Lippard, Lucy

Lippard, Lucy (1937– ). American art critic, a woman of radical views who is particular known for her writings on Conceptual art and Feminist art. She was born in New York and studied at Smith College and the New York Institute of Fine Arts. In 1969 she was one of the founders of the Art Workers’ Coalition, which combined demands for artists' rights with protests against the Vietnam War. She was closely involved with the early history of Conceptual art, and in 1973 published the first attempt in book form to document its growth—Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object. This used a collage of chronologically ordered references and quotations and deliberately suspended aesthetic judgement. Part of the reason Lippard was interested in this kind of art was that its theoretical abandoning of a physical ‘product’ appeared to undermine the commercial values of the art market, although she admitted in her ‘postface’ to the book that by 1972 Conceptual artists were selling works for substantial sums and that ‘art and artists in a capitalist society remain luxuries'. Lippard's other books include Pop Art (1969), Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (1971), From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art (1976), A Different War: Vietnam in Art (1990), Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (1992), and monographs on Eva Hesse (1976) and Ad Reinhardt (1981). From 1987 to 1994 she was adjunct professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.