John O'Brian
| John O'Brian | |
|---|---|
| Born |
John O'Brian April 2, 1944 Bath, England |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Education | University of Toronto, York University, Harvard University |
| Occupation | Writer, art historian, professor, curator |
John O'Brian is a professor, writer and curator. He is best known for his books and articles on modern art history and criticism. Since 1987, he has taught at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he is a Faculty Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and held the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies from July 1, 2008, to June 30, 2011. He was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2009, and received an honorary doctorate from the Trinity College at the University of Toronto in 2011.
O'Brian was born in 1944 to Canadian parents in Bath, England. He was educated at New Park School in St. Andrews, Fife, and Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, before entering University of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he received an Honours B.A. in Political Science and Economics in 1966.
He worked at the Toronto firm of Harris & Partners until 1974, before enrolling at York University. There, he began to initially write art criticism, then poetry, and eventually art history. He received his PhD in art history from Harvard University under the supervision of T.J. Clark in 1990. While at Harvard, he was a member of the Pumping Station, a Cambridge collective of radical thinkers that met at the house of Gillian and Iain Boal.
After publishing a monograph in 1983, David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting, he published the first two volumes of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism in 1986. The books generated wide international interest and debate, establishing O'Brian's career as an historian of modernism. Alice Goldfarb Marquis has made the case that O'Brian's work on Greenberg helped to establish his reputation. Two additional volumes of the Greenberg edition appeared in 1993. In an editorial written for The New Criterion, Hilton Kramer expressed admiration for Greenberg's criticism but distaste for O'Brian's politicization of it. O'Brian is the editor or author of eighteen books and more than sixty articles.
...
Wikipedia