A Tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Barbara Rose is an American art historian and critic who has published widely in the field of modern American art. Born in 1938 in Washington, DC, Rose studied at the Sorbonne, Smith College, Barnard, and finally, Columbia University under Meyer Schapiro. Rose became immersed in the New York-based circle of modernist artists and curators in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and made her substantial contribution to the discourse on contemporary art with the insider’s perspective this afforded her.

Rose taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence, University of California at Irvine and San Diego, and the American University Art in Italy program, and was senior curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from 1981-1985. A prolific writer, Rose is the author of American Art Since 1900(1967), The Golden Age of Dutch Painting (1969), American Painting: The 20th Century (Skira, 1969), and monographs on the artists Magdalena Abankawicz, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Liberman, Larry Rivers, and others, as well as dozens of exhibition catalog essays. She held editorial positions at Art in America, Vogue, Artforum, Partisan Review, and Journal of Art, and her writing has also appeared in Art International, Studio International, Arts Magazine, and ARTnews, among many others.

Jonathan Fineberg is the program director of the PhD in Creativity program at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He is the author of Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, the most widely read survey of postwar art, and co-creator (with John Carlin) of Imagining America: Icons of 20th Century American Art, the award-winning PBS television documentary of 2005. Fineberg is also the author of some 30 books and catalogs on modern art, including: Christo and Jeanne-Claude: On the Way to the Gates (Yale & Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY); The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton); When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child (University of California Press and The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.); and more recently Modern Art at the Border of Mind and Brain (University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

He is the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Art History Emeritus at University of Illinois and a trustee emeritus of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., where he was founding director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art. Fineberg has curated more than a dozen museum exhibitions, taught at Yale and Illinois, and served as a visitor at Harvard, Columbia, University of California and elsewhere.