John Perreault, Art Critic (and Artist) Who Championed the New, Dies at 78
John
Perreault, an art critic at The Village Voice and The SoHo Weekly News
who was an early champion of feminist art and the craft-oriented pattern
and decoration movement in the 1970s, and who later held senior
curatorial positions at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island and the American Craft Museum, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 78.
The cause was complications of gastrointestinal surgery, his husband, Jeff Weinstein, said.
Mr.
Perreault started out as a poet and painter, but after being
recommended by the poet and art critic John Ashbery, he began writing
criticism for Art News. In 1966, The Village Voice made him its chief
art critic, and he used the position to make the case for new art and
work outside the mainstream, especially the creations of feminists like
Judy Chicago; photorealism; art with gay content; and the pattern and
decoration art associated with the Holly Solomon Gallery.
On Artopia,
a blog on the website Arts Journal that he started in 2004, he
described his interests as ranging “from Minimalism and Earth Art to
realist painting; from pattern painting to performance art; from street
works to ceramics and design.”
Mr.
Perreault’s reviews were required reading for anyone trying to make
sense of the swirling, often confusing, art scene of the 1970s, when
movements and trends vied for attention.
As an artist himself, he became friends with many of the subjects he wrote about.
Alice Neel painted him, nude, in a portrait shown at her 1974 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In “The Turkish Bath,”
Sylvia Sleigh painted him — nude again — with his fellow critics
Lawrence Alloway and Carter Ratcliff. Depicted from the chest up, this
time wearing a shirt, he was the subject of a 1975 portrait by Philip Pearlstein.
John
Lucas Perreault (pronounced per-ALT) was born on Aug. 26, 1937, in
Manhattan and grew up in Belmar, N.J., and other towns along the Jersey
Shore. His French Canadian father, Jean, parlayed his experience cooking
on merchant marine ships during the war into a series of restaurant
jobs.
In
high school, John scooped ice cream at a Howard Johnson’s along the
Garden State Parkway where his father worked. There he mastered the
profit-pumping technique of creating a curled scoop that looked like
solid ice cream from the outside but actually contained a large air
pocket.
After
studying briefly at Montclair State Teachers College (now Montclair
State University), he enrolled in Kenneth Koch’s poetry workshop at the
New School for Social Research in Manhattan. His first poetry
collection, “Camouflage,” was published by Lines Books in 1966, with an
introduction by Mr. Ashbery. He was also the author of the collections
“Luck” (1969) and “Harry” (1974).
In
the mid-1960s Mr. Perreault began exhibiting his paintings at One
Eleven Gallery in Greenwich Village. He soon turned to conceptual and
performance art. For the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the
Bowery, he recited a long poem, “Hunger,” as color slides were projected
on his back. He also did a series of street projects with Vito Acconci
and, with Hannah Weiner and Eduardo Costa, organized the Fashion Show Poetry Event, which featured clothing made by Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Alex Katz and other artists.
After
The SoHo News, as it had been renamed, went out of business in 1982,
Mr. Perreault became the chief curator of the Everson Museum of Art in
Syracuse. He was the director and curator of the Newhouse Center for
Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor from 1985 to 1989, a period when, the
critic Vivien Raynor wrote in The New York Times in 1995, “the Staten Island art scene experienced a kind of golden age.”
He was a pivotal figure in organizing the first “Day Without Art”
in 1989 to draw attention to the impact of AIDS on the arts. More than
600 cultural institutions took part in what became an annual event.
After serving as senior curator at the American Craft Museum (now the Museum of Arts and Design)
from 1990 to 1993, he became the artistic director, and later executive
director, of Urban Glass, a workshop and gallery in Brooklyn, and the
editor of its magazine, Glass Quarterly.
Mr.
Perreault taught at several schools, including the New School, the
School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, the University of Arizona in Tucson
and the State University of New York at Binghamton. It was while
teaching at the University of California, San Diego, that he met Mr.
Weinstein. They married in 2008 in Massachusetts. He is also survived by a brother, Ron, and a sister, Barbara Kaska.
Mr.
Perreault was the author of numerous catalogs and books, including
“Philip Pearlstein: Drawings and Watercolors” (1988). His fiction was
collected in “Hotel Death and Other Tales,” published in 1989.
In
recent years Mr. Perreault began painting again, exhibiting at Gallery
125 in Bellport, N.Y., on Long Island, where he had a second home. He
turned to unusual media, including toothpaste, sand and instant coffee, a
nod to Bellport’s status as the summer home of the man who first
mass-produced instant coffee.
“Although
my guess is that the art ‘object’ is done with, I myself still go on
making ‘paintings,’ but this doesn’t have much to do with making salable
physical objects,” he told the magazine Art Experience NYC in 2011. “Making them is more like philosophical investigations, art criticism or yoga.”
