22 Facts About Peter Plagens

Peter Plagens was born on 1941 and is an American artist, art critic, and novelist based in New York City.

Peter Plagens is most widely known for his longstanding contributions to Artforum and Newsweek, and for what critics have called a remarkably consistent, five-decade-long body of abstract formalist painting.

Peter Plagens has been awarded major fellowships for both his painting and his writing.

Peter Plagens's work has been featured in surveys at the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, and PS1, and in solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Las Vegas Art Museum.

Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel described Peter Plagens's painting as a "fusion of high-flying refinement and everyday awkwardness" with an intellectual savvy, disdain for snobbery and ungainliness he likened to Willem de Kooning's work.

Peter Plagens was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1941 and grew up in Los Angeles.

Peter Plagens attended the University of Southern California, where he majored in painting and drew cartoons for the Daily Trojan.

Peter Plagens left USC an abstract painter, influenced by Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, which set him at odds with the somewhat conservative painting faculty at Syracuse University where he did his graduate studies.

In 1966, Peter Plagens accepted a teaching position at the University of Texas, remaining until 1969, when he accepted a position at California State University, Northridge.

Peter Plagens taught there until 1978, and at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Southern California, and the University of North Carolina, where he chaired the art department.

Peter Plagens began exhibiting professionally in 1967, and was featured in the 1971 LACMA show, "24 Young Los Angeles Artists" and the 1972 Whitney Biennial.

Peter Plagens has shown at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 1975, and showed regularly at the Jan Baum Gallery in Los Angeles and Jan Cicero Gallery in Chicago.

Peter Plagens maintains there is no symbolism in his work; he often appends enigmatic titles to his work upon completion that indicate his ruminations while in the studio.

Between 2000 and 2003, Peter Plagens sought to create a greater degree of tension In a series of untitled works on paper by subdividing them into two fields: one containing fluid, expressive shapes and linear forms on gray or khaki-colored grounds, atop another, featuring configurations of jarring, hard-edged rectangles set on black or off-white fields.

Peter Plagens has been a prominent art critic for more than five decades, producing numerous reviews, essays and articles about artists and the art world.

Peter Plagens began writing for Artforum in 1966 and became a contributing editor in 1971 and an associate editor, West Coast in 1974.

Peter Plagens was a senior writer and art critic for Newsweek from 1989 to 2003 and a contributing editor until 2010.

Peter Plagens has written two novels: The Art Critic and Time for Robo.

Peter Plagens has received recognition from major art institutions for both his art and writing.

Peter Plagens has received painting fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Brown Foundation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Peter Plagens's writing has been awarded fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and he was one of four senior fellows in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University in 1998.

Peter Plagens's art has been acquired by numerous public and corporate collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Baltimore Museum of Art, Albright-Knox Gallery, Museum of New Mexico, and Ackland Art Museum, among others.