When I used to be an artwork historical past graduate pupil within the early Nineteen Nineties, Hilton Kramer (1928–2012) was a peripheral determine for my colleagues and me. We didn’t learn The New Criterion, which he cofounded and printed from 1982 to his retirement in 2007. All of us had been too younger to recollect his tenure from 1965 to 1982 with the New York Instances, throughout which he wrote greater than 1,000 opinions of exhibitions. He was the paper’s first artwork critic.
Political correctness wasn’t pervasive sufficient in these days to paralyze our brains, so nobody dismissed him as a right-winger, a Nazi, or a racist. Nonetheless, his tackle up to date tradition made him appear vintage. “We’re nonetheless dwelling within the aftermath,” he wrote in 1982, “of the insidious assault on the thoughts that was probably the most repulsive options of the unconventional motion of the Sixties.”
Neither an artwork historian nor a tutorial, Kramer was a self-taught scholar, which made his view of artwork historical past recent and quirky. He noticed the artwork market change from the Sixties by the Nineteen Eighties, powered by new patrons, a lot of them unstable, tasteless, commitment-phobic, and all the time clamoring for one thing new. He hated the triumph of irony within the Sixties as the premise for a lot new artwork. This was the grease on the skids that took artwork from the soulful to the soulless. He thought kitsch a waste of time.
Kramer was greatest identified in his day as a champion of Modernism in artwork. For him, Modernism was, to start with, a liberation motion. It overthrew a number of issues and produced 100 kinds. Picasso, Matisse, Miró, Léger, Pollock, and Rothko—names everyone knows—present the vary. All had been rebels. Modernism in artwork belonged to a broad social, political, and financial motion beginning within the nineteenth century that was pushed by the abandonment of disguises and faux distinctions. This motion affected every thing, together with aesthetics, and most of Kramer’s writing is worried with aesthetics solely. Modernism was the assured, constructive triumph of the person (each artist and viewer) over officialdom, of progress over senescence—all the time freewheeling and ingenious. It was an ideal tossing out of phoniness, emperors with no garments, low cost melodrama, and philistinism of all stripes. Modernism was the self-discipline of freedom and reality. That’s the massive thought.
This didn’t imply that avant-garde artists had been imagined to run out and shoot the primary archduke they discovered. Modernism in artwork was its personal Drain the Swamp motion, however the hygiene was aesthetics. Kramer’s tackle Pre-Raphaelite artwork is instructive. Its fashion and topics—languid women with flowing hair, ethical messaging, ornamental flourish, and tight end—visually outlined the Victorian zeitgeist. In his view, it took a water cannon to scrub the “literary excrescences” that made it so terrible. Good artwork wasn’t propaganda, and it was nobody’s device however the artist’s. The reality {that a} Modernist artist sought went past the mundane. Unusual for a newspaperman to suppose this fashion, however Kramer believed that the every day headlines had been the final issues that ought to curiosity an artist.
After studying a whole bunch of his columns, I’d name Kramer prescient. By the late Sixties, he had noticed the then-nascent forces shaping excessive tradition immediately. Political correctness grew to become the brand new jingoism. Range, boutique socialism, and privilege research now rule the roost. Of the Whitney Biennial, he was blunt. It, together with most up to date biennial artwork exhibitions, “appear[s] to be ruled by a constructive hostility towards—and actually visceral distaste for—something which may conceivably interact the attention in a big or pleasurable visible expertise.”
Kramer didn’t suppose that good artwork was a gimmick geared toward a giggle or a sneer. He had requirements and believed in high quality, however he wasn’t pompous, and he noticed high quality in many various issues. He abhorred the invasion of semiotics, feminism, Marxism, and multiculturalism within the examine of artwork, feeling that they undermined aesthetics as the fundamental standards for judging artwork; they made artwork a department of social research.
His writing comes with a handicap now, since he was a critical particular person, and we dwell in an unserious time. He was additionally direct, and we dwell in an age of hypocrisy, convolution, and denial.
