John O'Brian

Last updated

John O'Brian
John O'Brian (photo Blaine Campbell).pdf
John O'Brian
Born
John O'Brian

(1944-04-02) April 2, 1944 (age 80)
Bath, England
NationalityCanadian
Education Trinity College, Toronto
York University
Harvard University
Occupation(s)Writer, art historian, curator

John O'Brian FRSC is an art historian, writer, and curator. He is best known for his books on modern art, including Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, one of TheNew York Times "Notable Books of the Year" in 1986, and for his exhibitions on nuclear photography such as Camera Atomica, organized for the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015. Camera Atomica was the first comprehensive exhibition on postwar nuclear photography. From 1987 to 2017 he taught at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he held the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies (2008-11) and was an associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. [1] O'Brian has been a critic of neoconservative policies since the start of the Culture Wars in the 1980s. [1] He is a recipient of the Thakore Award in Human Rights and Peace Studies from Simon Fraser University. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

O'Brian was born in 1944 to Canadian parents in Bath, England. His father was a career officer in the Royal Air Force. [2]  His only sibling, Peter, is a filmmaker and producer. In 1969 he married Helen Worts, with whom he has three children: Melanie O'Brian, Amy O'Brian Wang, and Meghan O'Brian Braunstein. He also has four grandchildren. He was educated at New Park School in St. Andrews, Fife, and Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, before entering Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he received an Honours B.A. in Political Science and Economics in 1966. At university, he played Varsity rugby.

He worked at the Toronto firm of Harris & Partners until 1974, before enrolling at York University to study art and literature. There, he began to publish art criticism, poetry, and art history. He received his PhD in art history from Harvard University under the supervision of T.J. Clark. [3] While at Harvard, he was a research associate at the Fogg Art Museum and a proponent of "social art history", an approach that investigates social as well as aesthetic issues. [4]  "I'm interested in how art gets produced and looked at under the social arrangements of capitalism," he stated in an interview. [5]  His work has sometimes been targeted by neoconservative critics for mixing art and politics. [6]  O'Brian was also a member of the Pumping Station collective, a group of radical thinkers that met at the house of Gillian and Iain Boal, during the first half of the 1980s.

Teaching and lectures

O'Brian has taught at York University, Toronto, Harvard University, Cambridge, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. At the University of British Columbia, he was appointed assistant professor in 1987, associate professor in 1991, and full professor in 1998. He chaired the University Art Committee from 1993 to 2014 and the Program in Canadian Studies from 2002 to 2005. He also held the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies from 2008 to 2011 and was an associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. [1] He taught undergraduate and graduate courses, in addition to supervising MA and Ph.D. theses. He also organized numerous field trips for students. Following the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, he canceled a field trip to New York because, he said, "worms are crawling out of the ground all over America [and I will] not crawl with them." [7]  Students circulated a petition denouncing the cancellation.

He has lectured across North America as well as in Europe, Australia, China, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Palestine, and South Africa. [1] He was the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute Visiting Lecturer in India in 1996-97 and visiting research professor at Ritsumeikan University in Japan in 2007. [1]

Museums and galleries

O'Brian has been professionally involved with museums and galleries as a curator, exhibitor, researcher, advisor, and board member. From 1989 to 1991, he was a member of the board of the Vancouver Art Gallery, and from 1991 to 1998 a special advisor to the board of the National Gallery of Canada, In 2020 was appointed an external advisor to the National Gallery. He has also been involved with the Harvard University Art Museum, Polygon Gallery, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

He maintains an occasional art practice. His work has been exhibited at public and private galleries: Octozilla (2018), produced with Gregory Coyes, was shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery; Ci elegans (2017), produced with Marina Roy, at SFU Galleries, Vancouver; Sixteen Nuclear Power Stations (2013) at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Multiplication (1998) at the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver; and More Los Angeles Apartments (1998) at Gagosian Gallery in New York and Los Angeles. [1] "More Los Angeles Apartments unfolds as a peripatetic meditation on Edward Ruscha's photobooks, personally placing O'Brian in geographical and conceptual proximity to Ruscha's earlier work." [8]

Publications

O'Brian is the author or editor of twenty books and many articles. Some have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or Japanese. Approximately half his publications focus on Canadian art and culture. [1] His first book, David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting, published in 1983, is the first in-depth study of the artist. [9]  His most recent book, The Bomb in the Wilderness: Photography and the Nuclear Era in Canada, published in 2020, is the first substantial examination on what photography reveals about the size and shape of Canada's nuclear footprint. [10]

The Bomb in the Wilderness: Photography and the Nuclear Era in Canada

The Bomb in the Wilderness contends that photography is one of the primary ways, if not the primary way, nuclear activities are interpreted and remembered. The book asks: Do photographs alert viewers to nuclear threat, numb them to its dangers, or do both at the same time? O'Brian argues that the impact and global reach of Canada's nuclear programs have been felt ever since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The book has been referred to as a "foundational text". [11]   Douglas Coupland writes, "It finds beauty in grotesque places [and] validates the reader's Cold War paranoia." [12]

