Anthology of the writings of art critic Hilton Kramer. "In the eight years since he became art news editor of The New York Times, Hilton Kramer has emerged as perhaps the most perceptive and influential art critic in America. This volume brings together a sizable collection of the essays and reviews he has written over the past decade and a half (for such publications as Artforum, Commentary, Arts Magazine, and The New York Review of Books, as well as the Times), and thus provides his first comprehensive statement about art and the art world. The principal focus is on the artists and movements of the last hundred years or more : the Age of the Avant-Garde that begins in the nineteenth century with Realism and Impressionism, reaches its great flowering in the first quarter of the twentieth century with the advent of Cubism, Expressionism, and Dada, and has now drawn to a close in the movements of the last decade - Pop art, Minimal sculpture, Conceptual Art, and the like - which have met with instant prosperity and popularity. 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 long, brilliant introductory essay traces the rise and fall of the avant-garde as a historical phenomenom, and examines some of the cultural problems which the collapse of the avant-garde poses the future of art. In addition, there are articles on the art critics, the museums, the relation of avant-garde art to radical politics, and on the growth of photography as a fine art." -- from interior flap. Artists and critics mentioned in the work include J.M.W. Turner, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Odlon Redon, Medardo Rosso, Simeon Solomon, Puvis de Chavannes, Aubrey Beardsley, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Lovis Corinth, Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, László Moholy-Nagy, Alexandr Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Oskar Schlemmer, Walter Sickert, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein, Henri Matisse, Antoine Bourdelle, Edouard Vuillard, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braques, Juan Gris, Julio Gonzalez, Henri Laurens, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Hans Arp, Joan Miró, Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Archipenko, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Pierre Lachaise, Maurice Prendergast, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Alfred Maurer, Man Ray, H. Lyman Saÿen, Arnold Friedman, Charles Sheeler, John Storrs, John Graham, Edward Hopper, Saul Baizerman, Romaine Brooks, Arshile Gorky, Milton Avery, Abraham Walkowitz, David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hofmann, Josef Albers, Louise Nevelson, Joseph Cornell, Balthus, Francis Bacon, Saul Steinberg, Isamu Noguchi, José de Rivera, Helen Frankenthaler, Jean Hélion, Mark di Suvero, Anthony Caro, Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, Matta, Jean Ipousteguy, Nicolas de Staël, Fairfield Porter, Jim Dine, Ernest Trova, George Segal, Philip Pearlstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Mary Frank, Richard Hunt, Leland Bell, Anne Arnold, Alex Katz, William King, David Hockney, Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Clement Greenberg, Herbert Read, Harold Rosenberg, William Bailey, and Andy Warhol. Printed in black-and-white. Includes an index.
