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Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art

The Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, established in 2003, celebrates the career of an author of note and includes art criticism, art history, art biography, and/or art theory. The award is presented to an author who, among other distinctions, has demonstrated particular commitment to their work throughout a long career and has had an impact, nationally and internationally, on the field.

2023 WINNERS

Svetlana Alpers and Griselda Pollock   

Renowned for her groundbreaking work on Dutch Golden Age painting, Svetlana Alpers’ writings have had a profound impact on the field of art history. A founder of the journal Representations and one of the central figures in the revisionist turn of the new art history, Alpers broke with long-standing approaches to northern European art by asking new questions about visual culture and ways of seeing. In The Art of Describing (1983), her questions about optics and image-making devices ignited scholarship in premodern and modern fields alike. In subsequent publications, Alpers’ notions about the monetary value of art materials and the marketing strategies of artists also proved fertile ground for later scholars. However, the Art of Describing did not only reinvent methodologies for understanding Dutch art, pushing against the field’s reliance on ideas forged in the study of Italian artistic practices; it recast what it means to “describe” art, the ekphrastic basis of our field, effecting the writing of art history ever since.   

Professor Emerita from the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught from 1962–98, Alpers continues to publish across and redefine fields ranging from the Baroque to contemporary art and photography history. Widely known for Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988), which won CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in 1990, Alpers has also penned field-changing monographs on Tiepolo, Rubens, and Velázquez. To this list, Alpers has added her latest book, Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch (2020), a monograph on one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century, and part of a subset of her writings that have confronted directly the challenges of photography, as The Art of Describing long ago became required reading in this field. Her recent publications such as Roof Life (2013) make concrete the writerly challenge that her work has always issued to art history, the need to reinvent “how” as well as “what” we say and write about art.   
 

Arguably the leading feminist art historian of the generation after Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock first made an impact with a vigorous dissembling of the “artists mythologies and media genius” that attended the canonization of artists such as Vincent van Gogh. She went on to devote close attention to previously devalued women artists such as Mary Cassatt, Eva Hesse, and, more recently, in her innovative Virtual Feminist Museum, Charlotte Salomon. Essays such as “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” in her 1987 book Vision and Difference were powerful examples of her strategy of “feminist interventions” into the history of art, rather than falling for the trap of settling for the inclusion of women artists within the prevailing patriarchal structures.    

The Award acknowledges this groundbreaking work as well as a wider, far-reaching achievement, ranging across several decades. Pollock’s writing has long refused to stay in its art historical place, to belong to a single position or way of working. Her brand of feminist revisionism constantly engages the social history of art, bridges art history with cinema studies, opens onto the fields of psychoanalysis and cultural geography, while also participating in the debates of postcolonial theory and responding to the imperatives of decolonization. While remaining attentive to the demands of each of these critical disciplines, her writing about art remains passionate, profound, open-hearted, and, always, political.   

Jury Members:  
Terry Smith, University of Pittsburgh, Chair  
George Baker, University of California Los Angeles  
Gillian Elliott, George Washington University   

PAST WINNERS

Although the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art was established fairly recently, the award juries have honored the writing careers of notable luminaries in the field, including Hans Belting, Oleg Grabar, Georges Didi-Huberman, and John Berger. 

2022 Wu Hung
Jury: Shirin Fozi, University of Pittsburgh, chair; Molly Nesbit, Vassar College; and Joseph Mascheck, Hofstra University.

2021 Deborah Willis and Kenneth Frampton 
Jury: Shirin Fozi, University of Pittsburgh, chair; Molly Nesbit, Vassar College; Joseph Mascheck, Hofstra University; and Kimberly Musial Datchuk, University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art.  

2020 Joseph Leo Koerner   
Jury: Shirin Fozi, University of Pittsburgh, chair; Molly Nesbit, Vassar College; and Joseph Masheck, Hofstra University.  

2019 Molly Nesbit 
Jury: Jelena Bogdanović, Iowa State University, chair; Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, University of Louisville; Anna Novakov, St. Mary’s College of California 

2018 Joseph Masheck
Jury: Jelena Bogdanović, Iowa State University, chair; Anna Novakov, St. Mary’s College of California; and Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, University of Louisville.

2017 This award was not given in 2017.
Jury: Ellen T. Birrell, California Institute of the Arts and X-TRA, chair; Jelena Bogdanović, Iowa State University; and Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, University of Louisville.

2016 Rosalind E. Krauss
Jury: Michael Brenson, Independent Scholar, chair; Ellen T. Birrell, California Institute of the Arts and X-TRA; and Rebecca Zorach, University of Chicago

2015 Lucy R. Lippard
Jury: Michael Brenson, independent scholar, chair; Ellen T. Birrell, California Institute of the Arts; and Rebecca Zorach, University of Chicago.

2014 John Berger
Jury: Thomas Lawson, California Institute of the Arts, chair; Michael Brenson, independent scholar; and Rebecca Zorach, University of Chicago

2013 T. J. Clark
Jury: Catherine Soussloff, University of British Columbia, chair; Lane Relyea, Northwestern University; and Thomas Lawson, California Institute of the Arts

2012 Allan Sekula
Jury: Catherine Soussloff, University of British Columbia, chair; Lane Relyea, Northwestern University; and Thomas Lawson, California Institute of the Arts

2011 Mieke Bal
Jury: Keith Moxey, Barnard College, Columbia University, chair; Lane Relyea, Northwestern University; and Catherine Soussloff, University of British Columbia

2010 Holland Cotter
Jury: Janet Kaplan, Moore College of Art and Design, chair; S. Hollis Clayson, Northwestern University; and Keith Moxey, Barnard College, Columbia University

2009 Georges Didi-Huberman
Jury: Janet Kaplan, Moore College of Art and Design, chair; S. Hollis Clayson, Northwestern University; and Keith Moxey, Barnard College, Columbia University

2008 Robert L. Herbert
Jury: John Beldon Scott, University of Iowa, chair; S. Hollis Clayson, Northwestern University; and Janet Kaplan, Moore College of Art and Design

2007 James Cahill
Jury: John Beldon Scott, University of Iowa, chair; Larry Silver, University of Pennsylvania; and Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard University

2006 Linda Nochlin
Jury: Katherine Manthorne, Graduate Center, City University of New York, chair; Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard University Art Museums; John Beldon Scott, University of Iowa; and Larry Silver, University of Pennsylvania

2005 Oleg Grabar
Committee: Katherine Manthorne, Graduate Center, City University of New York, chair; Terrie F. Sultan, Blaffer Gallery, Art Museum of the University of Houston; Larry Silver, University of Pennsylvania; John Beldon Scott, University of Iowa; and Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard University

2004 Hans Belting
Committee: Jonathan Fineberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, chair; Katherine Manthorne, Graduate Center, City University of New York; Katy Siegel, Hunter College, City University of New York; and Terrie Sultan, University of Houston

2003 Robert Farris Thompson
Committee: Jonathan Fineberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, chair; Janet Kaplan, Moore College of Art and Design; Katy Siegel, Hunter College, City University of New York; Kenneth E. Silver, New York University; and Terrie Sultan, University of Houston