Brian O'Doherty was an Irish-American art critic, writer, visual artist, and academic.
14 Facts About Brian O'Doherty
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Brian O'Doherty lived in New York City for over 50 years, serving as an art critic for The New York Times and NBC, as well as an editor for Art in America.
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Brian O'Doherty used a number of alter egos, including Patrick Ireland.
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Brian O'Doherty studied medicine at University College Dublin, and did post-graduate work at Cambridge University and at the Harvard School of Public Health.
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In 1957, Brian O'Doherty spent a year working in a cancer hospital before devoting himself full-time to the visual arts.
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Brian O'Doherty commissioned Roland Barthes to write his "Death of the Author" essay for a special edition of Aspen magazine in 1967.
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Brian O'Doherty was an editor of Art in America and an on-air art critic for NBC.
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For many years, Brian O'Doherty was an influential member of the senior staff of the National Endowment for the Arts; first as director of the Visual Arts Program, and subsequently as director of the Media Arts Program, where he was responsible for the creation of such major public television series as American Masters and Great Performances.
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Brian O'Doherty authored numerous works of art criticism, including his books American Masters and Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, a series of essays first published in Artforum.
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Brian O'Doherty wrote novels: The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P, the 2000 Booker Prize-nominated The Deposition of Father McGreevy, and The Crossdresser's Secret.
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Brian O'Doherty had a retrospective at Dublin's Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in 2005.
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On 20 May 2008, in recognition of the progress for peace in Ireland, Brian O'Doherty ceremoniously buried his alter ego at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and resumed being called by his birth name.
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For more than 30 years, Brian O'Doherty was married to art historian and former chair of the Art History department at Barnard College, Barbara Novak.
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Brian O'Doherty died at his home in New York on 7 November 2022, at the age of 94.