Rendered...

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I read with some sadness this evening of the death of Max Kozloff, art critic, art historian and photographer, on April 6th. He was ninety-one and had been suffering from Parkinson's for the last decade. He wrote for the magazine Artforum, to which I still subscribe [blog posts passim]. I suppose my principal connection with his writings - aside from the copy of his collected essays: "Renderings" that I bought the year before starting my degree course, and which I still have - is that in 1963 he championed the work of Robert Rauschenberg in the face of the then current view that he was somehow a 'lightweight' in the American art scene: an arriviste with no substance. Like Kozloff, I thought otherwise, and history I think has borne out the truth that, far from that description, Rauschenberg was a true leading light in post-war American abstract art, combining Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism in a wholly unique way: the Rauschenberg way. RIP Max. You knew what you were talking about... 

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