Thomas Lawson (born 1951, Glasgow, Scotland) is an artist, writer, editor, and from 1991 to 2022 was the Dean of the School of Art & Design at California Institute of the Arts.Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art. "Oral history interview with Thomas Lawson, 2018 August 9-10," Collections. Retrieved 14 January 2018.California Institute of the Arts. Thomas Lawson, Administration and Staff. Retrieved 14 January 2018. He emerged as a central figure in ideological debates at the turn of the 1980s about the viability of painting through critical essays, such as "Last Exit: Painting" (1981).Miles, Christopher. "Thomas Lawson", Artforum, Summer 2007.Lawson, Thomas. "Last Exit: Painting," Artforum, October, 1981, p. 40–7.Eklund, Douglas. The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009. He has been described as "an embedded correspondent [and] polemical editorialist"Bovier, Lionel and Fabrice Stroun. "Introduction," Mining for Gold: Selected Writings (1979–1996), Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2004. who articulated an oppositional, progressive position for representational painting from within an increasingly reactionary art and media environment.Bankowsky, Jack. "October 1981," Artforum, October 2001.Heartney, Eleanor. "Thomas Lawson: Metro Pictures," ARTnews, March 1984. Artforum called his approach to the medium "one of the most cogent and controversial" in the 80s.Rothkopf, Scott. "The Painter: Thomas Lawson," Artforum, March 2003.
Lawson has received awards from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation,John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Thomas Lawson, Fellows. Retrieved 14 January 2018. National Endowment for the Arts and Rockefeller Foundation.
His paintings have been exhibited internationally at galleries and museums including Metro Pictures (New York), Anthony Reynolds (London), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), and Le Magasin (Grenoble).Cork, Richard. "Visual Arts: strange paintings by Thomas Lawson," The Times, 30 May 1995.Hammer Museum. "The Undiscovered Country", Exhibition, 2005. Retrieved 14 January 2018. He work was featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, "The Pictures Generation" (2009), and "A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation" (1989) at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA).The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984" (2009), Exhibitions. Retrieved 14 January 2018.Goldstein, Ann and Mary Jane Jacob. "A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation," Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989. Retrieved 14 January 2018. He has also created temporary public works in New York City, Glasgow, and Newcastle upon Tyne.New York Percent for Art. "Thomas Lawson,".The Bellgrove Station Project. "Thomas Lawson," Catalogue, 1990.Lawson, Thomas. "Memory Lingers Here," A New Necessity, First Tyne International, Catalogue, Newcastle on Tyne, United Kingdom: Tyne and Wear Museum Services, 1990.
Lawson's essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals such as Artforum, Art in America,Lawson, Thomas. "Art School Symposium," Art in America, May 2007. Flash ArtLawson, Thomas. "The Uses of Representation: Making Some Distinctions," Flash Art, March/April 1979, p. 37–9. and October;Lawson, Thomas, "Silently, By Means of a Flashing Light," October, #15, 1980. an anthology of his writing, Mining for Gold, was published in 2004.Lawson, Thomas. Mining for Gold: Selected Writings (1979–1996), Zurich: JRPRingier, 2004. Retrieved 14 January 2018. He has also edited or co-edited the contemporary art journals REALLIFE Magazine, Afterall and East of Borneo.Katzeff, Miriam, Thomas Lawson, and Susan Morgan (eds). REAL LIFE Magazine: Selected Writings and Projects 1979-1994, New York: Primary Information, 2006.East of Borneo. Contributors. Retrieved 14 January 2018. Lawson currently lives and works in Los Angeles and Edinburgh, Scotland.
Early life and career Lawson grew up in Glasgow and developed an early interest in the language of painting. As a teenager, he took classes at the Glasgow School of Art, but found it too conservative and enrolled at the University of St Andrews, where he studied English Language and Literature (graduated, 1973).Lawson, Thomas. "An Artist’s Education," ''CORE: Artists and Critics in Residence'', Joseph Havel (ed), Houston, TX: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2007 p. 79–97.Lawson, Thomas. "Paying Attention," Akademie X Lessons in Art + Life, London: Phaidon, 2015. He was active in the art scene there, creating an art club and organizing an exhibition of Scottish painter Pat Douthwaite. After enrolling in the Art History graduate program at the University of Edinburgh, he traveled to New York to interview Jasper Johns for his thesis, before graduating in 1975.
