Brian O'Doherty (4 May 1928 – 7 November 2022) was an Irish-American art critic, writer, visual artist, and academic. He lived in New York City for over 50 years, He used a number of alter egos, including Patrick Ireland. He studied medicine at University College Dublin, and did post-graduate work at Cambridge University and at the Harvard School of Public Health.

In 1957, O'Doherty spent a year working in a cancer hospital before devoting himself full-time to the visual arts. Speaking of his experience after Harvard:

Career

In the 1960s, O'Doherty was an art critic for the New York Times. He commissioned Roland Barthes to write his "Death of the Author" essay for a special edition of Aspen magazine in 1967. In the latter book, he discusses and invents the term for the contemporary gallery space. He also wrote novels: The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. (1992), the 2000 Booker Prize-nominated The Deposition of Father McGreevy (1999), and The Crossdresser's Secret (2014). He had a retrospective at Dublin's Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in 2005.

On 20 May 2008, in recognition of the progress for peace in Ireland, O'Doherty ceremoniously buried his alter ego at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and resumed being called by his birth name.

In 2018, at the age of 90, O’Doherty was the subject of three exhibitions celebrating his work in his native Ireland, including the restoration of the room sized “One Here Now” installation he created at the Sirius Arts Centre in Cork in 1995-96.

In The modern art collection, Trinity College Dublin, David Scott writes that:

<blockquote>Much influenced by Marcel Duchamp he is an essentially interrogative artist, constantly questioning artistic conventions and the assumptions on which we base our aesthetic judgements.</blockquote>

Personal life and death

For more than 30 years, O'Doherty was married to art historian and former chair of the Art History department at Barnard College, Barbara Novak. He lived and worked in the United States.

O'Doherty died at his home in New York on 7 November 2022, at the age of 94.

References

Further reading

  • Brenda Moore-McCann, "Brian O'Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Between Categories," Lund Humphries, London, 2009.
  • Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, (1976), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999
  • Brian O'Doherty, Beyond the Ideology of the White Cube. MACBA: Barcelona, 2009.
  • David Scott (1989), The modern art collection, Trinity College Dublin. Dublin: Trinity College Dublin Press.
  • O'Doherty's Structural Play #3 in Aspen no. 5+6 at Ubuweb