NEW YORK, NY.- DC Moore Gallery announced the passing of Max Kozloff, who died at home in New York on April 6, 2025. Max Kozloff was a leading critic and writer on modern art, informed by his own artistic practice as a painter and photographer.

Born in 1933 in Chicago, Kozloff moved to New York City in 1959. He was the art critic for The Nation from 1961-1968 and contributing editor to Artforum from 1963 to 1974, and later Artforum's executive editor through 1976. An eminent writer in the fields of art history and criticism, he authored many insightful essays on modern art, focusing particularly on photography from the mid-1970s on. His influential essay “American Painting During the Cold War,” published in Artforum in 1973, linked Abstract Expressionism to American political hegemony in the postwar period.

Kozloff was highly regarded as a critic who also created art, exhibiting his color photographs at Holly Solomon Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, Steven Kasher Gallery, and at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 in the exhibition Max Kozloff: Critic and Photographer. He focused on street photography and portraiture, interested in the complex transactions between photographer and subject. Less well-known was his private painting practice as a creator of moody and nuanced landscape paintings. An exhibition of his paintings, Max Kozloff: The Atmospherics of Interruption: Paintings 1966-2018, was held at DC Moore Gallery in 2018.

Kozloff developed his own pleasure in painting in the early 1960s, after many youthful visits to the Art Institute of Chicago and training at its school. His attachment to the brush was furthered by discoveries in the work of George Inness, Philip Guston, Cy Twombly, and Pierre Bonnard, whose achievement was the subject of his Master’s thesis at the University of Chicago. Kozloff’s approach to painting always involved a fascination with the primacy of color. When a life change occurred, it transformed his method and compositions. As the artist wrote:

A physical condition inflected the course my painting was to take: a severe hearing disability. To compensate for this drawback, I intimated the idea that brushstrokes, marks and touches could have a musical import, as they are elaborated in an indefinite space. The body language of clouds came to inhabit that space, where faces sometimes appear, faces which I allowed and retained but did not intend.

Kozloff’s numerous publications include Cubism/Futurism (1973), Photography & Fascination (1979), The Privileged Eye (1987), New York Capital of Photography (2002), The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900 (2007), Vermeer: A Study Contrasto (2011), Arbus Friedlander Winogrand: New Documents, 1967 (2017), and Understanding Photography: Interpreting and Enjoying the Great Photographer (2020), as well as monographs on Jasper Johns (1969, 1972), Duane Michals (1991), Peter Hujar (1994), and Saul Leiter (2014). Books on Kozloff's photography include New York Over the Top (2013) and A Carnival of Mimics (2020).

Max Kozloff is survived by his wife, Joyce Kozloff, and son, Nikolas Kozloff.

A funeral service will be held on April 14, 2025 from 11 am - 1 pm at Greenwich Village Funeral Home, 199 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012.