Okramer was born in Gloucester, on Cape Ann in northeastern Massachusetts, in 1928 and majored in English at Syracuse College. He began writing for Partisan Overview in 1952. The subsequent 12 months, he wrote a narrative for the journal criticizing the tradition critic Harold Rosenberg’s advocacy of Summary Expressionism. Rosenberg, writing for Artwork Information, mentioned that artwork by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning was a “psychological occasion” pushed by the artists’ particular person biographies, moderately than an aesthetic act or an engagement with present material. Rosenberg accepted of this; Kramer didn’t. If artists had been making artwork as a psychological occasion, he felt, this implied that the viewer would have to be a psychologist to entry it. Such artists, Kramer argued, annihilated not solely content material however actuality.
For Kramer, simply 25, the Partisan Overview essay was a feat of instinct translated into authority. In these days, inside the tiny artwork intelligentsia, mano-a-mano moments like these had been atomic. Rosenberg’s nemesis, Clement Greenberg, employed Kramer to write down for Commentary. Kramer later grew to become editor-in-chief for Arts Journal and, in 1965, the artwork information editor on the New York Instances. In 1974, he grew to become the paper’s chief artwork critic.
Kramer’s artwork historical past and sense of the beginning of what we name Modernism in artwork begins with J. M. W. Turner, the nineteenth-century British grasp of swirling, summary seascapes. Kramer virtually by no means wrote in regards to the Previous Masters; he might have thought that he was unqualified. Moreover, the Previous Masters weren’t actually a part of his Instances beat. The galleries and museums hardly ever did Previous Masters exhibits, and the artwork marketplace for this work was based mostly in London.
Turner, he felt, divorced coloration from drawing. Shade didn’t fill within the strains as a result of Turner didn’t have strains, which for Kramer meant that he felt free to interrupt guidelines. He conveyed much less the visible content material of nature, or nature dressed for show, than nature within the uncooked—not its easy look alone, however its vitality. Turner painted from expertise, and he strove to current the reality he construed from that have as profoundly and instantly as he may.
Kramer noticed each murals as a chunk of fiction, an summary of one thing actual and tangible. Actual objects exist, however the artist modifies, or interprets, how he perceives them. The very best artists shed social constructions, distractions, and disguises till they attain one thing important. That’s what makes Modernism a radical artwork motion.
He thought Turner was onto one thing, however in exploring Modernism, Kramer’s basis was French. Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was, for him, the ur-Modernist. A bit later, Cézanne’s creative youngsters, Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), and Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), had been probably the most analytical, critical, and influential figures in peak Modernism. Amid their variations, they had been all essentialists and abolitionists of pomp and cant.
Every chased a Modernist ethos otherwise, in Kramer’s view. Cézanne began the fragmentation of the topic in earnest. He made his buildings, landscapes, and other people from cones, rectangles, and cubes—coolly looking for construction. Picasso fragmented additional, giving us Cubism and, later, girls carved to items and reassembled in a approach that resembled violence. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork was his first huge brothel image, with fragmented girls carrying African masks and looking out like beasts.
Kramer liked Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) for his stability of beautiful chromatic remark, allure, and wealth of frequent expertise with a toughness—a discount of each kind right into a flat, although typically tiny, subject of coloration. Vuillard took Seurat’s cool, indifferent remark and gave it affection and heat. Vuillard was one final step to Matisse, who was the larger, extra intense, artist—clever, completely critical in his pursuit of concord and order. Picasso, Kramer felt, obtained misplaced in his libido, however Matisse stayed true to a imaginative and prescient of a serene paradise. Picasso may need mastered dissonance, however Matisse gave the attention’s satisfaction a non secular dimension.
Matisse was, for Kramer, the best painter of the 20th century. Matisse sought what the artist known as “an artwork of stability, of purity and serenity, an artwork devoid of troubling or miserable material.” Kramer liked The Purple Studio (1911), which hangs at MoMA. He liked Matisse’s palette and regarded him an excellent colorist but in addition admired his quiet sense of order. Most early critics of Matisse thought that he was too ornamental, in distinction with Picasso’s power and keenness. Kramer noticed him as the final word inheritor of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, and Raphael. Matisse’s quest for stability, purity, and tranquility was probably the most egalitarian of journeys, spanning centuries and the complete vary of human emotion. For Kramer, Picasso and Matisse had been the 20th century’s two Modernist giants—standing at reverse poles.
