Grace Glueck, Influential Art Journalist at New York Times, Dies at 96 – ARTnews.com

Grace Glueck, a pioneering artwork reporter at the New York Times who helped deliver to mild a serious controversy over sex-discrimination at the paper, died at the age of 96 on Saturday at her dwelling in Manhattan. The author’s family confirmed the news to the Times.

During the six a long time that she was lively, Glueck reported on artists and the artwork world. She started doing so at a time when criticism was thought-about the first manner of writing about visible artwork.

Her reporting on the area of interest sector, which culminated in a number of hundreds of writings that included profiles, interviews and occasion protection, started a nationwide development, with different shops within the U.S. establishing the humanities as a beat in their very own newsrooms.

Throughout the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, because the artwork world started to broaden in dimension, Glueck’s reporting let readers contained in the sector’s opaque partitions. At the time, exhibitions had been the principle focus for critics. Glueck as a substitute turned her consideration to the community of economic sellers, establishments, artists, actions, and collectors that helped make these reveals occur.

Some of Glueck’s most influential work was targeted on a rising tide of feminist artists, whose artwork was responding to a widening political motion throughout the U.S. A present exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, “52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone,” attracts on Glueck’s evaluate of its equally titled 1971 showcase, which she reviewed for the Times.

While spearheading that news reporting, Glueck additionally helped lead a 1974 class motion lawsuit with eight of her colleagues. The group of ladies alleged that the Times had systematically underpaid its feminine staffers and failed to advertise lots of them. The go well with led to a landmark settlement, with the Times agreeing to rent girls in company positions throughout its newsroom and to compensate its feminine staff for delays in selling them.

Glueck, who was a graduate of New York University, started working at the Times in 1951 in a clerical job. During the early levels of her time at the paper she was not permitted to coach as a reporter due to her gender, she revealed in 1997. At the time, few girls held greater newsroom positions and it was widespread for feminine school graduates to be discouraged from searching for out skilled careers. Eventually, she landed at the New York Times Book Review, researching artworks. She held the place for simply over a decade, up till the Nineteen Sixties.

She was finally given a column titled “Art People,” had been she printed interviews and writing on artists like Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O’Keeffe, Francis Hines,  George Grosz, Max Weber, and Phillip Guston, amongst others.

Her work appeared in different main shops just like the New Criterion, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Art in America.

In a tribute to Glueck, Los Angeles Times artwork critic Christopher Knight called Glueck “exceptional.” In one other, New York Times structure critic Michael Kimmelman described his former colleague as “savagely witty,” dubbing her work as “still the gold standard for art reporting.”