Hilton Kramer

How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control

The Betrayal of Liberalism

The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of the Twentieth Century

Against the Grain

Marjorie B. Cohn

E. A. Carmean

Lois Orswell

Jaime Andrade

Catalogue of an exhibition held at Knoedler & Co. in collaboration with the Harvard University Art Museums, from November 14, 2003 - January 24, 2004.

Works from the Lois Orswell Collection, Harvard University : November 14, 2003-January 24, 2004

Lois Orswell, David Smith and Friends

Hilton Kramer, well known as perhaps the most perceptive, courageous, and influential art critic in America, is also the founder and co-editor (with Roger Kimball) of The New Criterion. This comprehensive book collects a sizable selection of his early essays and reviews published in Artforum, Commentary, Arts Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The Times, and thus constituted his first complete statement about art and the art world. The principal focus is on the artists and movements of the last hundred years: the Age of the Avant-Garde that begins in the nineteenth century with Realism and Impressionism. Most of the major artists of this rich period, from Monet and Degas to Jackson Pollock and Claes Oldenburg, are discussed and often drastically revaluated. A brilliant introductory essay traces the rise and fall of the avant-garde as a historical phenomenon, and examines some of the cultural problems which the collapse of the avant-garde poses for the future of art. In addition, there are chapters on art critics, museums, the relation of avant-garde art to radical politics, and on the growth of photography as a fine art. This collection is not intended to be the last word on one of the greatest as well as one of the most complex periods in the history of the artistic imagination. The essays and reviews gathered here were written in response to particular occasions and for specific deadlines--in the conviction that a start in the arduous task of critical revaluation needed to be made, not because a critical theory prescribed it but because our experience compelled it!

1956-1972

The Age of the Avant-garde

Constantin Brancusi

Brâncusi, the Sculptor as Photographer

"Kramer, former New York Times art critic, has assembled a collection of his reviews along with a smattering of essays. In his hymn to New York's renovated Museum of Modern Art, he notes that its "formalist outlook tends . . . to lead to a false sense of orthodoxy." Yet these reviews, which rigorously apply his own formalist standards of what constitutes modern art, miss out on much of what is vital and meaningful in today's highly variegated art scene. Kramer is appalled by political art, most of which, he argues, lacks artistic merit; he doubts whether any great art can be political. In surveying the '80s' rebirth of realism, he reassures us that many new realists are not antimodernist or antiabstractionist. One piece agonizes over whether Saul Steinberg should be considered an artist. A somewhat condescending essay on Max Ernst sets him above the "muddled narcissism" said to mar many other surrealists. Other subjects range from Rodin to Walker Evans; selections were culled from the New York Times, New Criterion (which Kramer edits), Commentary and elsewhere."--Publishers Weekly via amazon.com.

Art and Culture, 1972-1984

The Revenge of the Philistines

Hilton Kramer

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