Lawson next moved to New York and enrolled in the Art History and Criticism PhD program at CUNY Graduate Center, where he studied with Rosalind Krauss, Linda Nochlin and Robert Pincus-Witten, and alongside postmodern writers Douglas Crimp and Craig Owens. He arrived ahead of the convergence of a flourishing downtown art/punk scene, new critical-artistic practices such as appropriation, brewing ideological debates, and an art-market explosion.Sandler, Irving. Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s, New York: Harper Collins, 1996. While at CUNY, Lawson began exhibiting art at Artists Space (1977, 1979) and the Drawing Center (1978).Milwaukee Art Museum. New Figuration in America, Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1982, p. 68. He also co-founded REALLIFE Magazine in 1978 with his wife, writer Susan Morgan, and contributed essays to Artforum, Art in America and Flash Art. In 1981, he began showing at the newly opened, influential Metro Pictures with artists such as Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, and later in the decade, showed at the Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery in Los Angeles.Marzorati, Gerald. "Artful Dodger," Soho News, 19 September 1980.Drohojowska, Hunter. "Closed Captions/Thomas Lawson", Los Angeles Times, 22 May 1981. Surveys of Lawson's work have since been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow),Glasgow Herald. "The Arts in 1990," Review, Glasgow Herald, 21 September 1990. the Battersea Arts Centre (London),Battersea Art Center. "Thomas Lawson," Exhibition materials, "Third Eye Touring Exhibition," Battersea Art Center, November/December 1990. and Goss-Michael Foundation (Dallas).D Magazine. "The Best of Big D 2014," Culture, D Magazine. August 2014. Retrieved 14 January 2018. He is currently represented by David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.Griffin, Jonathan. "The New Art Dealer," New York Times Style Magazine, 10 September 2014. Retrieved 14 January 2018. In 1991, Lawson was appointed Dean of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), a post he held until 2022. In addition to teaching, Lawson has curated or co-curated shows and lecture series at MoCA, PS1, Artists Space, White Columns, the Renaissance Society, LACE, REDCAT Gallery, and Los Angeles Municipal Gallery.Lawson, Thomas. A Fatal Attraction, Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1982.David Kordansky Gallery. Thomas Lawson, Artists. Retrieved 14 January 2018.
Work and reception Lawson is arguably better known for his critical writing and tenure as Dean at CalArts than for his painting. However, critics in the 2000s, such as Andrew Berardini, began suggesting that his painting was due for a reassessment for its role in broadening the parameters of appropriated imagery and offering a nuanced, critical alternative to conceptual art and neo-expressionist painting in the 1980s.Berardini, Andrew. "Thomas Lawson: 1977-1987," Art Review, Summer 2009.Rubinstein, Raphael. "Person, Place and Thing," Art in America, January 2005, p. 104-109.Lally, Phyllis. "Artist Profile: Thomas Lawson," Phillips Art Expert, 6 July 2009.
His career is best understood in its entirety, with his complementary practices of artmaking, critical writing, magazine editing, curating, and educating collectively addressing key ideological debates of the time.
"The painting wars" (1977–1987) Lawson emerged in the late 1970s as part of "The Pictures Generation" artists, which included Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and David Salle, among many.Bowman, Russell. "New Figuration: Background and Definition," New Figuration in America, Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1982, p. 10–5.Rickey, Carrie. "Naïve Nouveau and Its Malcontents," Flash Art, Summer 1980.Crimp, Douglas. "Pictures," October, Spring 1979, p. 75–88. Their work was broadly unified by its critique of modernism's avant-garde myths and embrace of postmodern art-making strategies, media imagery, pop-culture references and simple, sometimes crude, technique and presentation.Drohojowska, Hunter. "Stop Making Sense", ARTnews, October, 1989, p. 146–51.Rickey, Carrie. "Smyth, Schmidt, Smitten," Village Voice, 14 January 1980.Zimmer, William. "Group Exhibition," Soho News, 19 November 1980.Tatransky, Valentin "Group Show," Arts Magazine, 1979.Lawson, Thomas. "Introduction," Four Artists: James Birrell, Michael Davey, Gareth Fisher, Thomas Lawson, New York and Edinburgh: Artists Space and New 57 Gallery, 1979. This approach was bolstered by critical writing from Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Hal Foster, and Lawson,Risatti, Howard (ed). Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art, New York: Prentice Hall, 1999.Miles, Christopher. "The Death of Painting and The Writing of Painting’s Post-Crisis, Post-Critique Future," Art Lies, Issue 47, Summer 2005. who in Artforum, Flash Art and REALLIFE called for art that deconstructed dominant media and cultural representations in the face of what he termed "a growing lack of faith in the ability of artists to continue as anything more than plagiaristic stylists." In "Last Exit: Painting" (1981), Lawson championed appropriationist painting as "the perfect camouflage" (due to its very unlikeliness) to infiltrate the art-world and expose stereotypes and conventions, maintaining that the work's hand-made subjectivity and expressive tools tempered its ironic and detached tone.Lawson, Thomas. "Going Public," New Art International, 1990. Crimp (and the others) denounced contemporary painting's "reactionary expressionism" as fatally compromised; they favored photographic work, like that of Richard Prince or Cindy Sherman.Crimp, Douglas. "The End of Painting," October, Spring 1981, p. 69-86. Lawson argued such work was too declarative, obvious, and likely to lapse into a "bureaucratic continuation" of Conceptualism that would be marginalized in esoteric, avant-garde ghettoes outside the mainstream.