Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (1945–2024)

British American artist, critic, and educator Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe died in Gainesville, Florida, on August 14 at the age of seventy-nine. A founding editor of the seminal contemporary art journalOctober, Gilbert-Rolfe wrote extensively on modern and contemporary art as well as on poetry, fiction, and fashion for publications includingArtforum,Bomb, andCritical Inquiry. He was the author of numerous volumes, among themBeyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986–1993(1995) and the pathbreakingBeauty and the Contemporary Sublime(1999), which reframed traditional masculinist notions of beauty and expanded the notion of the sublime away from nature and into technology. As a painter, Gilbert-Rolfe gained renown for his minimal geometric abstractions that, he said, were all influenced in some way by the work of Barnett Newman, which he first encountered as a teenager. In both his art and his writing, he remained untethered to canon. “I think cultural forms might be most subversive when most irrelevant,” he toldBomb’s David Shapiroin 1987. “What could be more threatening to the megalomania of power than that which couldn’t be fitted in, the irrelevant? One should struggle to be irrelevant, which is to say to be irresponsible where the power apparatus is concerned.”

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe was born August 4, 1945, in Tunbridge Wells, England. His parents, who had met in the air force, divorced when he was six. Offered by his father’s side of the family the opportunity to attend private school at the age of eleven, he chose public school instead. “I became wedded to the idea of meritocracy at an early age,” he told theLos Angeles Times’s Hunter Drohojowska-Philp in 1998. “The idea of going to a school with all these people who were paying and therefore not guaranteed to be smart was not attractive to me.” Gilbert-Rolfe earned his national diploma in painting from Tunbridge Wells School of Art and his art teacher’s certificate from the London University Institute of Education before moving to the United States in 1968. He obtained his MFA from Florida State University in 1970 and settled in New York shortly thereafter.

In 1973, Gilbert-Rolfe began writing forArtforumafter encountering Robert Pincus-Witten, then the magazine’s reviews editor, at the Broome Street Bar in SoHo. “I was saying to [Pincus-Witten], ‘Why do you have these imbeciles write for you?’” he told Drohojowska-Philp. “He said, ‘Well, darling, if you think you can do any better. . . .’ And that is how I started to write.” Gilbert-Rolfe over the next few years would contribute to the magazine an avalanche of reviews, covering the work of artists includingBernd and Hilla Becher,George Brecht,Marcia Hafif,Barry Le Va,Brice Marden,Philip Pearlstein,Robert Ryman,Anne Truitt, andJackie Winsor. In 1976, with Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, both of whom had left behind roles atArtforum, he cofoundedOctober, which would become widely credited with introducing US audiences to French post-structural theory. Gilbert-Rolfe parted ways with the journal after just three issues, owing, he would later say, to the chemistry between the three being “all wrong.”

He continued to write prolifically throughout the 1970s, during which time he taught at Princeton University. Invited by John Baldessari in 1980 to spend a semester teaching at California Institute of the Arts, he worked there until 1986, when he accepted a role developing the MFA program at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, where he counted among his students Lynn Aldrich, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Sharon Lockhart, Sterling Ruby, and Diana Thater. He retired from the school in 2015 as professor and chair emeritus.

Apart from the aforementionedBeyond PietyandBeauty and the Contemporary Sublime,Gilbert-Rolfe published several other volumes, including one coauthored with architect Frank Gehry. Concurrent with his careers as critic and educator, he made and exhibited work for decades, beginning in 1974 with his first solo show of works on paper at New York’s Bertha Urdang Gallery. Experimenting with various ideas and influenced by various artists—Roberta Smithdescribedan early show as “both ambitious and derivative”—he eventually settled on the four-panel grid as his preferred format. Commenting on his “North Group” series inArtforumin 1979, which featured works of this nature, Hal Foster wrote that Gilbert-Rolfe’s grids embodied “a system of transformation more than of equation.”

The artist remained consistently interested in contrasts and binaries; even his most minimal works were multifarious. “My paintings are about complexity,” he noted in anartist’s statement. “I think that they have come to be about logic as much as anything else. Not logic as in philosophy, logic as in music, where one talks of it making sense but does not mean it provides a riddle and its answer. I want the work to interact with the viewer, to take place in the space around itself and between itself and the person looking at it, and to hold the attention for some time.”

Gilbert-Rolfe’s work is held in the collections of major institutions including the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, all in Los Angeles; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.

“Historicization may be part of what we expect from art, but Fredrick Jameson’s recommendation that one ‘Always historicize,’ sounds like a rule,” he wrote in the Brooklyn Rail in 2023. “The problem, I think, is the word ‘always.’ It makes it sound as though historicism is always the same and always observed or digested in the same way. ‘Always’ is an absolute, everything else other than absolutely nothing isn’t. I’d prefer something less than ‘always,’ not least because art is involved, and little if not nothing,” he concluded, “is always true of art.”