I read Amy Newman's oral history Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (Soho Press) with fascination.

I read Amy Newman's oral history Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (Soho Press) with fascination, watching my acknowledge past parade by. Artforum's first decade is traced with great care. Charlie Cowle the same of the magazine's early publishers, provides a user's guide to the launching of an art publication, and Phil Leider, beloved editor during the first decade and the magazine's shift from California to recently made known York, lays out his strategy. His emphasis onward nurturing writers comes through clearly, as does the appreciation of the recipients of this care. John Coplans provides a more irascible voice, irritated through the relentlessness of the monthly grind and exasperated by means of the ideological tug-of-war within the editorial board, riven as it was from "formalists" Annette Michelson and myself and sociopolitical contextualists Lawrence Alloway and Max Kozloff Challenging Art is a original of its kind and a much-need historical document of united of the most important cultural journals of the '6o a journal nearly driven to its deat h according to Coplans.

Rosalind Krauss is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University. She is the author principally recently of "A Voyage in succession the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Thames & Hudson 1999)

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