New Criterion

It is difficult to evoke, now, the impact Hilton Kramer's powerful essay "The Age of the Avant-Garde" had on me when Commentary first published it in 1972. Few essays of that time broke through the prevailing current of countercultural intoxication,...

From the moment I met Hilton, he demonstrated to me just what it meant to be serious about serious things. He wasn't dour--anything but with his constant delight in the cultural world's follies--yet he sent a message that some altars were more worth...

I read Hilton Kramer before I met him. When I was in the Army, in response to an essay he published in 1959 in Commentary on the subject of James Thurber's book on Harold Ross and The New Yorker, I wrote a letter-to-the-editor arguing against his attack...

To any reader who may doubt it, I can attest that the public Hilton Kramer--the culture warrior, the corrector of taste, the defender of high modernism against the fitters and travesties of Pop Art and after--was indeed the real Hilton Kramer. He was...

It was big news in the world of journalism when Hilton Kramer left The New York Times in 1981 to become the first editor of The New Criterion. Few could understand why the chief art critic of the newspaper of record should choose to leave his post to...

No one, if he could help it, would tolerate the presence of untruth in the most vital part of his nature concerning the most vital matters. There is nothing he would fear so much as to harbor falsehood in that quarter. --Plato, The Republic, Book II...

In 1976, when Hilton Kramer wrote what his New York Times obituary writer called his most provocative article, "The Blacklist and the Cold War," I still considered myself a man of the political Left. I was therefore rather furious when I read that essay--so...

Many years ago, I invited Hilton to Indiana University where I was then teaching. I had never met him, but admired the seriousness of his criticism, its originality, its independence and his courage. I called unannounced and he graciously accepted, crossed...

Hilton Kramer had recently been appointed editor of Arts magazine and I was a graduate student of art history at New York University Institute of Fine Arts where my MA thesis subject was the Dada-era work by the French-Spanish artist Francis Picabia....

Hilton Kramer was one of those Americans whom once upon a time I had heard of as a maker and breaker of cultural reputations. All I then knew about him was that his opinion really mattered. And there this awesome figure was at a conference in London....

Say the word "drawing" to someone, and they'll likely think of an image rendered on paper in a medium such as pencil, crayon, or charcoal. Say "sculptor's drawings" and what will come to mind is a preparatory sketch for a soon-to-be-realized, three-dimensional...

If I remember right, The New Criterion opened its editorial offices on Monday, April 5, 1982. On April 6, as daffodils were beginning to appear in Central Park and the magazine's small staff--including me--was learning to find its way to Fifty-Seventh...

In case you haven't had your fill of Adlai Stevenson jokes, here's Gore Vidal with a revival of The Best Man from 1960, a very slight piece of middlebrow liberal wish-fulfillment--think of a particularly overwrought episode of The West Wing produced...

The defense of what I wish to call art--a word I shall use here to represent what it is that the creators of high culture in every field achieve in all of the arts and humanities--the defense of what I am calling art can never be successful on any terms...

In the 1980s, growing up in the ideological confines of the Upper West Side, I first knew I liked Hilton because the people around me didn't. Or at least they professed not to, all the while turning, first thing, to his front-page art reviews in The...

Hilton Kramer's death deprives the intellectual world of one of its brightest lights and his friends of a raconteur as spellbinding and pithy as Doctor Johnson. He was one of the last of the New York Intellectuals, who did so much to shape the twentieth-century...

Hilton's writings speak for themselves: They are models of intellectual ardor, aesthetic discrimination, and critical independence. He was, as his faithful readers knew, a champion of aesthetic greatness, of high modernism in literature and art, of human...