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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 27, 2012

TT: Hilton Kramer, R.I.P.

March 27, 2012 by Terry Teachout

kram190.jpgHilton Kramer, who died today after a long and debilitating illness, was a great art critic who also founded an important magazine, The New Criterion. He was, like so many other great critics, more than a little bit narrow in his enthusiasms, but whenever he wrote about the artists who engaged his sensibilities most powerfully, he never failed to be illuminating.
I last had occasion to write about Hilton in 2007, when he brought out his final book, The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005:

Kramer is best known for his unfavorable reviews, and in recent years he has spent an ever-increasing share of his time commenting on politics. As a result, too many younger readers are unaware that he is one of the best critical advocates we have. I saw several of the shows reviewed in The Triumph of Modernism when I was first starting to take a serious interest in art, and I vividly remember how reading what Kramer had to say about such critically undervalued modern painters as Fairfield Porter, Arthur Dove and Richard Diebenkorn helped give shape to my inchoate excitement. For all his gifts as a demolition man, it is this aspect of his work that continues to mean the most to me. Nothing is harder to write than a good review, and nobody writes better ones than Hilton Kramer.

John Podhoretz, who has written well about Hilton’s political passions, portrays him as a difficult man who was hard to like. For my part, I found him so intimidating that it was impossible for me to get to know him more than superficially. I regret that, but I am proud both to have known Hilton at all and to have published in The New Criterion. He was a man of the highest possible seriousness, forthright and fearless, and I expect that he will not soon be forgotten.
UPDATE: The New York Times obituary is here.
Franklin Einspruch gets Kramer exactly right.

TT: Lookback

March 27, 2012 by Terry Teachout

BackwardGlance_Perugini.jpgFrom 2005:

I found this note from an old friend, written apropos of a recent posting: “I felt, during my chemotherapy, that I lived in the Goldberg Variations, because it was the universe.”
I’ve never undergone chemotherapy (though I’ve watched it being given many times), but I have had a not entirely dissimilar experience with Bach’s Goldberg Variations. If you’re going to have mystical experiences accompanied by a piece of music, I guess you can’t do much better than the Goldbergs, and should the time ever come when I find myself in an extremity as dire as being on the business end of chemotherapy, I hope I’ll have the presence of mind to recall that reassuring fact….

Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

March 27, 2012 by Terry Teachout

“Yet when truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.”
Roger Scruton, “Should He Have Spoken?”

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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