Kirk Varnedoe

John Kirk Train Varnedoe (born January 18, 1946 in Savannah , † August 14, 2003 in New York ) was an American art historian .

Life

Kirk Varnedoe was born in Savannah, the youngest of four children of stockbroker Samuel Lamartine Varnedoe and his wife Lilla Train Varnedoe. His grandfather, Gordon Saussy, was the mayor of Savannah. The family lived in wealthy circumstances. After completing his school education, he studied art history at Williams College in Massachusetts and graduated in 1967 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) . He then moved to Stanford University in California , where he received a Master of Arts (MA) degree in 1970 and a Ph.D. in 1972. attained. In his dissertation, Varnedoe devoted himself to the drawings by Auguste Rodin and worked for some time at the Musée Rodin in Paris . Through his Rodin research, J. Carter Brown , director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC , became aware of Varnedoe and invited him to co-curate the exhibition Rodin Drawings True and False with Albert Elsen in 1971 .

Varnedoe taught art history as an assistant professor at Stanford University from 1973 to 1974 , followed by a teaching position at New York's Columbia University from 1974 to 1980. During this time he curated the first major retrospective with works by Gustave Caillebotte in the United States in 1976 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston . This retrospective contributed significantly to the international rediscovery and re-evaluation of the painter. The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University appointed him in 1980 as an associate professor . In 1982 he directed the traveling exhibition Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting, 1880-1910 . This show, shown at the Brooklyn Museum , the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts , provided an overview of early modern art in Scandinavia.

In 1984 Varnedoe became professor of art history at New York University and received a MacArthur Fellowship . In the 1990s, lectures at the University of Oxford and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC followed. In 1984 he put together the highly acclaimed exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art in the Museum of Modern Art, together with William Rubin , museum curator for painting and sculpture . In this exhibition they mainly showed the influence of African art on the development of 20th century art in Europe and America. In the following year, Varnedoe became Rubin's assistant at the Museum of Modern Art and, in 1989, his successor. He headed the Department of Painting and Sculpture until 2001. During his time at the Museum of Modern Art, Varnedoe organized some very successful and highly regarded exhibitions. This included 1986 Vienna 1900 , which presented developments in Austrian modernism in the fields of visual arts, design and architecture together. The exhibition High & Low , which he conceived together with Adam Gopnik in 1990, was trend- setting . The much-discussed exhibition showed the interaction between modern art and pop culture. From 1945 onwards, painting was one of Varnedoe's main areas of interest. So he organized retrospectives on Cy Twombly , Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock . He was also able to make important acquisitions for the museum. In addition to the painting Portrait Joseph Roulin by Vincent van Gogh , this included a sketch for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso , Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol and works by James Rosenquist , Richard Serra , Robert Rauschenberg , James Turrell and Cy Twombly. After his time at the Museum of Modern Art, he accepted a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2002 . He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1993 and of the American Philosophical Society since 2001 .

Kirk Varnedoe had been married to sculptor Elyn Zimmerman since 1983 . He died on August 14, 2003 in New York City. He bequeathed his private art collection with works on paper by artists of the 20th century such as Jasper Johns , Chuck Close , Roy Lichtenstein , Jeff Koons , Robert Rauschenberg , Frank Stella and Richard Avedon to the Telfair Museum of Art in his hometown of Savannah.

Publications (selection)

• Chronology and Authenticity in the Drawings of Auguste Rodin (dissertation). Stanford University, 1972.
• The Drawings of Rodin . Praeger Publishers, New York 1971 (together with Albert Elsen).
• Gustave Caillebotte, a retrospective exhibition, 1976-1977 . Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 1976.
• Northern light, realism and symbolism in Scandinavian painting, 1880-1910 . Brooklyn Museum, New York 1982, ISBN 0-87273-094-8 .
• Vienna 1900, art architecture & design . Museum of Modern Art, New York 1986, ISBN 0-87070-618-7 .
• Gustave Caillebotte . Yale University Press, New Haven 1987, ISBN 0-300-08279-7 .
• Northern light, Nordic art at the turn of the century . Yale University Press, New Haven 1988, ISBN 0-300-04146-2 .
• High & low, modern art, popular culture . Museum of Modern Art, New York 1990, ISBN 0-87070-353-6 (together with Adam Gopnik).
• A fine disregard, what makes modern art modern . Abrams, New York 1990, ISBN 0-8109-2574-5 .
• Cy Twombly: a Retrospective . Abrams, New York 1994, ISBN 0-8109-6129-6 .
• Jasper Johns: a Retrospective . Museum of Modern Art, New York 1996, ISBN 0-87070-389-7 .
• Jackson Pollock, new approaches . Abrams and Museum of Modern Art, New York 1998, ISBN 0-8109-6202-0 .
• Rodin, a magnificent obsession . Merrell and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, London 2001, ISBN 1-8589-4388-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Kirk Varnedoe in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography in the Dictionary of Art Historians
• Obituary in the New York Times on August 15, 2003