Kramer tended to downplay the polarity of abstraction and realism. Many individuals get tripped up by the notion that the 2 are separate universes. Since Modernism is the assertion of the person, it doesn’t imply a single fashion or theme; it’s in all places visually. Kramer sees the very best artists, and the very best of Modernism, as peeling an onion to get to deeper, brisker components of the particular factor. This may take the artist removed from the floor look, or preserve him near it. Impressionism, he believed, explored “the depth of nature seen freshly.” Kinds may need been vague and brushstrokes irregular, however the object remained, altered by the artist’s emotional response to it. It was emotionalism and expressionism leavened by self-discipline.
The very best artwork, Kramer believed, has what he known as an ethical goal. I’d quibble with the phrase “ethical.” Morals are private and range based mostly on a person’s upbringing and expertise. Kramer, moderately, noticed the very best artwork as rooted in ethics, these broadly held requirements of greatest conduct—going past household, tribes, or style—that make us a human neighborhood. Rigor, honesty, expressiveness, imaginative and prescient, craving, and conviction are on the heart of the artwork he favored greatest.
Kramer didn’t write about non secular perception usually. He was Jewish—not observant, however non secular feeling wasn’t far. He wasn’t dogmatic about religion however was eager on soulfulness. He thought of the early Modernists like Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, probably the most excessive abstractionists, as not dogmatically non secular artists however definitely searchers after God. They had been prepared to desert direct, discernible references to recognizable objects to get past materialism and the desperation, unbelief, and lack of goal that it foments. Kramer thought that the very best artwork broached subjects like immortality and the which means of life.
As his profession unfolded, Kramer’s considering grew to become extra explicitly social and political. Within the Nineteen Seventies, Kramer had grown increasingly more troubled by the left-wing drift of the Instances, his employer, and by the Nineteen Nineties, he had written sensible items on, amongst different literary figures, Whittaker Chambers, whom he admired, and Lillian Hellman and Susan Sontag, whom he didn’t. Kramer’s ebook The Twilight of the Intellectuals (1999) is about tradition and politics in the course of the Chilly Conflict; its first part known as “Within the Service of Stalinism.”
Within the Nineteen Seventies, Kramer started to see broad cultural developments having a deleterious affect on artwork. Even within the Sixties, he wasn’t proud of what he was observing in New York’s high galleries and American museums. He felt that the truth-seeking mission of Modernism ran off the rails, in all probability as a result of a surfeit of prosperity made folks spoiled. Modernism in artwork may need been a liberation motion at one time, however issues had been getting muddy and directionless. And what course he noticed, he didn’t like. Kramer thought that de Kooning (1904–97) had run out of steam by 1960. He discovered Rothko more and more unhappy and miserable. Pollock (1912–56) had a short interval of triumph within the late Forties however shortly grew to become repetitious, ornamental, and deflating. Kramer known as his work after 1950 “Summary Expressionist Salon portray.” For Kramer, that was a giant insult.
Two artists—Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) and Salvador Dalí (1904–89)—had been totems for a lot of what Kramer got here to dislike most in up to date artwork. He conceded their technical proficiency however felt that that they had no actual imaginative and prescient apart from self-promotion. Wyeth supplied a picture of American life—“pastoral, harmless, and homespun—that bears about as a lot relation to actuality as a Neiman Marcus boutique bears to the lifetime of the outdated frontier.” Of Dalí, Kramer writes:
He understands very properly the trendy urge for food for violence and scandal, and has made a profession of catering to this urge for food, spicing every successive dish with adequate outrage and shock to maintain the general public somewhat baffled, somewhat offended, somewhat appalled, however all the time delighted, impressed, and—above all else—. He’s a grasp showman who lavishes his actual genius on the devices of public relations.
Kramer noticed Pop Artwork’s celebration of kitsch and camp as a giddy repudiation of substance. It relieved excessive tradition of its rectitude and significant consciousness. In one in all his many articles on Pop Artwork, Kramer quotes the architect Philip Johnson: “What good does it do you to consider in good issues? It’s feudal and futile. . . . I believe it a lot better to be nihilistic and neglect all of it.” Kramer discovered this toxic. He rejected Pop Artwork as a “cult of the facetious.” It takes Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian out to the trash, changing them with a bemused sterility that Kramer related most with Andy Warhol (1928–87): childish, mercenary, and “half-straight, half-gag double speak.”
