Rosalind E. Krauss - Early Life

Early Life

Rosalind Krauss grew up in the area of Washington D.C., where she recalled, as a formative experience, visiting art museums with her father. After graduating from Wellesley in 1962, she attended Harvard, whose Department of Fine Arts (now Department of History of Art and Architecture) had a strong tradition of the intensive analysis of actual art objects under the aegis of the Fogg Museum. Krauss wrote her dissertation on the work of David Smith, whose recent death had rendered him an acceptable dissertation subject in Harvard's view. Krauss received her Ph.D. in 1969. The dissertation was published as Terminal Iron Works in 1971.

In the late-1960s and early-1970s Krauss began to contribute articles to art journals such as Art International and Artforum — which, under the editorship of Philip Leider, was relocated from California to New York, and became one of the leading titles in art criticism during that era. She began by writing the "Boston Letter" for Art International, but soon published well-received articles on Jasper Johns (Lugano Review, 1965) and Donald Judd (Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd, Artforum, May 1966). Her commitment to the emerging "minimal art" in particular set her apart from Fried, who was oriented toward the continuation of modernist abstraction in Jules Olitski, as well as from Kenneth Noland and Anthony Caro. Krauss's article A View of Modernism (Artforum, September 1972), was one signal of this break.