Search Results

“... In February 1976 Hilton Kramer gave his approval to Philip Pearlstein’s ‘remorseless articulation of the authentic’. In November of the following year he alerted his readers to the absence, in the art of David Hockney, of ‘the spiritual quest at the heart of modernism’. Several years later, in June 1981, he gave warning that the stained canvases of Morris Louis, the leading member of the ‘Washington Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that other critics had announced ...”

“... many American campuses, though it is neither so widespread nor so unchallenged as Camille Paglia, Hilton Kramer, Thomas Sowell and other viewers-with-alarm suggest. One of its products is the kind of wildly inconsistent rhetoric dissected by David Bromwich in Politics by Other Means: the insistence that you are only an authentic black if you identify ...”

“... rather than the anaesthetics it was initially thought to bring about. ‘Pop Art,’ the critic Hilton Kramer complained in 1962, ‘does not tell us what it feels like to be living through the present moment of civilisation – it is merely part of the evidence of that civilisation.’ ‘What is Pop art?’ G.R. Swenson asked in 1963. He pressed Andy ...”

“... Malevich and his 1915 Black Square. Not everyone agreed with this interpretation. The critic Hilton Kramer argued that the curators had only accorded af Klint such ‘inflated treatment’ because – ‘dare one say it’ – she was a woman. It wasn’t until 2013 that there was a major retrospective of her work, at the Moderna Museet in ...”

“... embattlement is palpable in a recent anthology of articles from the New Criterion, whose editor, Hilton Kramer, gazes back on the founding of the magazine in 1982: The ‘long march through the institutions’ that had been promised by the radicals of the 1960s was nearing its completion. In the universities, in our leading arts institutions, in the ...”

“... of the times. But five years later, she no longer seemed in touch with the zeitgeist. Hilton Kramer dismissed her novels in Commentary as the product of ‘a completely conventional mind’. His line on her work – it was written too quickly and there was too much of it – has been repeated over the years. Oates’s own position is ...”

“... American radicalism​ , the art critic Hilton Kramer claimed in a review of Max Eastman’s autobiography in 1965, produced ‘not an intellectual tradition that illuminates current problems but a collection of case histories’, of which Eastman’s is ‘in some respects the most dismaying’. It isn’t difficult to see what he meant ...”

“... the Tate – defending, Michael Craig-Martin, leading light at Goldsmiths’ College; prosecuting, Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion (it’s telling that there was no obvious British champion on this side). It was made a condition that the speakers should not address each other. Afterwards I went to look at Rachel Whiteread’s House by ...”

“... and critics wish to believe. The New Criterion greeted this book with a pious funeral address by Hilton Kramer on the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University where Clark works. The Fogg, according to Kramer, once enjoyed a ‘high reputation among the cognoscenti of the art world as a citadel of humanistic scholarship ...”

“... just a space for a queer sensibility, but new life for the sensibility of superiority. In 1982, Hilton Kramer started a conservative pro-Modernist journal with the deferential title the New Criterion. Kramer was an art critic from the third-generation New York intellectual milieu; he had been writing exhibition ...”

“... engagement with them. Instead he settles for a rhetoric that sounds more like Lynne Cheney or Hilton Kramer than himself. The received idea that there are no more great public intellectuals, that academic professionalism has destroyed the critical vocation, is belied by a host of contemporary figures and movements, from Foucault to feminism, many of ...”

“... Germany, Schwartz woke to find a note from Elizabeth saying she wouldn’t be accompanying him: Hilton Kramer (an editor at Arts magazine) had asked her to write for him and she was staying in New York. She added that she would not see her husband again unless he admitted himself to hospital. Schwartz flew into a paranoid rage, convinced that she and ...”

“... the show was a scandal. Many saw it as a betrayal, not only of abstract art but of high culture. Hilton Kramer in the New York Times doubted the authenticity of Guston’s clunky comic-strip images – ‘A mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum’ was the notorious title of his review. Guston was no stranger to doubts of this kind himself. Obsessed ...”

“... to one of [the Podhoretzes’] parties when they lived on the Upper West Side,’ the art critic Hilton Kramer recalled, ‘to see the look on Norman’s face the moment Norman Mailer arrived was to me a profound embarrassment.’ But Podhoretz was more than a fan boy. He was also a dependable, standup guy. It was Podhoretz whom he leaned on for support ...”

“... feature the talents of American neo-conservatism – Alan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Joseph Epstein, Hilton Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one side, there are limits to local supply – the ...”