As editor in chief of Artforum from 1977 to 1980, Joseph Masheck published a series of five articles tracing ways that twentieth-century abstraction remained subtly rooted in Christian conceptualities and antetypes. With titles like “Cruciformality” and “Iconicity,” these articles were less concerned with religious iconographies (the ubiquity of cross-shaped structures in modernist painting, for example) than with understanding how nonobjective art was (re)processing religious logics, precisely while dispensing with iconographical and pictorial content.
Brian Horowitz is the author of six books, including Vladimir Jabotinsky s Russian Years (2020), Russian Idea-Jewish Presence (2013), Empire Jews (2009), and a study fo the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia (Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia [2009]). His first book was on the historian and philosopher, Mikhail Gershenzon. He holds the Sizeler Family Chair and teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans. He has received numerous grants and awards. In an earlier life, he was a Slavicist and wrote about Alexander Pushkin, among others.