Thomas McEvilley
| Thomas McEvilley | |
|---|---|
| Born |
13 July 1939 Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America |
| Died | 2 March 2013 (aged 73) New York City, New York, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Author, art critic, historian, professor |
| Spouse(s) | Joyce Burstein |
| Children | 3 |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Cincinnati (B.A., PhD) University of Washington (M.A.) |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions |
Rice University School of Visual Arts Yale University School of the Art Institute of Chicago |
| Main interests | Philology, art criticism, linguistics, history |
| Notable works |
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Thomas McEvilley (/məkˈɛvᵻliː/; July 13, 1939 – March 2, 2013) was an American art critic, poet, novelist, and scholar, a Distinguished Lecturer in Art History at Rice University, and founder and former chair of the Department of Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
McEvilley was an expert in the fields of Greek and Indian culture, history of religion and philosophy, and art. He published several books and hundreds of scholarly monographs, articles, catalog essays, and reviews on early Greek and Indian poetry, philosophy, and religion as well as on contemporary art and culture.
In his 1993 book The Exile’s Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era, McEvilley made an important contribution to the late twentieth century "death of painting" debate. He noted that after two decades of decline in importance as a medium, painting revived around 1980. In its return from exile, painting assumed a new theoretical basis in postmodern cultural theory, together with a new kind of self-awareness and interest in its own limitations.
In the article "Heads it's Form, Tails it's not Content" McEvilley describes a theoretical framework for the formalist project presented by postwar critics such as Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried and Sheldon Nodelman. He argued that formalist ideas are rooted in Neoplatonism and as such deal with the problem of content by claiming that content is embedded within form. Formalism is based on a linguistic model that Claude Lévi-Strauss argued is given content through the unconscious. In adopting a formalist approach, a critic cannot ignore the content that accompanies every deployment of form.
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