Thomas McEvilley (; July 13, 1939 – March 2, 2013) was an American art critic, poet, novelist, and scholar. He was a Distinguished Lecturer in art history at Rice University[Thomas McEvilley, G. Roger Denson (1996), Capacity: : History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism. Routledge. : This information is given on the backpage of this book.] and founder and former chair of the Department of Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Biography
McEvilley was born in
Cincinnati. He studied
Ancient Greek,
Latin,
Sanskrit, and classical philosophy in the
classics programs of the University of Cincinnati
where he received a B.A., and the University of Washington, where he received an M.A.
He then returned to Cincinnati, where he received a Ph.D. in classical philology. He also retained a strong interest in
modern art, reinforced by the artists of his acquaintance.
In 1969, McEvilley joined the faculty of Rice University, where he spent the better part of his teaching career.[Thomas McEvilley (2004). "Art and Cognition.". Slought Foundation Online Content. 11 December 2004, retrieved 4 April 2008] He was a visiting professor at Yale University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. He taught numerous courses in Greek culture and Indian culture, history of religion and philosophy. In 2008 he retired from teaching after 41 years, residing in New York City and in upstate New York in the Catskills.
He received numerous awards, including the Semple Prize at the University of Cincinnati, a National Endowment for the Arts Critics grant, a Fulbright fellowship in 1993, an NEA critic’s grant, and the Frank Jewett Mather Award (1993) for Distinction in Art Criticism from the College Art Association.
McEvilley was a contributing editor of Artforum and editor in chief of Contemporanea.[ School of VISUAL ARTS, graduate programs 2007-2008 , Retrieved 4 April 2008.]
McEvilley died on March 2, 2013, of complications from cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was 73. He is survived by his wife, the artist Joyce Burstein; two sons from a former marriage, Thomas and Monte; a sister, Ellen M. Griffin; and two grandchildren. His son Alexander predeceased him. He was married twice earlier; both marriages ended in divorce.
Work
McEvilley was an expert in the fields of
Greeks and
culture, history of religion and philosophy, and art. He published several books and hundreds of scholarly monographs, articles, catalog essays, and reviews on early Greek and Indian poetry, philosophy, and religion as well as on contemporary art and culture.
[ McPherson & Company Publishers ]
Art and Otherness
In his 1992 book
Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity, McEvilley collected and revised twelve essays from the 1980s in the midst of the
culture wars, the roiling debate regarding the predominance of white, male, Western culture in academia and visual art, and the need for that supremacy to be challenged and opened up to other points of view. McEvilley did this in pointed fashion in "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief," his influential jeremiad against the underlying assumptions that framed the Museum of Modern Art's 1984 exhibition
Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art.
Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era
In his 1993 book
The Exile’s Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era, McEvilley made an important contribution to the late twentieth century "death of painting" debate. He noted that after two decades of decline in importance as a medium, painting revived around 1980. In its return from exile, painting assumed a new theoretical basis in
postmodern cultural theory, together with a new kind of self-awareness and interest in its own limitations.
Heads It's Form, Tails It's Not Content
In the article "Heads it's Form, Tails it's not Content" McEvilley describes a theoretical framework for the formalist project presented by postwar critics such as Clement Greenberg,
Michael Fried.
[Thomas McEvilley (1996), "Heads It's Form, Tails It's Not Content", in: Artforum 21.3 ( Nov.1982) : 50-61. Later collected in: Capacity: The History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism, by Thomas McEvilley and G. Roger Denson. Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group. . Page 22-44.] He argued that formalist ideas are rooted in
Neoplatonism and as such deal with the problem of content by claiming that content is embedded within form. Formalism is based on a
linguistic model that Claude Lévi-Strauss argued is given content through the unconscious. In adopting a formalist approach, a critic cannot ignore the content that accompanies every deployment of form.
Sculpture in the Age of Doubt
In the book
Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (1999), McEvilley analyzes the intellectual issues surrounding the postmodern movement in the course of 20th-century sculpture.
The Shape of Ancient Thought
In
The Shape of Ancient Thought, McEvilley explores the foundations of
Western culture. He argues that today's
Western world must be considered the product of both Greek and Indian thought, both Western philosophy and Eastern philosophies. He shows how
trade,
imperialism and currents of
human migration allowed cultural philosophies to intermingle freely throughout
India,
Egypt,
Greece and the ancient
Near East. This book spans thirty years of McEvilley's research, from 1970 to 2000.
See also
This section gives an overview of topics on which McEvilley has written.
- Art
- Greek history and philosophy
-
Indo-Greek Kingdom
-
Legacy of the Indo-Greeks
-
Plato of Bactria
-
Pyrrhonism
-
Similarities between Pyrrhonism and Buddhism
- Indian philosophy
Selected publications
- Books
-
1964, Party Going (First Novel)
-
1987, North of Yesterday (a Menippean Satire)
-
1991, Art and Discontent
-
1992, Art and Otherness
-
1993, Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Biennale
-
1993, The Exile’s Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era
-
1994, Der Erste Akt
-
1996, Capacity: History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism (with G. Roger Denson)
-
1999, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt
-
2002,
-
2007, The Triumph of Anti-Art
-
2008, Sappho
-
2010, Art, Love, Friendship: Marina Abramović and Ulay, Together & Apart
-
2010, Yves the Provocateur: Yves Klein and Twentieth-Century Art
-
2013, Charles Dellschau's Aporetic Archive
-
2014, The Arimaspia (Novel, a Menippean Satire)
- Essays
-
Heads It’s Form, Tails It’s Not Content; Artforum November 1982
-
On the Manner of Addressing Clouds; Artforum Summer 1984
-
The Monochrome Icon
-
I Am” Is a Vain Thought
-
Art History or Sacred History?
-
Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief:‘Primitivism In Twentieth-Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art; Artforum November 1984.
-
The Selfhood of the Other
-
Another Alphabet: The Work of Marcel Broodthaers
-
History, Quality, Globalism
-
Penelope’s Night Work: Negative Thinking in Greek Philosophy
-
Arrivederci, Venice: The Third World Biennials; Artforum November 1993
-
The Tomb of the Zombie
-
Paul McCarthy: Performance and Video Works: the Layering (2008)
-
Here Comes Everybody
Beyond the Pale, Art and Artists at the Edge of Consensus, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1994
Africus: Johannesburg Biennale, exhib. cat., Transnational Metropolitan Council, 1995
issue 4/5, 1995, of the magazine neue bildende kunst
Ekbatana exhib. cat., Images of the World, Nikolaj Exhibition Space. Copenhagen, 2000
-
James Lee Byars and the Atmosphere of Question; Artforum Summer 1981
-
Charles Dellschau: A Higher Vision Is A Basic Demand Of Poetry.
- Monographs
Thomas McEvilley wrote monographs on
Yves Klein (1982),
Pat Steir,
Leon Golub (1993),
Jannis Kounellis (1986),
James Croak (1999),
Dennis Oppenheim,
Anselm Kiefer,
Dove Bradshaw (2004), Bert Long (2016).
- Poetry
-
44 Four Line Poems (1982)
-
17 Ancient Poems (2013)
External links