Camera Atomica

Guest curated by O'Brian for the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015, Camera Atomica was "the first substantial exhibition of nuclear photography to encompass the entire postwar period from the bombings of Hiroshima in 1945 to the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011." [13] The exhibition included over 200 works ranging from photographs taken by the United States government of atomic bomb tests to images of anti-nuclear protests on the streets of Toronto, to images by artists, to photos of the utilization of nuclear technology in medicine. [13] In addition to addressing key issues in the nuclear era, Camera Atomica aimed to make visible the interconnections between nuclear technology and the photographic medium. One critic concluded that going to the show was "a civic duty". [14] Peter Galison wrote that "this remarkable show and catalogue promise to make clear that the age of the nucleus is also and always an age of the image." [15]

Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse

Matisse was an emblematic figure in twentieth-century art, perhaps the emblem of an artist whose work is predicated on the sensual pleasures of looking. This study investigates how the artist and his work were received in America until his death in 1954. To promote his work, Matisse tried to show the media that whatever his reputation as an avant-gardist the conduct of his life was solidly bourgeois. He collaborated closely with museums exhibiting his work, cultivated private collectors, and played off dealers against each other. The book "casts a great deal of light on the way in which a picture becomes valuable… Patronage is as much a romance as a business transaction." [16]

Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism

The four volumes of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism have generated international interest and debate. [17]  The first two volumes appeared in 1986, the second two 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. [18] Following a 2009 symposium at Harvard University on Greenberg, Jeff Nguyen wrote:

"The symposium kicked off with a roundtable discussion featuring experts on Greenberg's art criticism: Yve-Alain Bois (heavyweight in 20th century European and American art), Thierry de Duve (specialist in the metaphysics of art, made Duchamp difficult), Serge Guilbaut (specialist in art and politics during the Cold War), Rosalind Krauss (foremost champion of Greenberg, turned defector), John O'Brian (editor of the Collected Essays and Criticism). Benjamin Buchloch was the moderator. Holy Critics! How many more rock stars can you cram into a room? The only person missing from this esteemed company was Michael Fried. The University of British Columbia (Serge Guilbaut and John O'Brian) appears to be a happening place for art history." [19]

Research and Archives

Until the early 2000s, O'Brian's research focused on modern art history and criticism, primarily in North America. Since then, it has concentrated on nuclear photography in North America and Japan. His archives include photographs, study notes, correspondence, interviews, journal reviews, and press clippings. Notable collections within the archives include correspondence with Clement Greenberg from 1981 to 1993 and atomic photographs (military, press, and vernacular), artworks, protest leaflets, propaganda pamphlets, corporate reports, government bulletins, newspaper front pages, and postcards. [20]  The archives are promised to the National Gallery of Canada.

Awards and recognition

Recent Exhibitions Organized

Selected publications

Books and Exhibition Catalogues

Articles

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Group of Seven (artists)</span> Group of Canadian landscape painters (1920–1933)

The Group of Seven, once known as the Algonquin School, was a group of Canadian landscape painters from 1920 to 1933, with "a like vision". It originally consisted of Franklin Carmichael (1890–1945), Lawren Harris (1885–1970), A. Y. Jackson (1882–1974), Frank Johnston (1888–1949), Arthur Lismer (1885–1969), J. E. H. MacDonald (1873–1932), and Frederick Varley (1881–1969). A. J. Casson (1898–1992) was invited to join in 1926, Edwin Holgate (1892–1977) became a member in 1930, and Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (1890–1956) joined in 1932.

Roy Kenzie Kiyooka was a Canadian painter, poet, photographer, arts teacher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Lum</span> Canadian artist (born 1956)

Kenneth Robert Lum, OC DFA is a dual citizen Canadian and American academic, curator, editor, painter, photographer, sculptor, and writer. Working in several media including painting, sculpture and photography, his art ranges from conceptual to representational and is generally concerned with issues of identity about the categories of language, portraiture and spatial politics. Since 2012, Lum has taught as a Professor of Fine Art in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Walter Tandy Murch</span> Canadian born American painter (1907–1967)

Walter Tandy Murch was a painter whose still life paintings of machine parts, brick fragments, clocks, broken dolls, hovering light bulbs and glowing lemons are an unusual combination of realism and abstraction. His style of painting objects as though they are being seen through frosted glass has been compared to 18th century painters such as Chardin, while his oddly marred and pitted surfaces tend to evoke the 20th-century's abstract expressionists. He is the father of sound designer and film editor Walter Scott Murch and Louise Tandy Schablein.

Chris Cran is a Canadian visual artist, based in Calgary, Alberta.

