Hal Foster (art critic)

Hal Foster

Hal Foster, who is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, is an internationally renowned author of books on post-modernism in art.

Born in Seattle, the son of a partner in the distinguished law firm of Foster Pepper and Shefelman, Foster was educated at a private academy, Lakeside School, where one of his classmates was Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

He later studied at Princeton and took a PhD at CUNY before becoming an instructor at the Whitney Program an offshoot of the Whitney Museum. His landmark 1983 book The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture identified the end of the modern era and the arrival of postmodernism.

As a recent recipient of Guggenheim and CASVA fellowships, he continues to write regularly for the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, October, and the New Left Review.

His most recent publication is a book on Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism coauthored with three other distinguished historians of 20th-century art, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh.