USA

Rosalind E. Krauss

2025 Balzan Prize for History of Contemporary Art

For her outstanding scholarly achievements and her foundational role in the establishment of contemporary art as a field of research.

Art history was established in the late nineteenth century as an academic discipline dedicated to Western art of the post-classical age. With the emergence of Modernism, art criticism stimulated the academic study of living artists. In the 1960s and 1970s, in Europe and the United States of America, the discipline broadened its traditional fields of research and teaching from the early modern and the modern to contemporary times. Post-war art itself has contributed to the renewal of the academic discipline. Today’s globalized contemporary art system is articulated through countless institutions, events, and publications, a context in which art historians, curators, and artists collaborate in the interpretation of our aesthetic condition. Thus, the very notions and practices of research into contemporary art are persistently and critically revised. In the last decades, thanks to politically engaged and conceptually reflective art and the critical role of women, academe has developed new methods of research, such as feminist and queer, transcultural and postcolonial, poststructuralist and ecocritical approaches, while turning away from Western-centrism. Whereas in the 1980s, academic positions dedicated to the history of contemporary art were rare, today, the field attracts large numbers of students and produces extensive scholarship.

Rosalind Krauss is one of the most acclaimed scholars worldwide, who has significantly contributed in shaping and establishing today’s leading disciplinary field of art history. Professor at Columbia University, co-founder of the influential journal October, prolific and consummate author translated into many languages, Rosalind Krauss is an internationally admired and followed pioneer of the history of contemporary art, whose conceptual brilliance, academic trajectory, and intellectual impact on young scholars are extraordinary.

The œuvre of Professor Rosalind Krauss, which counts among the most cited in the field, not only covers the whole span and a rich variety of aspects of Western modern and contemporary art but also introduces key critical terms. To move beyond the dominant formalist art criticism of the 1950s, Professor Rosalind Krauss adopted structuralist and phenomenological approaches to modern sculpture from Auguste Rodin to Land Art, as in her now classic Passages in Modern Sculpture of 1977. As a scholar of Surrealism, adopting psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, she developed a new understanding of mediums like photography and collage. In her work The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths of 1985, she both revised conventional founding terms such as “originality” and set influential concepts such as the modernist “grid” and “sculpture in the expanded field.”

With her thinking and writing, Professor Rosalind Krauss expands the field of art history itself by experimenting with new forms, while combining intellectual creativity with a deep reflection on the philosophical foundations of the discipline, such as in The Optical Unconscious of 1993, which revisits key figures of the twentieth century, including Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Max Ernst, and Jackson Pollock. Her numerous writings, which include collaborative and curatorial work, cannot be adequately appreciated in a few words, but can only be explored by accepting an invitation to engage in fascinating and thought-provoking reading.