Peter Plagens

Peter Plagens (born 1941) is an American artist, art critic, and novelist based in New York City. He is most widely known for his longstanding contributions to Artforum and Newsweek (senior writer and art critic, 1989–2003), and for what critics have called a remarkably consistent, five-decade-long body of abstract formalist painting. Plagens has written three books on art, Bruce Nauman: The True Artist, Moonlight Blues: An Artist's Art Criticism (1986) and Sunshine Muse: Modern Art on the West Coast, 1945-70 (1974), and two novels, The Art Critic (2008) and Time for Robo (1999). He has been awarded major fellowships for both his painting (John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts) and his writing (Andy Warhol Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts). Plagens's work has been featured in surveys at the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Whitney Museum, and PS1, and in solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Las Vegas Art Museum. they also contend that the visibility of his bylines as a critic has sometimes overshadowed his artmaking—unduly. New York Times critic Roberta Smith called the show an "eye-teasing sandwich of contrasting formalist strategies," the hard-won result of a decade of focused experimentation. He moved back to California in 1965 and took an Assistant Curator position at the Long Beach Museum of Art; soon after, he approached Artforum editor Phil Leider for work as a reviewer—at five dollars per review—in order to keep up with the Los Angeles art scene. Plagens began exhibiting professionally in 1967, and was featured in the 1971 LACMA show, "24 Young Los Angeles Artists" and the 1972 Whitney Biennial. He has shown at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 1975, and showed regularly at the Jan Baum Gallery in Los Angeles (1977–1992) and Jan Cicero Gallery in Chicago (1986–98). His 2004 retrospective at USC traveled to Columbia College Chicago and the Butler Institute of American Art in Akron. Plagens married the painter, Laurie Fendrich, in 1981. They moved to New York City in 1985 where they continue to reside, while also maintaining a studio outside the city.

Artwork and reception Critic Dave Hickey, among others, has characterized Plagens as "an irrevocably abstract formalist painter," David Pagel wrote that Plagens's 2004 retrospective traced "a remarkably consistent arc" of stubbornly held abstract work of "sophisticated inelegance." During this time, he also created the drawing series "My Father Worked in Advertising" (1986), which featured dappled, abstract expressionist-like areas around the edges over which he painted and collaged fields of color and hard-edged and irregular shapes. In paintings such as Benton Way and Sunset, LA, 6/28/55, 1:40 pm (1989) and Learning of the Tragic News (1996), he introduced expressive drips and gestural, free-form marks and shapes, that Michael Kimmelman wrote had "a looping calligraphic eloquence" recalling Arshile Gorky and Richard Diebenkorn. for shows that critics described, variously, as "jaunty, accomplished disquisitions" exploring the co-existence of incompatible styles, formal concepts and paint application in single works. These paintings (e.g., The Ides of October or A Literary Sensibility, both 2017) and works on paper employed three main visual elements: a gestural, improvisational field of squiggles, loops and loose grids partially blotted out by a large, irregularly edged expanse of opaque orange, pink, lavender-gray or aqua, upon which Plagens set hard-edged, irregular polygons built from six or seven shards of bright color that he dubbed "color badges." Critics suggested that these badges mediated an ongoing flux between coherent wholes and fluid parts, order and disorder, freedom and restraint, Other critics characterize Plagens's writing as "stylish, clear-eyed," Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight wrote that Plagens's Bruce Nauman monograph probed the question of what an artist is "with wit, insight and a prodigious amount of research, plus a good deal of personal experience"; Sunshine Muse, deemed "vivacious and valuable" in The New York Times,

Plagens began writing for Artforum in 1966 and became a contributing editor in 1971 and an associate editor, West Coast in 1974. He has been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, ARTnews, Art+Auction, The Nation, L.A. Weekly, and Bookforum, among many publications. Plagens has written catalogue essays for the artists Jim DeFrance, Tony DeLap, Don Gummer, Ron Linden, Nick Miller and for the exhibitions "Clay's Tectonic Shift: John Mason, Ken Price, and Peter Voulkos, 1956–1968" and "Pasadena to Santa Barbara" (both 2012).

Plagens has also written two novels: The Art Critic (2008)

Awards and collections Plagens has received recognition from major art institutions for both his art and writing. He has received painting fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1972), His writing has been awarded fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation (Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant, 2008) and National Endowment for the Arts (art criticism, 1973), and he was one of four senior fellows in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University in 1998. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Baltimore Museum of Art, Albright-Knox Gallery, Museum of New Mexico, and Ackland Art Museum, among others.