Benjamin H. D. Buchloh


Benjamin Heinz-Dieter Buchloh is a German art historian. He is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art in the History of Art and Architecture department at Harvard University.

Education and career

Born in Cologne, Germany on November 15, 1941, Buchloh received a M.Phil in German literature from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1969. He later obtained his Ph.D in art history in 1994 from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, where he studied with fellow art historian Rosalind Krauss.
After time as an editor for German art journal Interfunktionen and teaching stints at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, NSCAD University, and CalArts, Buchloh began teaching art history at the State University of New York at Old Westbury and the University of Chicago. He later taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an associate professor from 1989–1994. From 1991–1993, he also served as the Director of Critical and Curatorial Studies for the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He then taught at both Columbia University and its sister college, Barnard College, as Virginia B. Wright Professor of Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Art from 1994–2005, including service as a department chair from 1997–2000.
He later joined the Harvard University department of History of Art and Architecture in 2005. He was named Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of Modern Art. In 2006, he was named Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art. In 2007, Buchloh won the Golden Lion award at the 2007 Venice Biennale for his work as an art historian towards contributing to contemporary art. In fall 2009, Benjamin Buchloh resided at the American Academy in Berlin as a Daimler Fellow.
Buchloh is currently also a co-editor of the art journal October and working on a monograph of Gerhard Richter titled Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History.

Works

His book, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, is a collection of eighteen essays on major figures of postwar art written since the late 1970s. It covers Nouveau Réalisme in France, postwar German art, American Fluxus and Pop Art, minimalism and postminimal art, and European and American conceptual art. Buchloh addresses some artists in terms of their oppositional approaches to language and painting, for example, Nancy Spero and Lawrence Weiner. About others, he asks more general questions concerning the development of models of institutional critique and the theorization of the museum ; and addresses the formation of historical memory in postconceptual art.
The second volume of Buchloh's collected essays Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art was released in February 2015. It collects a series of important and widely influential essays on thematic and historical issues in twentieth-century art including the "return to order," Soviet "factography," and the "paradigm repetitions" of the neo-avant-garde.