Last week, painter, critic, and educator Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe died at the age of seventy-nine. A founding editor of the journal October, Gilbert-Rolfe published widely on modern and contemporary art, releasing books including the 1995 anthology Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986–1993 and the 1999 classic Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime.

To pay tribute to Gilbert-Rolfe’s achievement, Artforum revisits critic and art historian Hal Foster’s essay on his “North Group” paintings from the magazine’s May 1979 issue.

“The grid is . . .  a device that tends to render the painting a tautology of form and format,” writes Foster. “Gilbert-Rolfe argues, however, for ‘an internal elasticity’ to the tautology: the grid as ‘a more fluid context of transitionality,’ a denser ‘range of convergences.’” —The editors