- Kirk Varnedoe
John Kirk Train Varnedoe (Jan. 18, 1946 – Aug. 15, 2003) was an American art historian and writer, a Professor of the History of Art at the
Institute for Advanced Study , Princeton, and a noted curator of painting and sculpture at theMuseum of Modern Art in New York. He studied at St. Andrew's School andWilliams College .After his years at Williams, he went to Paris, where he became expert on
Auguste Rodin 's drawings, and fell in love with French culture and civilization. He returned to America and particularly to New York, where he married the artist Elyn Zimmerman and taught art history, first atColumbia University , and then at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.He co-curated, with William Rubin, the exhibition "Primitivism: Affinity Between The Tribal and The Modern" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, the same year that he won a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1988, he became the Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the
Museum of Modern Art , where his exhibitions included "High And Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" (co-directed with the writerAdam Gopnik ) as well as retrospectives of the work ofCy Twombly ,Jasper Johns andJackson Pollock .He was famous as one of the most eloquent public speakers of his time, and he gave many lectures and lecture series, including the Slade Lectures at Oxford and the Mellon Lectures at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. These last, his final lecture series, was published in 2006 byPrinceton University Press under the title of "Pictures of Nothing".Varnedoe died of cancer in 2003. Adam Gopnik, one of his graduate school proteges in the mid-1980's, wrote a tribute in the New Yorker in 2004.
One of Elyn's sculptures was destroyed in the World Trade Center's plaza on September 11, 2001.
External links
*Obituary in the "New York Times," [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9800E6DC1730F936A2575BC0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all "Kirk Varnedoe, 57, Curator Who Changed the Modern's Collection and Thinking, Dies"] by Michael Kimmelman
*Michael Malone, [http://www.rugbymag.com/archive/2002/february/kirk_varnedoe.htm "Kirk Varnedoe: A Hooligan and a Gentleman"]
* [http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/10/040510fa_fact_gopnik Personal History, "Last of the Metrozoids,"] by Adam Gopnik, "The New Yorker", May 10, 2004, p. 82
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