Hilton Kramer, who died today at the age of 84, was a polarizing figure. That’s part of what I liked about him.
In a left-leaning artworld, he was a committed conservative, railing against what he perceived as mediocrity and speciousness in political thought and artistic practice.
It was easy to disagree with him, but hard not to appreciate his intellectual acuity and graceful prose. Like many NY Times critics of the period, he was worth reading at least as much for the quality of his writing as the perceptiveness of his opinions.
One still celebrated artist about whom he was defiantly scathing was Jasper Johns. In his infamous Dec. 18, 1977 review of the Whitney Museum’s Johns retrospective, Kramer wrote:
John’s career is…one of the legendary chapters of American art history. But retrospective exhibitions on the scale of the Whitney’s Johns show are a cruel test for any artist, and for some they are fatal. [Johns and his work are still very much alive.] They have the power to make a small artist seem even smaller, especially when he has the reputation for being “big.” Johns has the reputation, but he doesn’t have the oeuvre to support it.
Another Times reviewer once characterized Kramer’s attitude towards Johns as “high and haughty dudgeon,” which also sums up his default stance towards much of the contemporary artworld. He was a purist and elitist, who lamented the trend towards more and more exhibition wall text, which he felt distracted people from looking closely at art and forming their own impressions.
His taste grew increasingly stodgy in later years: Art had moved on, but he hadn’t—a not unusual phenomenon among critics and collectors. That said, he had something that I deeply miss in much of today’s newspaper writing on culture—a comprehensive grasp of art and ideas, that enabled him to put anything that he touched into historic and cultural context. I relished his fierce fearlessness in taking forceful stands—also in short supply among today’s polite and politic art writers.
As an admiring fledgling art writer, I had wished that this eminence would notice me—so much so that I once sent him a fan letter (which went unanswered). I’d occasionally run into him at press previews, where he’d look right through me. It was a bittersweet moment when, near the end of his career, he finally did demonstrate that he had noticed me—by cribbing my work.
After leaving the Times, where he worked from 1965 to 1982, Kramer went on to co-found (in 1982) the New Criterion, whose current editor and publisher, Roger Kimball, has published an obit for his friend and colleague, here. Kramer also wrote art criticism for the NY Observer.
The NY Times obit, by William Grimes, is here. I’d be surprised if the Times doesn’t follow up with an appreciation by the newspaper’s co-chief art critic, Roberta Smith, who knew him well.