John Kirk Train Varnedoe (Jan. 18, 1946 – Aug. 15, 2003) was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia and was an American art historian and writer, a Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a noted curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He studied at St. Andrew's School and Williams College, where he was a member of The Kappa Alpha Society.
After his years at Williams, he...
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John Kirk Train Varnedoe (Jan. 18, 1946 – Aug. 15, 2003) was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia and was an American art historian and writer, a Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a noted curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He studied at St. Andrew's School and Williams College, where he was a member of The Kappa Alpha Society.
After his years at Williams, he went to Paris, where he became expert on Auguste Rodin's drawings, and fell in love with French culture and civilization. He returned to America and particularly to New York, where he married the artist Elyn Zimmerman and taught art history, first at Columbia University, and then at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.
He co-curated, with William Rubin, the exhibition "Primitivism: Affinity Between The Tribal and The Modern" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, the same year that he won a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1988, he became the...
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