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.
When the American artist Bruce Nauman was in graduate school in the mid-1960s, the traditional forms of visual art were in deep trouble. The best new work, the Minimalist Donald Judd had asserted, was neither painting nor sculpture, and he was hardly alone in that judgment. So what might serve as a medium in default of the usual ones? What might count as art at all? In 1917 Marcel Duchamp...
How should a visual artist respond to a culture in which the vast majority of images are produced by machines for other machines, with humans left out of the loop? This technological turn complicates basic ideas about mimesis: that images represent the world, that they are meant to be beheld by us, that they mean at all (think of facial-recognition programs alone). The standard critique...
More than a hundred years ago new technologies transformed the aesthetic field, as painting and sculpture were pressured by photography and film, and modernists like Walter Benjamin and László Moholy-Nagy redefined literacy as the ability to read both. For Benjamin, the reproducibility of these media not only shattered the auratic power of the unique work (this was mostly...
Born to Italian shopkeepers in Edinburgh in 1924, Eduardo Paolozzi was a key member of the Independent Group (IG) of artists, architects, curators and critics formed in London in the early 1950s. He was especially active in the New Brutalist wing of the IG, which also included the artists Nigel Henderson, William Turnbull and Magda Cordell, the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, and...
‘He has created more than any artist after Picasso,’ Jasper Johns said of Robert Rauschenberg, his one-time partner, and the Rauschenberg retrospective now at Tate Modern fully attests to the sheer abundance of his six-decade career.
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
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.