As editor in chief of Artforum from 1977 to 1980, Joseph Masheck published a series of five articles tracing ways that twentieth-century abstraction remained subtly rooted in Christian conceptualities and antetypes. With titles like “Cruciformality” and “Iconicity,” these articles were less concerned with religious iconographies (the ubiquity of cross-shaped structures in modernist painting, for example) than with understanding how nonobjective art was (re)processing religious logics, precisely while dispensing with iconographical and pictorial content.
In the field of art history, scholars who prioritize understanding artists’ perspectives over imposing their own interpretations are rare. Joseph Masheck is one of these exceptional scholars, distinguishing himself by his commitment to unraveling what artists thought about themselves, their work, and the world in which they lived.