Richard Shiff is an art historian and the Effie Marie Cain Regent Chair in Art and Director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin. His publications include essays on Willem de Kooning (for the retrospective initiated by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.) and on Richard Serra (for the Drawing Center, New York). A theoretician of the practices of the artist, the critic and the historian, Shiff is a regular contributor to the journal Artforum.