Art Critic
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Art’s Gender Hustle May 12, 2023
Typical. You wait decades for an undiscovered genius, then hundreds appear at once. And by an astonishing coincidence, every one of them is female. After centuries of neglect and prejudice, these forgotten women are being ushered into the light by Ka...
A World of Melancholy, Exile, and Nostalgia May 11, 2023
In February 1926, the art critic Waldemar George coined the term “Neo-Romantics” when reviewing an exhibition at Paris’s Galerie Druet of young artists, all former students at the Académie Ranson, their teachers Edouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, an...
Ford Madox Ford: An Impressionist on the Page May 08, 2023
‘The lobbed ball plops, then dribbles to the cup. . . . / (a birdie Fordie!)” This strange and arresting line begins Robert Lowell’s poem “Ford Madox Ford,” one of the lesser-known examples of the poet’s work. Its oddity however suits that of its sub...
A Serious Critic for Unserious Times September 06, 2022
When I was an art history graduate student in the early 1990s, Hilton Kramer (1928–2012) was a peripheral figure for my colleagues and me. We didn’t read The New Criterion, which he cofounded and published from 1982 to his retirement in 2007. All of ...
The Political Legacy of John Berger's Art Criticism August 31, 2022
In an essay in his provocatively titled 1960 collection Permanent Red — so provocatively named, indeed, that its title for US publication was changed to the far more anodyne Toward Reality — John Berger lamented the unending mawkishness of the Royal ...
Hilton Kramer Ten Years On April 11, 2022
Editors’ note: It is difficult to believe that it was ten years ago last month that Hilton Kramer, the founding editor of The New Criterion, died, aged eighty-four. Time really does seem to speed up as one gets older. To mark the occasion, we adapt p...
When Art Becomes Self-Help April 24, 2020
In a moment perhaps better consigned to the mists of television history, Bravo once produced a reality TV show called Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, which had its two seasons in 2010 and 2011. It came between the decline of cable and the rise of...
In Praise of John Ruskin September 17, 2019
It’s the year of John Ruskin. 2019 is the bicentennial of his birth and there continues to be events to mark it. Perhaps the celebrations will prove to be a turning point for him.For though during his lifetime, and for a generation or so afterwards, ...
