Monday, Apr. 21, 1952
You may remember the recent story in TIME's ART section, describing an exhibition of the favorite 20th century American paintings of seven art critics (TIME, Feb. 25). "The art critics of New York are not without courage," said a New York Herald Tribune review of the show. "One of them, in this day of heavy . . . emphasis on non-objectivism and abstraction, dared to include among his favorite ten, pictures by such substantial, solid realists as Eakins, Homer, Luks, Sloan, Wyeth and Burchfield. That. . . takes rather more audacity than naming . . . fashionably fragmentary abstractions."
The critic thus singled out was TIME's Art Editor Alexander Eliot, eight of whose ten choices are reproduced on this page. (Not shown: John Marin's Sun, Isles, and Sea and Thomas Eakins' Mrs. Edith Mahon.)
Critic Eliot brings some unique qualifications to his job. Both his parents are authors and his great-grandfather, Charles W. Eliot, most widely known for his "Five-Foot Shelf" of books, was president of Harvard University. A great-uncle, Portrait Painter Charles Hopkinson, gave his family an art tradition, as well.
Starting out to be an artist himself, Eliot tried all kinds of painting, from "tight realism to complete abstraction." In 1940 he made a gallery of his Boston apartment to exhibit the work of artist friends. But soon after that he began painting less & less and turned more & more toward writing. "A painter lives in his eyes," he says. "I felt a growing need to express myself in words. I'm not a painter any more."
Eliot came to TIME in 1945, first wrote for SPORT, but has spent most of his time with the ART section. When TIME began work on a regular series of Art pages in color last spring, Eliot took part in the original planning, and has since played a major role in their execution. He says: "Sport is easier to write than Art. You can always tell who won. In Art, the returns don't come in for a couple of centuries."
As a critic, Eliot's likes & dislikes apply to individual paintings, rather than to schools or kinds of art. Inevitably, he sometimes finds himself at odds with your own varying tastes and opinions. But, says Eliot: "The critic's job is not to decide what kind of painting is best for the period. It's his job to look at pictures, try to understand them and to explain them so other people can understand them."
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