Carter Ratcliff (b. 1941) is an American art critic, writer and poet from Seattle, Washington. In 1976, he was awarded a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's fellowship in Fine Arts research. Ratcliff has contributed to numerous magazines, such as Art in America and Parkett Editions, and wrote several books on art, including John Singer Sargent (Abbeville Press, 1982), Robert Longo (Rizzoli, 1985), The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1996); and Andy Warhol: Portraits (Phaidon Press, 2007).