Benjamin Buchloh

Benjamin Heinz-Dieter Buchloh (born November 15, 1941) is a German art historian. Between 2005 and 2021 he was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art in the History of Art and Architecture department at Harvard University.

Education and career
Born in Cologne, Germany on November 15, 1941, Buchloh received a M.Phil in German literature from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1969. He later obtained his Ph.D in art history in 1994 from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, where he studied with fellow art historian Rosalind Krauss.

After time as an editor for German art journal Interfunktionen and teaching stints at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, NSCAD University, and CalArts, Buchloh began teaching art history at the State University of New York at Old Westbury and the University of Chicago. He later taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an associate professor from 1989 to 1994. From 1991 to 1993, he also served as the Director of Critical and Curatorial Studies for the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He then taught at both Columbia University and its sister college, Barnard College, as Virginia B. Wright Professor of Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Art from 1994 to 2005, including service as a department chair from 1997 to 2000.

In 2005, he joined the Harvard University department of History of Art and Architecture. He was named Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of Modern Art. In 2006, he was named Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art. In 2007, Buchloh won the Golden Lion award at the 2007 Venice Biennale for his work as an art historian towards contributing to contemporary art. In fall 2009, Benjamin Buchloh resided at the American Academy in Berlin as a Daimler Fellow. In 2021 he retired from teaching.

Buchloh is currently a co-editor of the art journal October and in 2022 completed a monograph of Gerhard Richter titled Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History.

Works
His book, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry (2000), is a collection of eighteen essays on major figures of postwar art written since the late 1970s. It covers Nouveau Réalisme in France (Arman, Yves Klein, Jacques de la Villeglé), postwar German art (Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter), American Fluxus and Pop Art (Robert Watts and Andy Warhol), minimalism and postminimal art (Michael Asher and Richard Serra), and European and American conceptual art (Daniel Buren, Dan Graham).

Buchloh addresses some artists in terms of their oppositional approaches to language and painting, for example, Nancy Spero and Lawrence Weiner. About others, he asks more general questions concerning the development of models of institutional critique (Hans Haacke) and the theorization of the museum (Marcel Broodthaers); and addresses the formation of historical memory in postconceptual art (James Coleman).

The second volume of Buchloh's collected essays Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art was released in February 2015. It collects a series of important and widely influential essays on thematic and historical issues in twentieth-century art including the "return to order", Soviet "factography", and the "paradigm repetitions" of the neo-avant-garde.