DONALD KUSPIT, Professor of Art and Philosophy, Ph.D. University of Michigan, Phil.D. University of Frankfurt
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Room 4212 - 631.632.9361

Donald Kuspit is one of America's most distinguished art critics. Winner of the prestigeous Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism (1983), given by the College Art Association, Professor Kuspit is a Contributing Editor at Artforum, Sculpture, and Tema Celeste magazines, the Editor of Art Criticism, and on the advisory board of Centennial Review. He has doctorates in philosophy (University of Frankfurt) and art history (University of Michigan), as well as degrees from Columbia University, Yale University, and Pennsylvania State University. He has also completed the course of study at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the New York University Medical Center. He received honorary doctorates in fine arts from Davidson College (1993) and the San Francisco Institute of Art (1996). In 1997 the
National Association of the Schools of Art and Design gave him a Citation
for Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts. In 1998 he received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2000 he delivered the Getty Lectures at the University of Southern California. He is Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and has been the A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University (1991-97). He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Asian Cultural Council, among other organizations. He has written numerous articles, exhibition reviews, and catalogue essays, and lectured at many universities and art schools. He is the editorial advisor for European art 1900-50 and art criticism for the new Encyclopedia Britannica (16th edition), and wrote the entry on Art Criticism for it. He is on the advisory board of the Lucy Daniels Foundation for the psychoanalytic study of creativity. His most recent books are The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993; also in German, Klagenfurt: Ritter Verlag, 1995), The Dialectic of Decadence (New York: Stux Press, 1993; reissued New York: Allworth Press, 2000), The New Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988; reissued New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), The Photography of Albert Renger-Patzsch (New York: Aperture, 1993), Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994; also in Spanish, Madrid: Akal, 2002), Primordial Presences: The Sculpture of Karel Appel (New York: Abrams, 1994), Health and Happiness in Twentieth Century Avant-Garde Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), Idiosyncratic Identities: Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Chihuly (New York: Abrams, 1997), Jamali (New York: Rizzoli, 1997; reissue with expanded text, 2004), Joseph Raffael (New York: Abbeville, 1998), Daniel Brush (New York: Abrams, 1998), Hans Hartung (Antibes/Nagoya: Aichi Museum of Art, 1998), The Rebirth of Painting in the Late 20th Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Psychostrategies of Avant Garde Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries (New York: Allworth Press, 2000), Don Eddy (New York: Hudson Hills, 2002), Hunt Slonem (New York: Abrams, 2002), Hans Breder (M'nster: Hackmeister, 2002), Steven Tobin (New York: Hudson Hills, 2003), April Gornik (New York: Hudson Hills, 2004), and The End of Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). He has also written Clement Greenberg, Art Critic; Leon Golub: Existentialist/Activist Painter; Eric Fischl; Louise Bourgeois; Alex Katz: Night Paintings; and The Critic Is Artist: The Intentionality of Art. He is also the author of three books of poetry, Self-Refraction (1983; illustrations by Rudolf Baranik), Apocalypse with Jewels in the Distance (2000; illustrations by Rosalind Schwartz), and On the Gathering Emptiness (2004; illustrations by Walter Feldman).