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CHOICE Review

Donald Kuspit's essay on the paintings of Leon Golub perfectly complements Golub's visual images. With relentless and weighty argument Kuspit forces the reader to understanding the personal, artistic, and historical development of Golub's work from his paintings of skulls and skeletons in the 1940s to his recent paintings of torturers and killers. The oppressive, antihumanist art of Golub, which is illustrated with more than 150 reproductions (including several details and 24 color plates), might easily overwhelm most essays. But Kuspit's five-part exposition, which is exhaustively supported with as many footnotes as there are illustrations of Golub's work, is a match for Golub's pictorial thought. The chronology, selected bibliography, lists of solo and group exhibitions, and index are useful supplements to this first comprehensive study of Golub's paintings that is recommended for college library collections on contemporary American art. Level: upper-division undergraduate and graduate students.-G. Eager, Bucknell University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Donald Kuspit (born March 26, 1935) is an American art critic, poet, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and former professor of art history at the School of Visual Arts. Kuspit is one of America's most distinguished art critics. He was formerly the A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University (1991-1997). He received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism in 1983 (given by the College Art Association).[1] In 1983 he received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Davidson College, in 1996 from the San Francisco Art Institute, and in 2007 from the New York Academy of Art. In 1997 the National Schools of Art and Design presented him with a citation for Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts. In 1998 he received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2000 he delivered the Getty Lectures at the University of Southern California. In 2005 he was the Robertson Fellow at the University of Glasgow. In 2008 he received the Tenth Annual Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Newington-Cropsey Foundation. In 2014 he was the first recipient of the Gabarron Foundation Award for Cultural Thought. He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim Foundation, and Asian Cultural Council, among other organizations. He has doctorates in philosophy (University of Frankfurt)and art history (University of Michigan), as well as degrees from Columbia University, Yale University, and Pennsylvania State University. He has also completed the course of study at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the New York University Medical Center.