by Jon Lackman | 16 April 2009 | Contemporary
In the Brooklyn Rail, Irving Sandler interviews critic Roberta Smith:
I was born in New York City. My father was finishing his PhD in geography at Columbia University. By the time I was five weeks old, we had moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where he had a job teaching at the University of Kansas … I went to Grinnell [College in Grinnell, Iowa] … there was a brief moment when it looked like art might be the default mode. But my studio courses were all downhill after that so I concentrated on what little art history was available. [Did you think about becoming an art historian?] I didn’t have the grades for graduate school and I also couldn’t stand the idea of being in school anymore … What really saved my college career was an art professor named Richard Cervene who kept up with all things New York, from Broadway plays to museum and gallery shows, etc. He also knew about Whitney’s ISP (Independent Study Program) when it first started and insisted that I apply, which I did, and I got in … [Later] I was living in a little loft on Broome Street with the painter Dona Nelson that first year and Judd had just bought his building on Spring Street, so I would see him quite frequently. I said to him, “Wouldn’t it be great if your writing existed in one place?” And he said, “Yes.” So I began to type all of his reviews that appeared in Arts Magazine—generally between 1959 and 1964—when he was most acute about new art. By the time I was done I had a manuscript of 150 single-spaced pages and I had completely inhaled Judd—his thinking, his style, his vocabulary … [How did you actually decide to be a critic?] Basically as an over-reaction. Robert Pincus-Witten wrote an article about Judd in Artforum, and it may me feel furiously territorial. I talked about it to Jennifer Licht, my boss at the Modern: “This is a terrible article comparing Judd to Russian Constructivism, of all things,” and so on. And she said, “Why don’t you write a letter to the editor?” So I started a letter that grew to ten pages. When I showed it to Jenny she said, “You know, you could be a critic.”