It’s placing that most of the artists Kramer prized probably the most within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties—Milet Andrejevic, Helen Torr, Morris Kantor, Elsie Driggs, Augustus Vincent Tack, Mary Frank, Anne Arnold, and Richard Hunt, amongst others—by no means took off. Most are identified to artwork insiders and area of interest collectors. Moreover their obscurity, these artists had just a few issues in frequent: very good craftsmanship and a novel imaginative and prescient. In any other case, these late favorites had been everywhere in the map. Arnold (1925–2014) created quirky sculptures of animals and other people, utilizing wooden. Andrejevic (1925–89) was a Realist painter of landscapes and scenes of on a regular basis life. Kramer noticed in his work “a purity of tone and a gravity of feeling” absent within the work of extra “clamorous” Realists like Richard Estes, who had been gaudy and never way more than tough copyists. About Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Keith Haring, Richard Prince, and Barbara Kruger—among the many greatest names in Nineteen Eighties artwork—he couldn’t have cared much less.
Okramer noticed excessive tradition as bearing three impossibly heavy structural burdens because it stumbled into the twenty-first century. One was the state of artwork historical past—“so many minuscule skills burrowing in ever tinier reaches of the thoughts,” as he put it. Kramer memorably skewered the sphere in “The ‘Apples’ of Meyer Schapiro,” a 1981 essay in The American Scholar. Schapiro (1904–96) taught at Columbia for many years, fomenting a brand new artwork historical past that launched class battle and social upheaval as interpretive contexts. Initially a scholar of Romanesque artwork, Schapiro grew to become a central determine in Modernist scholarship. He was a Jew, in addition to a Marxist. He served because the éminence grise for youthful artwork historians seeking to make the sphere—a rarefied topic that demanded good style and a journey price range—into a method to discover social, political, and financial issues.
Reviewing a compendium of Schapiro’s scholarship printed in 1979, Kramer disputed Schapiro’s studying of Cézanne’s The Apples. Cézanne, Schapiro believed, revealed a “displaced erotic curiosity” and “an unconscious symbolizing of a repressed want” within the image of two apples, which he thought of surrogate breasts. Kramer felt that this studying was absurd, as was Schapiro’s mental justification, which started with Horace and Virgil, borrowed from Flaubert and Baudelaire, and ended with a flourish: psychologists finding out desires. The portray’s aesthetic traits had been buried, Kramer mentioned, by blather and a false studying.
Earlier in his profession, Kramer famous, Schapiro was fast to empty non secular fervor from Romanesque church sculpture. He known as the fashion “a brand new sphere of creative creation with out non secular content material and imbued with values of spontaneity, particular person fantasy, enjoyment of coloration and motion, and the expression of feeling that anticipate fashionable artwork.” Kramer was appalled that an artwork historian would dispute the apparent position of faith in non secular artwork whereas inflicting on Cézanne a completely speculative sexual agenda. Schapiro was completely satisfied to see aesthetic impulses as a motive to throw medieval spirituality underneath the bus, however even happier to jettison Cézanne’s aesthetics for repressed impulses relationship to the artist’s childhood. This, Kramer felt, was an intellectually dishonest double customary. It was the artwork historian, not the artist, who was repressed.
Just a few years later, in The New Criterion, Kramer wrote “T. J. Clark and the Marxist Critique of Fashionable Portray,” a evaluation of Clark’s just-published ebook, The Portray of Fashionable Life, which he describes as “simply one other contribution to the propagation of the mythic phenomenon which lies on the coronary heart of the Marxist conception of historical past: class battle.” Kramer took offense to Clark’s denial of “even the slightest diploma of aesthetic independence from the iron legal guidelines of historical past.” The Impressionist fascination with trade was a classist rebuke to labor. Impressionists like Monet and Renoir, who depicted Paris’s boulevards, celebrating Baron Haussmann’s redesign of Paris, cleansed town of its stressed, working-class slums, Clark wrote. Their alternative of topics—boulevards, leisure, practice stations—grew from class allegiances. That every one artwork is, before everything, sociological reportage, a symptom of social ills, or a weapon to alter the world grew to become gospel earlier than too lengthy. For Clark, the measure of an object started and ended with how properly it advances or thwarts revolution. Kramer noticed this as a perversion of artwork.
