When Brian O’Doherty was a female Art critic: Mary Josephson’s collected writings. The American conceptual artist and author Brian O’Doherty published several essays and exhibition reviews between 1971 and 1973 under his only female pseudonym Mary Josephson, including Art in America, of which he was the editor at the time. moreIn 1988 he wrote the short story The History of X for the Artforum. O’Doherty himself did not reveal the identity of his four alter egos until about 40 years later in his lecture “Divesting the Self: A Striptease”, which appeared in the magazine The Recorder in 2012. About Mary Josephson he wrote: “I wanted to think and write as a female person to free myself from my restrictive masculinity, I wanted to allow another inner voice – the voice that never stops speaking and never leaves us alone”. In the early 1970s, Mary Josephson was the only fictional art critic. For the first time, the publication brings together her texts.