The artist Ray Johnson in 1965. In SoHo, he bedecked his friend Suzi Gablik, an artist and writer, with his “moticos,” as he called his collages, turning her…
As a collage artist and reviewer, she was an it-girl of avant-garde art. But she turned on that world in 1984 with her salvo of a book, “Has Modernism Failed?”
Suzi Gablik, an artist, author, and critic who penned the first English-language biography of René Magritte, died May 7 at the age of eighty-seven. In volumes that are still germane today, Gablik took on a diverse range of topics, including the commercialization of art, the relationship between art and the ecological and sociological spheres, and that between art and morality. Gablik firmly believed that artists could be agents of social change, and likewise believed that the term artist itself merited a broad definition. “I’ve always been trying to deconstruct the cultural narrative which pins