The second of excessive tradition’s structural burdens for Kramer was the change within the artwork market. Till the Nineteen Seventies, the very best artwork exhibitions, together with formidable mortgage exhibits, had been organized by sellers at their galleries. The landmark 1970 exhibition One Hundred Years of Impressionism was hosted at Wildenstein’s. The artwork market was small. Collectors tended to be critical and knowledgeable. Sellers had been few, too, and developed long-term relationships with artists and collectors. Information from the artwork market reached the separate worlds of cash and media glacially. However glamour and movie star had already begun to intrude, starting within the Sixties. Quickly market success and stylish got here to outline the canon. Kramer believed that cash was an invasive species within the artwork world, treating its creations as mere investments.
Kramer understood the worth of the business artwork gallery in retaining requirements elevated. Sellers take dangers on artists. They present braveness. They make discoveries. They rotate exhibits usually. They present artwork to the general public free of charge. Sellers knew their artists in depth, and infrequently supported them by tough patches. Museums make selections slowly, by committee, and lengthy after critics have vetted an artist. The collapse of the small and mid-level gallery economic system and the present hegemony of some huge sellers would have distressed Kramer.
The third burden was the state of museums, which Kramer noticed as the normal keepers of requirements. His bugaboo was Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork from 1967 to 1977. Hoving, he believed, began a pattern in American museums that continues in suits and begins. Hoving made every thing he touched, nonetheless critical or arcane or advanced, a department of present enterprise. From there, museums slid into the realm of mass tradition, competing with purchasing malls, video video games, tv, and sports activities as simply one other supply of leisure. However the leisure trade already existed to present folks what they needed; it was the job of museums, Kramer believed, to present them what they wanted. He was proper—although he seemed like an outdated Victorian to say it.
Okramer’s most controversial piece within the Instances was a 1976 article, “The Blacklist and the Cold War,” which assessed the revisionist pattern to rehabilitate the Communist sympathizers barred from working in Hollywood within the early Fifties. He thought that his lengthy article was balanced—presenting, because it did, the appreciable complexities of the time but in addition the various lies advised by individuals who had been clearly Communists, in addition to the info surrounding a lesser-known blacklist that Hollywood, the theater, ebook publishing, and newspapers would implement towards friends who had been vocally anti-Communist.
Because the Nineteen Seventies proceeded, he was appalled by how totally folks in leisure, in addition to historians and journalists, whitewashed an unpleasant episode of civic cannibalism. He believed that many outstanding cultural figures from the early Chilly Conflict years bore America ailing will, and the revised, official storyline was not solely letting them off the hook but in addition praising their braveness. If a Manhattan conservative is a liberal mugged by actuality, then this was the brand new actuality that mugged Kramer.
Kramer was sharp-eyed when it got here to recognizing the perils to artists and artwork historians of creating their work political. Till the Sixties, Modernist artists had been far faraway from politics. It merely wasn’t their sphere. They had been centered, as was Kramer, on the imperatives of aesthetics, that are nonpolitical. The politicization of artwork and artwork historical past reminded Kramer of tradition behind the Iron Curtain. Tradition has no goal for totalitarians besides to serve the state. Artwork within the Soviet Union, but in addition in its doppelgänger Nazi Germany, was totally debased as a consequence. In The Twilight of the Intellectuals, Kramer took a lot of America’s Chilly Conflict–period thinkers and writers to job as, at greatest, helpful idiots and, at worst, consciously complicit.
By the Nineteen Nineties, he feared that the identical factor was taking place once more. The humanities problem that involved Kramer was the position of political correctness in demolishing artwork criticism, since, essentially, it was an assault on high quality. Kramer wrote: “In a tradition now so largely dominated by ideologies of race, class, and gender, the place the doctrines of multiculturalism and political correctness have consigned the idea of high quality in artwork to the netherworld of invidious discrimination and all criticism tends to be judged in keeping with its conformity to present political orthodoxies, even to recommend . . . that aesthetic concerns be given precedence within the analysis of artwork is to ask probably the most categorical disapprobation.” I can think about Kramer’s blood strain rising as he wrote that lengthy sentence in 1993, reviewing a brand new ebook accumulating the writing of Clement Greenberg.
