Carter Ratcliff

Carter Ratcliff is a poet and art critic. His poems were first published in 1968, in The World, the poetry magazine of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, New York. Soon afterward, his first gallery reviews appeared in Artnews. Since then his art writing has been published by major art journals in the United States and abroad, including Art in America, Artforum, Modern Painting, Tate, Art Presse, and Artstudio, and in the catalogues published by American and European museums. Recent major essays include “Collage in the Postwar Era,” Collage, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 2006; “The (Almost) Invisible Art of Tom Marioni,” Tom Marioni, The Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, 2006; and “Georgia O’Keeffe and ‘the Great American Thing,’” Georgia O’Keeffe, Kunstshaus Zürich, 2003. Among his books on art are John Singer Sargent, New York: Abbeville Press, 1982; Robert Longo, New York: Rizzoli, 1985; The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996; Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965-1975. New York: Allworth Press, 2001; and Andy Warhol: Portraits, London: Phaidon Press, 2007.
Ratcliff’s books of poetry include Fever Coast, 1973, Give Me Tomorrow, 1983, and Arrivederci, Modernismo, 2007. He has lectured at a variety of institutions, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. He has received a Poets Foundation grant, 1969; an Art Critics grant, NEA, 1972 and 1976; a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1976; and the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, College Art Association, 1987. His editorial positions include Editorial Associate, Artnews, 1969-1972; Advisory Editor, Art International, 1970-1975; Contributing Editor, Art in America, 1976 to the present; Contributing Editor, Saturday Review, 1980-1982; Editorial board, Sculpture Magazine, 1992 to the present; and Contributing Editor, Art on Paper, 2001 to present.