KENWORTH MOFFETT

MOFFETT--Kenworth

William (1934-2016). Kenworth William Moffett, 81, died peacefully from complications of heart disease in Stamford, CT on June 21, 2016. Kenworth (Ken) was born in East Orange, NJ, the son of Kenworth Alvin Moffett and Kathryn Lily Moffett. Moffett earned his bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1960 and his doctorate in art history from Harvard University in 1968, where he became an expert on 19th- and 20th-century art and art criticism, and an advocate of abstract expressionism and color field painting in particular. Early in his career, Moffett achieved full professor of art history at Wellesley College, where he taught from 1969 to 1978. While a professor, he started his tenure as the first Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a role he held from 1971 to 1984. After five years spent advising art collectors on impressionist, early modern, and contemporary art acquisitions from 1984 to 1989, he served as Director of the Fort Lauderdale Museum from 1989 to 1997 and helped found the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, CO in 1998. Over the course of his prolific career, he organized or supervised more than 100 exhibitions; built public, private, and corporate collections; co-curated the first large exhibition of American art to tour China; and wrote monographs on Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Fairfield Porter, and Odd Nerdrum, as well as a volume, New New Painting, which he co-authored with the Belgian critic Marcel Paquet. His dissertation was also published as a book, Meier-Graefe as Art Critic, by Prestel Verlag (Munich) in 1973. During the eighties, he published Moffett's Artletter, which contained news and opinion about the art world and art market, and more recently had an online version, Moffett's Artletter 2.0 http://kenworthwmoffett.net. For the last 25 years of his life, he championed a group of artists called the New New Painters, who he considered to be the successors of Jackson Pollock and the New York School of abstract expressionism and color field painting. He is survived by his wife Cynthia Horvath Moffett, daughter Kathryn (Kay) Moffett, son-in-law Neil Parker, granddaughter Matilda Moffett Parker, and hundreds of friends and artists who loved him.