Hilton Kramer, an art critic who rose to prominence in the 1950s and remained a passionate advocate of Modernism throughout his career, died this morning in Harpswell, Maine. He was 84. His wife Esta Kramer said he died of heart failure, after developing a rare blood disease, in an assisted living facility near their home in Damariscotta, Maine.
Kramer's career as an art critic took off rapidly after he penned a response to Harold Rosenberg's December 1952 article on action painting in Art News, which was published in Partisan Review the following year. Kramer objected to Rosenberg's assertion that the Abstract Expressionists were creating records of an event, rather than artworks. His response resulted in invitations to be a regular contributor to Arts Digest and Commentary, the latter at the request of the most influential art critic of the time, Clement Greenberg. Kramer would later be a great defender of Greenberg's writing.
As managing editor and then, in 1961, chief editor of Arts Digest, Kramer also wrote criticism for the New Republic and the Nation. In 1965 he became the New York Times's art-news editor, and eight years later succeeded John Canaday as its lead art critic at a time when American art was in a period of extreme transition from the post-war dominance of the Ab Ex artists to a range of practices including Pop, post-modern, and conceptual art.
Despite his talents as a phrasemaker, Kramer will be best remembered as a pugnacious scouce of what he perceived as the liberal decadence of contemporary art. He left the Times to co-found the New Criterion in 1982, a magazine whose conservative editorial stance was a reaction to the perceived nihilism against which he railed in many of his most opinionated critiques of the contemporary art world. He hammered both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities for what he regarded as their excessive political correctness, helping fan the Culture Wars.
He wrote a media commentary column in the New York Post during the mid-90s, and a column on contemporary art for the New York Observer the following decade. Many of his writings are collected in four volumes of essays published between 1973 and 2006.
Here, ARTINFO selects some of Kramer's sharpest critical lashings.
From "Postmodern: art and culture in the 1980s" (September 1982):
Well, the philistines have certainly had their revenge—even if they have had to leave it to their enemies to secure it for them. Our cities now boast expensive new buildings that remind them—almost—of the good old days. In our museums everything from Salon painting to the inanities of kitsch has been dusted off, freshly labeled, and solemnly placed on exhibition, almost as if the modern movement had never altered our view of them. Scholars can always be found to study these objects, and critics to praise them almost as if they believed them to be worthy of their attention.
From "Criticism endowed: reflections on a debacle" (November 1983):
And if there was no intellectual standard governing the program, was there then a discernible political bias at work in the fellowship awards? Mr. Beardsley spoke of the “recurring desire to support alternative publications,” and went on to point out that “specific ideological biases were more pronounced in 1979 than in other years.” (It was in 1979 that the program awarded more fellowships than in any other year of its existence.) “The 1979 panel,” Mr. Beardsley wrote, “seemed bent upon correcting at one sitting two centuries of male dominated, geographically centered criticism.” One of the panelists for that ill-fated year told the seminar that the 1979 panel had been bluntly instructed at the outset not to give too many fellowships to white males. But it would be unfair to single out 1979 as a special year on political grounds. My own impression, after studying the list of fellowships from 1972 onward, is that a great many of them went as a matter of course to people who were publicly opposed to just about every policy of the United States government except the one that put money in their own pockets or the pockets of their friends and political associates. In this respect, it is worth noting that there seemed to be an annual fellowship reserved—unofficially no doubt—for one or another writer for.
From "The death of Andy Warhol" (May 1987):
Still, in any such study a special place would have to be reserved for the Warhol phenomenon, which gave to the art world—but not to the art world alone—a model that has proved to be so irresistible that it is now a permanent, and permanently disabling, component of cultural life. It was really that ghastly model, rather than the man or his art, that the media celebrated so copiously in their obituary notices of Andy Warhol—a model that continues to exhibit a potency his art could never achieve.
From "Willem de Kooning at 90" (June 1994):
Yet no matter how weakened and mannered and parodistic the paintings became, the juggernaut of canonization persisted in accelerating its claims, and continued to do so even in the face of the debacle that overtook the man himself from the Seventies onward, when his faculties were clearly failing—first as a result of uncontrollable drinking and the quantities of valium he was taking to cope with it, and finally as he succumbed to the mental occlusions of Alzheimer’s disease. One hardly knows whether to laugh or to cry as we are asked to believe that these impairments imposed no discernible disability upon the artist’s creative faculties—a claim that is, in any case, emphatically belied by the vacuous character of the paintings themselves. At ninety, and despite the immense inventory of failed paintings that now bears his name, Willem de Kooning is still being presented to us as an artist exemplary in his every endeavor. Thus the tragedy of a fallen talent is rewritten to read as a triumph over adversity, and the transformation of a very limited achievement into an art of epochal dimensions continues unabated.
From "Monster Minimalism: Dia Beacon Museum A Vast, Ascetic Folly" (September 16, 2003):
They are unrelievedly boring and they are maddeningly repetitious. Repetition — or Serialism, as it is usually called in the art world — is indeed what Dia:Beacon offers in abundance in lieu of artistic complexity, aesthetic invention or depth of feeling.
From "Deaccession roulette" (December 2005):
Especially to be deplored is the practice of extracting works from public collections in order to auction them to the highest bidder. Institutions that receive the benisons of tax-exemption should not be allowed to exempt themselves from their responsibility to the public. A work that is in effect owned by the public should, if it is no longer relevant to the collection of one institution, pass to another public institution, not into private hands.
There is an enormous amount of chicanery and bad faith surrounding the game of Deaccession Roulette. There certainly are beneficiaries of the wager, but neither the institutions that play the game nor the public that supports it is among their number.
All Kramer's articles for the New Criterion are collected here.