Artforum Founding Editor Dies at 96

Philip Leider, ” art forumDied at his home in Berkeley, California, on January 11 at the age of 96. art forum His death was announced over the weekend, but the cause of death was not given.

Ryder’s career was unusual. He helped turn around art forum As its editor since 1962, it has become the go-to source for serious, no-nonsense art criticism. (From 2022, art forum is owned by Penske Media, Inc. art news‘s parent company. ) “It is no exaggeration to say art forum 1960s Was Phil Leider,” Leider’s friend, the art historian Michael Fried, wrote in a 1993 reflection.

Then, in 1971, Ryder left the publication and the mainstream American art world. When Amy Newman, ex. art news Editor and author of a book art forumEarly interview with Leider new york times In 2000, she wrote that Ryder had been “almost 30 years removed from the art world in which he grew up in the 1970s.” By then, Ryder had left the United States entirely and began teaching in Israel.

Born in New York in 1929 to art forum Editor John Coplans once described Ryder as a “non-intellectual Jewish immigrant” who attended Brooklyn College as an undergraduate. “He got through college by writing papers for other people, for five to ten dollars each,” Copelans told Janet Malcolm in a famous 1986 essay. new yorker Introduction art forum Under the leadership of Ingrid Sisi.

Ryder subsequently attended the University of Nebraska’s graduate program in English Literature and served in the Army as a typist. Later, Ryder began law school, but, as Copelans recalled, he dropped out because he “wasn’t a careerist in the American sense.” “He wanted nothing to do with power or money.”

his plan is art forum reflects this spirit. Read, hired by John Irwin in 1962, had long expressed a desire for his publication to deviate from market tastes. “If the myth that buying art is a good investment (in the Wall Street sense) continues, the result can only be disastrous for both parties,” he once wrote.

Ryder was crucial in establishing art forumreputation, he left the magazine and focused on experimental art. “There’s a scene that happens that’s unexpected and unpredictable and unpredictable, but it’s real,” Ryder told Newman. However, Ryder found “I couldn’t get any writers I cared about interested in it” and left the publication for good. According to Coplans, Ryder also had a falling out with publisher Charles Cowles. art forumearning capacity.

After exiting art forumRyder then began teaching at the University of California, Irvine, and writing about artists such as Frank Stella, with whom he was close. Partly due to what he describes as “my growing Zionism,” Ryder eventually chose and moved to Israel, eventually taking a teaching position at the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts. He retired in 1998.

When Newman interviewed Ryder in 2000, he described growing dissatisfaction with the tastes of the current art world, saying he disliked Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger and other art stars of the 1980s and 1990s. But he also admits that his taste has become calcified. “Hard work requires constant vigilance to prevent backsliding,” he said.