapport
with artists. He even married one. When he asked me to do a show choosing
works from the museum's collection, his support was total in the service of
taking a fresh look at the collection. And personally, he was instrumental,
after I became paralyzed, in having my work seen not as the work of a
handicapped artist but as the work of an artist with a handicap. I can't
tell you how important that was. Then when he became ill he never allowed
himself to be defined by cancer."
Among the many acquisitions for which Mr. Varnedoe was responsible at the
Modern was one of van Gogh's great portraits of Joseph Roulin, the bearded
postmaster the artist befriended in Arles, France. Mr. Varnedoe was
finishing a book about the painting when he died. He also acquired for the
museum a sketch by Picasso for "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon." Above all, he
helped to build the collection of art from the 1960's and 70's, which had
been underrepresented at the Modern. The museum acquired James Rosenquist's
enormous, iconic pop mural "F-16," Andy Warhol's famous suite of soup-can
paintings and major works by Richard Serra, Rauschenberg, James Turrell, Cy
Twombly and others.
His exhibitions included the hugely successful Jackson Pollock retrospective
in 1998, which he organized with Pepe Karmel, a former student, and
retrospectives of Jasper Johns (1996) and Mr. Twombly (1994). With Mr.
Gopnik he did "High & Low" in 1990, a historical survey of the traffic
between high modern art and popular culture. Mr. Varnedoe's first big
undertaking as curator, it was a brave debut because it predictably caused
much debate, and some bitter criticism, while the contemporary art world was
sharply divided. With time, the breakdown of traditional artistic
hierarchies and the book that came out of the exhibition have been
increasingly accepted and influential.
Before then, as a guest curator at the museum, Mr. Varnedoe helped to
organize, with William Rubin, who previously headed the painting and
sculpture department, the equally contentious "Primitivism" show (1984),
which traced the influence of so-called primitive art on Western artists
from Gauguin to the present. And by himself he put together the
much-praised, popular "Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture & Design" (1986).
Less conspicuously, but very significantly, as curator he initiated the
Artists Choice series. Artists - Scott Burton, Elizabeth Murray, Chuck
Close, John Baldessari, Ellsworth Kelly - were invited to organize
exhibitions of works from the museum's permanent collection. Mr. Varnedoe
explained, "I would really like the public to see the collection through the
eyes of the people to whom it means the most."
His marriage to an artist, Ms. Zimmerman, had helped alert him to the value
of including the views of living artists at the museum. Before Mr. Varnedoe
arrived, the museum had increasingly come to be perceived within much of the
contemporary art world as disconnected from, even hostile to, new art. These
modest shows not only reconnected the museum with the contemporary scene but
also helped to establish terms for a long overdue reconsideration of the
presentation of modern art history at the museum.
This reconsideration took place mainly through Mr. Varnedoe's reinstallation
of the collection. He progressively turned what had been a hard and narrow
view of the course of modern painting and sculpture, focused almost
exclusively on France and then the United States, into a more flexible and
inclusive narrative without undoing what he believed was essentially right
and elegant about the old view.
His installations gave new prominence to Russian, German and Italian art
before the war and to a wide array of art since 1960, including art by
women. The galleries were literally opened up so that they were no longer
arranged as an inescapable sequence of rooms dictating a single story. It
was a judicious, diplomatic reappraisal, not a drastic overhaul, reflecting
his personality. Naturally, conservative critics and more radical
revisionists fumed anyway, but the changes have come to be widely accepted
and imitated.
Mr. Varnedoe's willingness to rethink, tweak and tinker with the history of
art at the world's most influential modern art museum came from a vitality
and a large curiosity that expressed themselves before he arrived in books
about underappreciated and occasionally oddball figures like the French
painter and collector Gustave Caillebotte, the Scandinavian artists Vilhelm
Hammershoi and Eugene Jansson, and the American superrealist Duane Hanson.
Some of these books resulted from exhibitions. Mr. Varnedoe organized a
Caillebotte retrospective for the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 1976, as
well as "Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting" for
the Brooklyn Museum in 1982, while he was still a professor at the Institute
of Fine Arts at New York University. They helped to bring him to the
attention of the Modern as a scholar of independent inclinations who could
put together popular exhibitions and write smartly and accessibly for a wide
audience.
The jury for the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship noticed these qualities,
too, and granted him one of its genius prizes in 1984. Among other things,
he used the grant to write a history of modernism, "A Fine Disregard: What
Makes Modern Art Modern." He borrowed the title from a plaque near the Rugby
School in England honoring William Webb Ellis, "who, with a fine disregard
for the rules, invented the game of rugby." Mr. Varnedoe, a rugby player and
avid athlete, proposed Ellis's mad dash with the ball as a metaphor for
artistic innovation. It was an anti-Hegelian, anti-Marxist position, wherein
art was regarded not as an inevitable unfolding of progressive events but as
a variety of inspired inventions by remarkable and imaginative people. It
was also, importantly for Mr. Varnedoe, a visceral and immediate experience.
John Kirk Train Varnedoe was born on Jan. 18, 1946, the youngest of four
children, into an old, distinguished family from Savannah, Ga. In addition
to his wife, he is survived by two brothers, Sam, a photographer from New
York City, and Gordon, an arts administrator from Savannah, and a sister,
Comer, also from Savannah.
As a boy, Mr. Varnedoe had a flair for drawing and painting, and at St.
