Background
Goossen was born in 1920 in Gloversville, New New York
Goossen was born in 1920 in Gloversville, New New York
He attended Hamilton College, the Corcoran School of Fine Arts, the Sorbonne and earned his undergraduate degree at the New School for Social Research, where he earned a bachelor"s degree.
He was on the faculty of Hunter College, where he headed the art department. He was the art and theater critic for The Monterrey Peninsula and Herald. He moved to Bennington College in 1958, where he also served as director of exhibitions.
He was hired by Hunter College in 1961 and also taught at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Goossen was responsible for organizing dozens of art exhibitions at galleries and museums around the United States. He oversaw a 1969 retrospective of works by Helen Frankenthaler at the Whitney Museum of American Art and those by Ellsworth Kelly in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Artist
In addition to essays in catalogues, Goossen"s wrote several art books, including The Art of the Real, Stuart Davis and Ellsworth Kelly. In a review of the 1968 exhibition Art of the Real he organized as guest director at the Museum of Modern Art, John Canaday of The New York Times said that Goossen"s essay about the exhibit was "probably the clearest definition yet of the goals and justification of a school of art that is usually written about with maximum pretentiousness".
Goossen saw works by the abstract painter Doug Ohlson as depicting "yellowish pink and green dawns, blue noons, and red-orange sunsets that swiftly slide from purple to black".
The New York Times called Goossen "the leading expert" on the work of the visual sculptor Tony Smith. Goossen called Smith "the most important sculptor to appear in the second half of the 20th century" whose importance was not fully appreciated at the time but would be as the years passed. A resident of Buskirk, New York, Goossen died at age 76 on July 14, 1997, at Southwestern Vermont Medical Center in Bennington, Vermont.
The cause of death was pneumonia, which he suffered after a long illness.