Hilton KRAMER
15 articles
Art: Janises' Modern Collection Goes on Display; 103 Works Exhibited at the Modern Museum
By Hilton KRAMER
ONE of the most notable collections ever offered as a gift to the Museum of Modern Art -- the Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection -- goes on view today in the museum's first-floor galleries at 11 West 53d Street.
New York Times • page 94 • 658 words
The Mark of the Infidel
By Hilton KRAMER
THE exhibition entitled "Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage," which William S. Rubin has organized for the Museum of Modern Art, has promptly and predictably inspired some ferocious attacks in the press and even some demonstrations in the street.
New York Times • page D23 • 1,200 words
Greatest of All American Artists'; A critic calls David Smith
By Hilton KRAMER
" HE always wanted to be No. 1 man in the arts," wrote his friend Herman Cherry, himself a painter, about the American sculptor David Smith after the latter's death in 1965. And, Cherry added: "I can say that he has achieved that."
New York Times • page SM40 • 4,727 words
George Grosz: A Moral Recoil
By Hilton KRAMER
IT is now exactly 10 years since George Grosz died in his native Germany at the age of 66. From 1933 until shortly before his death, he had made his home in the United States. He taught for many of these years at the Art Students League in New York. He became, technically at least, an "American" artist, and did not lack admirers for the work he produced during his American years.
New York Times • page D25 • 1,248 words
Painting Icebergs, Decorating Dunes
By Hilton KRAMER
ONE of my favorite essays on art is the one devoted to that subject in the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica -- you know, the one that literate people still read for pleasure.
New York Times • page D25 • 1,070 words
Participatory Esthetics
By Hilton KRAMER
THE new "Spaces" exhibition, which Jennifer Licht has organized at the Museum of Modern Art, places the visitor to the museum in an unfamiliar situation. At least the situation is unfamiliar so far as museum-going is concerned, though the visitor to the exhibition will already have gleaned something of its
New York Times • page 105 • 1,320 words
Art in the Service of Revolution
By Hilton KRAMER
" WITH the victory of the proletariat will come the victory of Constructivism." What a world of hope, illusion, tragedy and genius is summed up in this statement, written in 1923 by the Russian critic Osip Brik about the Constructivist sculptor, painter and designer Alexander Rodchenko.
New York Times • page D23 • 1,233 words
Signs and Portents of Things to Come
By Hilton KRAMER
MAKING predictions is not, I believe, one of the functions of criticism. Yet there are times when certain signs and portents have to be acknowledged, if the terms of criticism are to be fully understood.
New York Times • page D27 • 1,177 words
EXHIBITION
Kertész, Rodchenko, and Moholy-Nagy: Photographs from the Collection
PUBLISHED
3 March 1974
Three Who Photographed the 20's and 30's; Art
By Hilton KRAMER
OF the three photographers whose work of the 1920's and 1930's is currently the subject of an absorbing exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art - Andre Kertesz, Alexander Rodchenko and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy-only Kertesz devoted himself exclusively to the photographic medium.
New York Times • page 21 • 1,222 words
Art: The Pleasures Found in Drawings
By Hilton KRAMER
The pleasures afforded by the art of drawing are inexhaustible. In certain drawings, it is the freshness of the artist's initial impulse that holds all attention. In others, it is the patient, painstaking orchestration of myriad tiny touches into a complex, unitary image that
New York Times • page 17 • 748 words
ART VIEW; Tina Modotti's Brief but Remarkable Career
By Hilton KRAMER
New York Times • page 79 • 1,203 words
ART VIEW; Early Steichen --An Artist At His Apex ART VIEW
By Hilton KRAMER
When the photographer Edward Steichen died in 1973, only two days before his 94th birthday, he was described on the front page of The New York Times as a "humanist." One could easily see why. Steichen had been many things in the course of his long and dis tinguished career--painter, esthete, collector, organizer, ...
New York Times • page D19 • 1,248 words
Art: Less Is More, Two Cases in Point; Ski-In Comes to Sheep Meadow Sunday
By Hilton KRAMER
IN a period when outsize art-- paintings that occupy entire walls, sculptures big enough to walk around in--has established itself as an esthetic norm, the smallscale art object acquires a special status.
New York Times • page C15 • 1,192 words
ART: EASEL TO CAMERA, A SHOW WITH A MESSAGE
By Hilton KRAMER
THE exhibition called ''Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography,'' which opens tomorrow at the Museum of Modern Art (through July 5), is a highly unusual event, and one that is certain to cause a great deal of discussion and debate. For this is an exhibition designed to illustrate an ambitious art-historical hypothesis that, if widely accepted as true, would significantly alter our understanding not only of the origins of photography but also of the development of modern art itself. For this reason, it may turn out to be one of the most important exhibitions ever mounted at the Museum of Modern Art - and the odd thing is, there isn't a single ''modern'' painting in the entire show. The argument, briefly stated, is that a radically new pictorial syntax, which we now acknowledge to be the syntax of Realism, emerged for the first time in certain landscape sketches to be found in late-18th- and early-19th-century European painting, and - this is the original and controversial point - that the invention of photography, far from being a scientific or technological sport, occurred as the direct result of this new pictorial vision pioneered in the art of painting. Photography is thus seen to be the ''inevitable'' consequence of a radical change in pictorial esthetics.
New York Times • Arts • page 18 • 1,167 words