Though Kramer admired Abe Rosenthal, the Instances’s govt editor, and had many cherished colleagues, by the late Nineteen Seventies a brand new, youthful tier of reporters and editors had been shifting the paper ever leftward. Kramer seen this with alarm and, finally, disgust. He left the paper in 1982.
His post-Instances years spanned a number of acts. Within the Nineteen Nineties, he would toss TNT spitballs at his outdated employer by way of his “Instances Watch” column within the New York Publish. He aimed weekly at information media bias and incompetence profession-wide, however principally on the Instances. The paper, he wrote, didn’t thoughts “offending folks as long as they’re white heterosexual males.”
The actual love and mission of his later years, nonetheless, was The New Criterion, which he cofounded with pianist and critic Samuel Lipman in 1982. Marking its fortieth 12 months in 2022 underneath longtime editor Roger Kimball, the journal stays dedicated to “championing what’s greatest and most humanely important in our cultural inheritance and of exposing what’s mendacious, corrosive, and spurious”—a Kramerian directive, if ever there was one. In the long run, Kramer’s imaginative and prescient was neither conservative nor liberal however, moderately, catholic in its method to excessive tradition.
There was nothing arbitrary about Kramer’s transfer to Damariscotta, Maine, towards the tip of his life. Damariscotta isn’t removed from Gloucester, the place he grew up. Kramer was extremely cultured and erudite and hardly craggy. He was incisive and trenchant and fewer doubtless than different critics to endure fools or phonies gladly. Regardless of his a few years in Manhattan, he by no means misplaced private traits that marked him as a New Englander.
Kramer died in 2012 from many illnesses, amongst them superior dementia. Towards the tip of his life, he moved to the Vicarage by the Sea in Harpswell, Maine, a small hospice. Weaned from medication, left to stroll the seaside grounds and speak, even learn, he died an apparently peaceable demise.
Writing a narrative centered on a single artist means stepping into his or her head, as greatest the author can. It’s no totally different when one is targeted on an artwork critic—and simpler, too, since a critic like Kramer left us hundreds of thousands of phrases. What would he suppose immediately? That American society has gone bonkers. What would he suggest? That’s a trickier query. Kramer didn’t suppose a lot of federal help for the humanities, which he believed bolstered standard left-wing considering. He’d certainly really feel immediately that top tradition is struggling. Cratering audiences; malpractice within the classroom, leaving college students unaware of excessive tradition and historical past; diminished numbers of discerning collectors and specialist sellers; and the decline of great artwork criticism—all have broken the humanities.
Nowadays, Kramer may additionally ask, “The place is the Proper?” The state of excessive tradition and good style must be of deep curiosity to conservatives. In Kramer’s day, artwork critics, artwork historians, and the artwork market collectively promoted excessive requirements, a necessity for rigor, and the privileging of aesthetics. This served Modernism properly. It has served creativity and excessive tradition properly, too, each fashionable and classical. Every of those sectors is now befuddled or misplaced. The Proper, Kramer would doubtless warn, is simply too usually an absentee landlord on the tradition entrance. However conservatives ignore excessive tradition at their peril.
A undertaking of renewal may begin with schooling, with supporting classical and conventional music, artwork, theater, and dance extra broadly and deeply, not simply in New York and never simply on the greatest venues. It’d embody suppose tanks including artwork and tradition to their roster of issues. It could imply supporting magazines, like The New Criterion, that defend excessive requirements. As for the college disaster, Kramer would in all probability attribute it partly to frightened management. “Develop a pair,” he may advise school presidents and trustees cowed by the outrage machines on campus. I’d definitely be completely satisfied to see extra cojones on campus at Yale and Williams, the place I studied artwork historical past. Tackling the tiresome fury amongst college students discovering racism in every single place, the assaults on freedom of speech and thought, rising anti-Semitism, and political nihilism requires each frequent sense and braveness. Hilton Kramer had each, and far else.
High Photograph: Kramer in 1975, when he was artwork critic for the New York Instances (FRED W. MCDARRAH/MUUS COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES)
