Hilton Kramer
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Hilton Kramer (1928, Gloucester, Massachusetts – March 27, 2012) was a U.S. art critic and cultural commentator.
Kramer was educated at Syracuse University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Indiana University and the New School for Social Research. He worked as the editor of Arts Magazine, art critic for The Nation, and from 1965 to 1982, as an art critic for The New York Times. He also published in the Art and Antiques Magazine and The New York Observer.
Over the course of his career, Kramer came to disagree with leftwing political views and what he perceived as the aesthetic nihilism characterizing a large majority of 20th century working artists and art critics. This change of position led to his resignation from The New York Times in 1982 to found The New Criterion, now a prominent conservative magazine for which Kramer was, with Roger Kimball, co-editor and publisher. Kramer took a strongly anti-Stalinist stance in his 2003 review of Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History. In his 1999 The Twilight of the Intellectuals, he defended the anti-Stalinist views of art critic Clement Greenberg.
He died on March 27, 2012, in Harpswell, Maine.
Works
- 1973. The Age of the Avant-Garde. (ISBN 0-374-10238-4).
- 1985. The Revenge of the Philistines. (ISBN 0-02-918470-3).
- 1997 (coedited with Roger Kimball). The Future of the European Past. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
- 1999. The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. {ISBN 1-56663-222-6
- 2002 (coedited with Roger Kimball). The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee (ISBN 1-56663-465-2).
- 2003, "Remembering the Gulag" (review of Anne Applebaum, 2003. Gulag: A History, Doubleday), The New Criterion 21 (9):
- 2006 The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005 (ISBN 1566637082)
- "Does Gerome Belong with Goya and Monet?" (1980)