<i>Voice of Fire</i> 1967 abstract painting by Barnett Newman

Voice of Fire is a 1967 acrylic on canvas abstract painting made by American painter Barnett Newman in 1967. It consists of three equally sized vertical stripes, with the outer two painted blue and the centre painted red. The work was created as a special commission for Expo 67. In 1987 it was loaned to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Bush</span> Canadian artist (1909–1977)

Jack Hamilton Bush was a Canadian abstract painter. A member of Painters Eleven, his paintings are associated with the Color Field movement and Post-painterly Abstraction. Inspired by Henri Matisse and American abstract expressionist painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Bush encapsulated joyful yet emotional feelings in his vibrant paintings, comparing them to jazz music. Clement Greenberg described him as a "supreme colorist", along with Kenneth Noland in 1984. Bush explained that capturing the feeling of a subject rather than its likeness was

a hard step for the art loving public to take, not to have the red look like a side of a barn but to let it be the red for its own sake and how it exists in the environment of that canvas.

Fred Herzog D.F.A. was a German-born Canadian photographer, who devoted his artistic life to walking the streets of Vancouver as well as almost 40 countries with his Leica, and various Nikon, Kodak and Canon, photographing - mostly with colour slide film - his observations of the street life with all its complexities. Herzog did not achieve critical recognition until the 1990s, when his unusual early use of colour in art photography was recognized. He became celebrated internationally for his pioneering street photography, his understanding of the medium combined with, as he put it, "how you see and how you think" created the right moment to take a picture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas Coupland</span> Canadian writer and graphic designer (born 1961)

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the terms Generation X and McJob. He has published 13 novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for the Financial Times, as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, DIS Magazine, and Vice. His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything, which was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, now the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, as well as the Villa Stuck.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nuclear art</span>

Nuclear art was an artistic approach developed by some artists and painters, after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Susan Dobson (born September 19, 1965) is a Canadian artist based in Guelph, Ontario. She is best known for her photographs and installations, many focusing on the theme of urban landscape and suburban culture.

Daina Augaitis is a Canadian curator whose work focuses on contemporary art. From 1996 to 2017, she was the chief curator and associate director of the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia.

Lorna Brown is a Canadian artist, curator and writer. Her work focuses on public space, social phenomena such as boredom, and institutional structures and systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Melanie O'Brian</span> Canadian curator (born 1973)

Melanie O'Brian is a Canadian curator of contemporary art and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Cheyanne Turions, self-styled as cheyanne turions, is a Canadian art curator, artist, and writer.

Jeanette Reinhardt is a Canadian video artist.

Cheryl Sourkes is a Canadian photographer, video and new media artist.


Robert Burley is a Canadian photographer of architecture and the urban landscape. He is based in Toronto, Canada, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Blake Fitzpatrick FRSC is a photographer, curator and writer, who is concerned with the photographic representation of the nuclear era, contemporary militarism and the Berlin Wall as a mobile ruin.

Clark McDougall was a Canadian painter known for his black enamel style.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "John O'Brian | AHVA". The University of British Columbia. September 1, 2020. Retrieved September 1, 2020.
  2. Langan, F.F. (May 15, 2007). "Peter O'Brian: One of the Last Battle of Britain Pilots". Globe and Mail.
  3. Elizabeth Lumley, Canadian Who's Who (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 983.
  4. Cohn, Marjorie B. (2012). Classic Modern: The Art Worlds of Joseph Pulitzer Jr. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 334.
  5. Webb, Margaret (Autumn 2003). "John O'Brian: Profile". Trinity Alumni Magazine. p. 31.
  6. For example, the audience response to John O’Brian, “Clement Greenberg Reconsidered,” lecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (May 2, 1995).
  7. John O’Brian, “Letter to Graduate Students,” December 15, 2016.
  8. Brouws, Jeff (2013). Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. p. 58.
  9. Carney, Lora Senechal (1984). "David Milne". Journal of Canadian Art History. VIII/1: 119.
  10. "UBC Press | The Bomb in the Wilderness - Photography and the Nuclear Era in Canada, By John O'Brian". UBC Press. Retrieved August 20, 2020.
  11. Claude Baillargeon, The Bomb in the Wilderness, cover.
  12. Douglas Coupland, The Bomb in the Wilderness, cover.
  13. 1 2 "Camera Atomica," Art Gallery of Ontario
  14. Adams, James (July 11, 2015). "Head in the Mushroom Clouds". Globe and Mail.
  15. [Peter Galison, http://artforum.com/museums/id=5164, May 2015]
  16. Campbell, Peter (April 13, 2000). "The Misery of Not Painting Like Others". London Review of Books. 22 (8).
  17. Plagens, Peter (April 19, 1993). "Thoroughly Modern, Really". Newsweek.
  18. "Clement Greenberg & the Cold War". newcriterion.com. Retrieved August 20, 2020.
  19. "Clement Greenberg at 100: Part 3". jeff clef. March 30, 2009. Retrieved August 20, 2020.
  20. O'Brian, John; Borsos, Jeremy (2011). Atomic Postcards: Radioactive Messages from the Cold War. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books.