Rosalind Krauss

Rosalind Krauss became a leading American art historian by joining close formal analysis to European critical theory. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1941, she studied at Wellesley College and earned a doctorate at Harvard University before teaching at Hunter College and later Columbia University.¹ Her early scholarship focused on modernist sculpture and the work of artists including David Smith, Anthony Caro, and Julio González. Rather than treating modern art as a sequence of individual styles, Krauss examined how artistic conventions, materials, and viewing conditions produced meaning.

Her intellectual vocabulary drew on structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. This approach placed her within a broader transformation of art criticism that treated artworks as historically situated systems of signs rather than transparent expressions of an artist’s personality.

Krauss’s most influential contribution was a redefinition of how modernist sculpture could be described. In “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” she argued that postwar practices had moved beyond the traditional opposition between sculpture and architecture, creating a logical field that included combinations such as marked sites, site constructions, and axiomatic structures.² The essay gave critics a precise vocabulary for discussing earthworks, installations, and other practices that did not fit the older category of freestanding sculpture.

Her book Passages connected modern sculpture to changing ideas of space, construction, and medium. Krauss also questioned the heroic narrative of modernism, especially when it presented artistic innovation as the inevitable achievement of isolated geniuses. Her criticism instead tracked relations among media, institutions, technologies, and historical arguments.

Krauss helped institutionalize a theoretically ambitious approach to contemporary art through October, the journal she co-founded with Annette Michelson in 1976.³ The publication became a major forum for debates about photography, film, video, performance, architecture, and the politics of representation. Its contributors brought French theory and psychoanalysis into sustained conversation with American art criticism.

In “The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths,” Krauss disputed the idea that avant-garde works are valuable because they are absolutely original. She argued that repetition, reproduction, and citation are structural conditions of modern artistic practice, not merely signs of decline. This argument also challenged the market’s preference for unique objects and the museum’s tendency to organize art around singular authorship.

Krauss’s later work broadened her critique from sculpture to the changing status of artistic media. She examined photography through the concept of the index, emphasizing traces, mechanical registration, and the tension between image and referent. Her writing on Surrealism, collage, and the photographic archive treated these practices as challenges to conventional modernist narratives rather than as marginal episodes.

She also criticized what she called the “post-medium condition” when it became a license for unrestricted eclecticism. For Krauss, a medium was not simply a physical material; it could be a historically developed set of technical supports and conventions that artists might reinvent. This position informed her discussions of video, installation, and the work of artists such as William Kentridge and James Coleman. Her essays remain notable for combining close readings of objects with arguments about museums, reproduction, and cultural power.

Expanded field

Krauss’s model for describing sculpture and related practices that operate among sculpture, architecture, landscape, and marked sites.

Medium specificity

The modernist idea that each art form should develop through the distinctive properties of its medium.

Index

In semiotic theory, a sign linked to its referent through physical connection, trace, or causal registration.

Post-medium condition

A situation in which contemporary art works across traditional media while retaining historically specific technical and conceptual supports.