Savannah's Art Museums: Kirk Varnedoe

It may surprise some people that a Savannahian was once the leading authority and some would say power of the modern and contemporary art movement. Kirk Varnedoe was said to be an early couch potato. He did not love sports and played at academics. But at the age of eleven he decided he wanted to be an athlete and a scholar. Thus began years of hard study and a desire not only to play sports but to be the best. He soon would succeed at both. It was as though he laid in his cocoon for as long as he could before he sprung into the world with his grace, beauty, and intelligence. Was it some knowing inside that his life would not be long thus he wanted it to be long enough?
He would suddenly desire to be sent to St. Andrews in Delaware a preparatory school to challenge himself. At St. Andrews his caricatures ran in the school yearbook and to everyone’s surprise he became a star in several different sports and graduated valedictorian of his class. He would continue to do the same at Williams College playing football and excelling in academics.

His brother Sam Varnedoe, a philosophy professor, remarked about the new Kirk," I guess I have to say he's one of the most competitive people I've ever met. I've played squash with him and you would not want to give up a point needlessly when you play Kirk Varnedoe. He is 57 places in the court at once."

After Williams College he became a doctoral student at Stanford University. He studied under Albert Elsen, a Rodin scholar, which led to his first major exhibition of Rodin drawings at the National Gallery in 1971. Following his graduation from Stanford he taught there and then later at Columbia and in 1980 he was appointed associate professor at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
IN 1984 his genius was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship which awarded him a “genius prize”.  He used the grant to write a history of modernism, ''A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern.'' He borrowed the title from a plaque near the Rugby School in England honoring William Webb Ellis, ''who, with a fine disregard for the rules, invented the game of rugby.'' Varnedoe who had played rugby player proposed Ellis's mad dash with the ball as a metaphor for artistic innovation.

He wrote in the book,” There was nothing inevitable about the stylizing course of modern picturemaking: It was directly contingent on these few artists' "fine disregard" of the status quo, and on their constant willingness to rewrite the rules of art.” A fine disregard of the rules became the rule. This would also be the theme of his new job as the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. He held this position from 1988 to 2001.

His tenure at the MOMA would turn the art world on its ear. He initiated the Artists Choice series. Artists -- Scott Burton, Elizabeth Murray, Chuck Close, John Baldessari, Ellsworth Kelly -- were invited to organize exhibitions of works from the museum's permanent collection. Mr. Varnedoe explained, ''I would really like the public to see the collection through the eyes of the people to whom it means the most.'' This allowed contemporary artists to critique and define the modern masters. A power shift was going on at the MOMA.

He also invited himself to rearrange the collection. He sold four paintings to purchase a Van Gogh that he thought was more pertinent to where the museum should go. Critics were appalled. He acquired paintings of the 60s and 70s: James Rosenquist's iconic pop mural ''F-16,'' Andy Warhol's famous suite of soup-can paintings and major works by Richard Serra, Rauschenberg, James Turrell, Cy Twombly and others. He was determined to contemporize and reshape the museum's collection. As if his new purchases were not enough to disturb his critics he began the crusading art shows.
In 1990 with his former student and critic Adam Gopnik with the New Yorker he did the ''High & Low' art show.  It was a historical survey that put contemporary artists with the masters. And worst of all to his critics it assumed you knew about the masters and spent more time developing the contemporary artists and their philosophies and art. It questioned the connection if any of the modern masters to popular culture. The implication of the exhibit was art needed to speak of the here and now and who was better to do that than contemporary artists.

He did individual retrospectives that questioned the artists as products of their times but as geniuses breaking the mold of their times to push art forward. So a Jackson Pollock retrospective in 1998, which he organized with Pepe Karmel, a former student, and retrospectives of Jasper Johns (1996) and Cy Twombly (1994). Symbolically what he was doing to the interpretation of Modern Art was seen in the realistic-looking dynamite (actually a clock that would be ticking) sitting on his desk.

Nothing could stop him as he stood regal like above the noise paving a path for the modern art museum. It was 2001 that he discovered he had incurable cancer.  In 2002, Varnedoe stepped down at MoMA to be the fourth professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The athletic, debonair, motorcycle rider, and art scholar needed to slow down.  This would give him time to write the Mellon Lectures which he was to deliver at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring. His subject was to be abstraction since 1945, not normally a barnburner of a subject. The lecture was to be  called "Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock." He would give one final series of lectures to define his position on Modern art. On the days of his lecturers the lines were long as the public and scholars gathered outside of the National Gallery of Art to hear the master speak. It would be one of his last lectures. He spoke without notes for the six lectures. He had mastered the subject long ago. He concluded the series with these words. "I have shown it to you. It has been done. It is being done. And because it can be done, it will be done. And now I am done." He died on August 14th, 2003.

​Varnedoe would leave a legacy of 18 books, students of his such as Gopnik, Jeffrey Weiss, head of the department of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery, and Pepe Karmel, formerly a curator at MoMA and now an associate professor of fine arts at NYU and many others. A change in the way modern and contemporary art is viewed. He is also honored by the Kirk Varnedoe collection of works on paper; artists who he worked with throughout his career donated in his memory to the newly built Moshe Sofide building, the Jepson Center. The Jepson Center challenged Savannah with the place of contemporary buildings in a historic district.  The collections include Jasper Johns, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Richard Avedon among others. Out of his cocoon arose a butterfly whose life though short was filled. He was a man for our time.

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Art from the Kirk Varnedoe Collection

Jepson Center