Andrews, a prep school in Delaware, his caricatures ran in the school
yearbook. He became one of many museum professionals to have graduated from
Williams College, where, he recalled, Lane Faison Jr. was one of the
professors who opened his eyes to art history. "You were encouraged to
believe that you should look hard at paintings and that what you had to say
about them would be worthwhile," Mr. Varnedoe said, "which in a sense was a
false hope, because many people had said thousands of things about these
pictures before. But it was very salutary."
As a doctoral student at Stanford under Albert Elsen, the Rodin scholar, he
gained access to hundreds of previously unseen drawings by Rodin, which
caught the attention of J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery,
and the result was his first major exhibition, of Rodin drawings, in
Washington in 1971.
For years, he taught at Columbia University and at the Institute of Fine
Arts, where his lectures routinely attracted huge audiences of students and
the public. Even in one-on-one conversation, his speaking style was
custom-made for the lecture hall: astonishingly fluent, easy and organized
in perfectly formed, complex paragraphs that seemed to flow naturally and
without hesitation. In person he had no time for idle charm, but people who
sometimes found him brusque at first came in time to recognize shyness,
loyalty, an occasional naïve streak about art world politics, and empathy.
Typically, he ceded some of the dictatorial power that had been exercised by
predecessors at the Modern, and shared more responsibilities with junior
colleagues who had different interests and strengths.
For him, modern art was like modern life, Mr. Gopnik added. It was not a
religion but a way of experiencing the world.
"Modern art writ large," Mr. Varnedoe once wrote, "presents one cultural
expression of a larger political gamble on the human possibility of living
in change and without absolutes, and also on the individual human
consciousness, for all its flaws and deforming optics, as our prime resource
and treasure."
Scott Brady
> >Kirk's athletic, virile manner made him an oddity in the art world,
> >and less than a favorite of a few of its inhabitants.
Code language if I ever heard it.
Scott Brady
> "PirateJohn" <pirat...@aol.comNOSPAM> wrote in message
> news:20030815141921...@mb-m02.aol.com...
> > >Kirk's athletic, virile manner made him an oddity in the art world,
> > >and less than a favorite of a few of its inhabitants.
> >
> > You aren't a bit homophobic there, now are you Scott?
> >
> > Kind of an odd phrase and an odd mindset for the author. You aren't
> hiding
> > anything, are you? ;)
>
>
> What the hell is wrong with you these days? The obituary was written by
> Blake Gopnik at the Washington Post. Now we have to take responsibility for
> the tone of the obits we post?
For God's sake, the man concluded his post with a smiley, or was the
significance of that completely lost on you? Then again, it was that
winking smiley, so read into it what you will.
PirateJohn
>Blake Gopnik at the Washington Post. Now we have to take responsibility for
>the tone of the obits we post?
Jeese Hyfler/Rosner, I might ask the same of you. Off your Prozac? PMS
flairing? For crying out loud ...
I thought that the author's comment sounded a bit homophobic. My opinion,
something that I'm entitled to (last that I heard) but I'd be interesting in
hearing contrary opinions.
Frankly, I think that Scott got the point that I was good-naturedly asking
rather than flaming.
Some discussion on your part would have been nice. Having a hissy fit doesn't
accomplish anything. IMHO.
Let us all relax, please.
Hyfler/Rosner
"PirateJohn" <pirat...@aol.comNOSPAM> wrote in >
> Jeese Hyfler/Rosner, I might ask the same of you. Off your Prozac? PMS
> flairing? For crying out loud ...
>
> I thought that the author's comment sounded a bit homophobic. My opinion,
> something that I'm entitled to (last that I heard) but I'd be interesting
in
> hearing contrary opinions.
Then I apologize. Especially since Scott didn't take offense. It's just
that he wasn't the author and I thought it a little bizarre that you were
accusing him of homophobia. I still do, but what the hell.
PirateJohn
>that he wasn't the author and I thought it a little bizarre that you were
>accusing him of homophobia. I still do, but what the hell.
>
Apology accepted. I think ;)
I thought it was an odd comment and that's why I mentioned it.
The Kentucky Wizard
consultations with my Joint Chiefs of Staff, being briefed by members of my
Cabinet and telephone conversations with various world leaders, I have come
to the following conclusions:
> Jeese Hyfler/Rosner, I might ask the same of you. Off your Prozac? PMS
> flairing? For crying out loud ...
>
Amelia spanked me a couple of days ago as well, John, but I rather enjoyed
it. I'm looking forward to being a naughty boy again for her real soon. ;-)~
--
© The Wiz ®
«¤»¥«¤»¥«¤»
Hyfler/Rosner
"The Kentucky Wizard" <kentuck...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:3QX%a.43570$2x.1...@rwcrnsc52.ops.asp.att.net...
Yich.
PirateJohn
>>
>> Amelia spanked me a couple of days ago as well, John, but I rather enjoyed
>> it. I'm looking forward to being a naughty boy again for her real soon.
>;-)~
>>
>
>Yich.
Yich? I've learned another new word. Yiddish, perhaps? ;)
Let's be nice now guys. After all, we're all friends, eh?
<ducking for cover yet again>
PirateJohn
>
>directions at the same time...
>
A fate I, no doubt, richly deserve ;)
>snoshoo <who wonders if PJ knows "snerk">
Wasn't that a cartoon character? Either that, or a desert made with ice cream.