Hal Foster teaches art history at Princeton. He has written widely on postmodernism, the avant-garde and aesthetic theory, both in the LRB and in his books, which include Recodings, The Return of the Real and The First Pop Age. He edited the influential essay collection The Anti-Aesthetic. Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics was published in February 2025.
In 1973, when a Marcel Duchamp retrospective was last staged in the United States, the critic Lucy Lippard declared that too much was made of him already. More than fifty years later he is still ubiquitous: we see endless variations on his old theme of the readymade object. The best cure for Duchamp fatigue, though, might be a large dose of the real thing. This is what the curators deliver...
Barnett Newman with ‘Jericho’, late 1960s.
Barnett Newman was an ‘eminence’ in the postwar art world, Amy Newman (no relation) writes in her exhaustive biography; at the time of his death in 1970 no one in his cohort was more revered. Yet today he is largely forgotten, which is one indication of how much the terms of art have changed. Was he eclipsed by the many...
Should we confine our use of the term ‘fascism’ to its time and place of emergence, the 1920s and 1930s in Italy, Germany and Spain, or extend it to recent manifestations in the United States, Hungary, Turkey and elsewhere? In the first instance we risk distancing ourselves from the problem; in the second we risk draining the term of analytical precision. A third approach...
When a man tips his hat on the street, we take it as a friendly greeting. That’s what it means to read visual signs ‘iconographically’, Erwin Panofsky writes in his classic essay ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art’, from 1939 (when men still wore hats and some were friendly). The tipping of the hat, he speculates, began...
Why do architecture and furniture of a century ago still look new, while clothes, cars and even people appear so dated? How did modern design – clean lines, white walls, geometric volumes, open plans, glass and steel structures, flat roofs – get locked in? A great deal of the credit (or blame) goes to the Bauhaus, to its buildings, products and pedagogy, and to the propagation...
Hal Foster reads his review of the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at Tate Modern.
When Hal Foster uses the word ‘first’ in the title of his confidently focused study, he means to start us thinking about Pop now and then. It is a reference to Reyner Banham’s
Helen Gardner’s benevolently dictatorial Art through the Ages was published in 1926, and remained the pre-eminent survey for American undergraduates until 1962, when H.W. Janson’s
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