Christopher Lyon

Christopher Lyon is an art historian and critic with extensive experience in producing trade and museum art publications and cultural reference books. Lyon attended NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and worked for ten years as a writer/editor and senior publications editor at the Museum of Modern Art. From 1996 to 2011 he was an acquiring editor for trade publishers including Little, Brown; Rizzoli; Abbeville Press; and Prestel. His critical writings have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Hyperallergic, and other publications, and he initiated Bookforum’s “Artful Volumes” column and wrote it for several years. He is a co-author of The Art and Spirit of Paris (Abbeville, 2003); the author of Nancy Spero: The Work (Prestel, 2010), the standard monograph on the artist; and an essayist and the editor of David Smith Sculpture: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1932–1965 (Yale, 2021), a project he directed for the Estate of David Smith. Lyon is currently preparing a monograph on Smith and collaborating with curator and historian Sylvia Wolf on a comprehensive survey of images by the Chicago photographer Nathan Lerner. Lyon Artbooks has packaged and copublished titles including Nancy Princenthal’s PEN award–winning Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson, 2015); Robert Storr’s Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois (Monacelli, 2016); and Duane Michals: Portraits (Rizzoli, 2017).