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FRESH PAINT: Varnedoe championed
contemporary works at the Museum of Modern Art.
Suzanne DeChillo/New York
Times
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DURING college and grad school,
Kirk Varnedoe managed to find a rugby team wherever he went.
Later, the football- and rugby-obsessed
athlete scored what is arguably the most important position
in the world of modern art. Rarely have athletics and
aesthetics
fused so happily.
Varnedoe, former chief curator of painting
and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, died
August 14 in New York of colon cancer. He was 57.
Born and raised
in Savannah, Ga., Varnedoe graduated from Williams
College in Massachusetts before earning
his master’s and doctorate in art at Stanford. A noted
authority on 19th- and 20th-century European sculpture
and painting, whom the New Yorker once described as “dauntingly
articulate,” he was briefly an assistant professor
at Stanford before teaching at Columbia University and
at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. His
lectures always attracted huge crowds, and the exhibitions
he organized
during this time—displaying conceptual originality
and a writing style that had broad appeal—drew the
attention of the Museum of Modern Art.
Varnedoe joined
the Modern in 1988 as chief curator of painting and
sculpture. Though he had exceptional curatorial
and scholarly qualities, there was some controversy
about his lack of administrative experience. Yet Varnedoe
moved
forward boldly. His first exhibition, developed with
New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, investigated the interaction
between “high” art
(like Picasso) and the “low” media of ads, comics
and graffiti. “High & Low” was criticized
when it opened in 1990, but the concept has since gained
acceptance.
Despite initial raised eyebrows, Varnedoe’s
13-year tenure brought great curators, more contemporary
art
and more interest in such art to the Modern. “He moved
that monolithic museum in a new direction, and because
of the prominence of the museum, he legitimized the study
of
this elsewhere,” says Bernard Barryte, chief curator
at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center. Among Varnedoe’s
acquisitions were Picasso’s preparatory sketches for
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and pieces from the previously
underrepresented 1960s and ’70s. Varnedoe’s monographic
exhibitions on Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock
were highly praised, and his Artist’s Choice series,
in which artists organized small exhibitions using the
museum’s
permanent collection, helped convey an openness to fresh
ideas. He also encouraged the acquisition of works by
young contemporary artists, giving them the opportunity
to be part
of a major collection.
Varnedoe left the Modern in 2001
and joined Princeton’s
Institute for Advanced Study. Last spring, he delivered
the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C.
A recipient of a 1984 MacArthur Foundation “genius” prize,
Varnedoe wrote 18 books, including A Fine Disregard:
What Makes Modern Art Modern (Abrams, 1990). He gave
Stanford’s
Commencement address in 1992, telling graduates, “One
of art’s functions, personally and socially, is to
propose new worlds different from the ones you know.”
He
is survived by his wife, sculptor Elyn Zimmerman;
two brothers; and a sister. |
