John O'Brian

John O'Brian (historian) is a writer, curator, and art historian. He is best known for his books and articles on modern art history and criticism. Since 1987, he has taught at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he is a Faculty Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and held the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies from July 1, 2008, to June 30, 2011.[1] He was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2009, and received an honorary degree from the University of Trinity College at the University of Toronto in 2011.

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Life and Work

O’Brian was born in 1944 to Canadian parents in Bath, England. He was educated at New Park School in St. Andrews, Fife, and Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, before entering University of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he received an Honours B.A. in Political Science and Economics in 1966. He worked at the Toronto firm of Harris & Partners until 1974, before enrolling at York University and starting to write art criticism initially, then poetry, and eventually art history. He received his Ph.D. in art history from Harvard University under the supervision of T.J. Clark (historian) in 1990.[2] While at Harvard, he was a member of the Pumping Station, a Cambridge collective of radical thinkers that met at the house of Gillian and Iain Boal.

After publishing a monograph in 1983, David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting, he published the first two volumes of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism in 1986. The books generated wide international interest and debate, establishing O’Brian’s career as an historian of modernism. Alice Goldfarb Marquis has made the case that O'Brian's work on Greenberg helped to establish his reputation.[3] The second two volumes of the edition, which also received broad attention, appeared in 1993. In an editorial written for The New Criterion, Hilton Kramer expressed admiration for Greenberg’s criticism but distaste for O’Brian’s politicization of it.[4]

O’Brian has lectured internationally – in Australia, China, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, and South Africa as well as across North America and Europe – often with a Canadian bias. He has been professionally involved with museums and galleries, either as a curator or an advisor. From 1991-1998, he was a Special Advisor to the board of the National Gallery of Canada.

His current research focuses on the role of photography in the production of nuclear narratives since the end of World War II. The technologies of photography and nuclear fission, he contends, are intimately connected to one another as well as to the social and political conditions of postwar modernity. The research forms part of a long-term project he calls “Camera Atomica.”

Selected Publications

Books

Articles

References

  1. ^ "Art History, Visual Art and Theory Department at the University of British Columbia"
  2. ^ Elizabeth Lumley, Canadian Who's Who (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 983.
  3. ^ Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg (Boston: MFA Publications, 2006), 242-46.
  4. ^ "Hilton Kramer, "Clement Greenberg & the Cold War ," The New Criterion (March 1993), 4."

Profiles and Opinions