Susan Landauer

Susan Landauer (1958–2020) was an American art historian, author, and curator of modern and contemporary art based in California. She worked for three decades, both independently and as chief curator of the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA) and co-founder of the San Francisco Center for the Book. Landauer was known for championing movements and idioms of California art, overlooked artists of the past, women artists, and artists of color. She organized exhibitions that gained national attention; among the best known are: "The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism" (Laguna Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1996), "Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement" (SJMA, 2006), and retrospectives of Elmer Bischoff, Roy De Forest (both at the Oakland Museum of California, 2001 and 2017, respectively), and Franklin Williams (2017, Museum of Sonoma County). Her work was recognized with awards and grants from the International Association of Art Critics, National Endowment for the Arts and Henry Luce Foundation, among others. Critics, including Roberta Smith and Christopher Knight, praised her scholarship on San Francisco Abstract Expressionism, De Forest, Richard Diebenkorn, and Bernice Bing, among others, as pioneering. In 2021, Art in America editor and curator Michael Duncan said that "no other scholar has contributed as much to the study of California art". Landauer died of lung cancer at age 62 in Oakland on December 19, 2020.