Thomas
McEvilley died on March 3 at Sloan
Kettering Hospital in New York from complications from cancer.
As one of the most influential and
prolific commentators on the art of the late twentieth century
he will be widely
missed. Few art critics have arrived on
the scene more spectacularly than McEvilley
did with ‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief’, his relentless
and withering attack on MoMa’s major
exhibition,
‘Primitivism in
Twentieth Century Art”
in the
November 1985 issue of
Artforum. If
postmodernism’s brief was the dismantling of Eurocentric formalism, McEvilley
became its leading spokesperson more or less overnight. Though an academic—he taught art history
at Rice University in Houston for over 30 years and subsequently established
the MFA program in Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts, New
York—his intellectual allegiance was less to the Academy than to the City, New
York where he lived.
That said, it was
McEvilley’s training in Classical Philology that initially distinguished him
from his fellow art critics and again recently, with the publication of his
book on and translations of the poetry of Sappho (2008) and his magnum opus
The Shape of Ancient Thought, A Comparative Study of Greek and Indian Philosophy (2002). This
lifelong command of such disparate fields of knowledge, is a
mark of
extraordinary capaciousness
of his mind.
The independence and
originality of
his insights into
the larger issues of modern and contemporary art are matched by those to be
found in his numerous studies of individual artists, as various as Marcel
Broodthaers, Denis Oppenheim, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Leon Golub,
and Kara Walker.
McEvilley had friends
and readers in New Zealand.
A contributor
to the first issue of
Midwest, he was
keynote speaker at the 1994 Wellington International Arts Festival Under
Capricorn conference,
Is Art a European
Idea?, and more recently he wrote an
essay for
The Brush of
All Things, the catalogue of Max
Gimblett’s 2004 retrospective at the Auckland Art Gallery.
He was a close contemporary and a good
friend of mine; I will miss the warmth and depth of his intelligence.
Wystan Curnow.
Image: Thomas McEvilley reading from Sappho
