Philip Leider, the founding editor of Artforum, died at his home in Berkeley, California, on January 11 at 96. Artforum announced his death over the weekend, but did not state a cause.
Leider’s career arc was an unusual one. He helped turn Artforum into a go-to source for serious, no-nonsense art criticism, serving as its editor starting in 1962. (Since 2022, Artforum has been owned by Penske Media Corporation, ARTnews’s parent company.) “It’s no exaggeration to say that Artforum in the 1960s was Phil Leider,” wrote art historian Michael Fried, a good friend of Leider, in a 1993 reflection.
Then, in 1971, Leider left the publication—and the eye of the mainstream art world in the US. When Amy Newman, a former ARTnews editor and the author of a book on Artforum’s early years, interviewed Leider for the New York Times in 2000, she wrote of Leider’s “almost 30-year disengagement from an art world that grew up” during the ’70s. By that point, Leider had departed the US altogether and begun teaching in Israel.
Born in 1929 in New York to what former Artforum editor John Coplans once described as a “non-intellectual Jewish-immigrant family,” Leider attended Brooklyn College as an undergraduate. “He got through college by writing papers for other people, at five or ten dollars apiece,” Coplans told Janet Malcolm for a famed 1986 New Yorker profile of Artforum under Ingrid Sischy’s leadership.
Leider then attended the University of Nebraska’s English literature graduate program and served in the Army, becoming a typist. Afterward, Leider began law school, but he dropped out because he was “not a careerist in the American sense,” as Coplans recalled. “He wanted nothing to do with power or money.”
His program for Artforum reflected that ethos. Hired by John Irwin in 1962, Leider wrote early on of a desire for his publication to diverge from the tastes of the market. “If the myth that buying art is a good investment (in the Wall Street sense) is perpetuated, the result can only be disaster for both,” he once wrote.
Leider was essential in building up Artforum’s reputation, and he left the magazine with an emphasis on experimental art. “There was a scene happening, unexpected, unpredictable and unpredicted, but there and real,” Leider told Newman. But, finding that “I couldn’t get any of the writers I cared about to get interested in it,” Leider left the publication for good. According to Coplans, Leider and publisher Charles Cowles also butted heads over Artforum’s ability to make money.
After exiting Artforum, Leider began teaching at the University of California, Irvine and writing on artists such as Frank Stella, with whom he was close. Due in part to what he described as “the increasing seriousness of my Zionism,” Leider eventually picked up and relocated to Israel, where he ultimately took a teaching post at the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts. He retired in 1998.
When Newman interviewed Leider in 2000, he described a growing dissatisfaction with the current taste of the art world, saying that he did not care for Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, and a litany of other art stars of the 1980s and ’90s. But he also freely admitted that his tastes had calcified. “Hard work requires constant vigilance against backsliding,” he said.
