New York School of Art a Cultural Reckoning the Dore Ashton
Dore Ashton, Art Critic Who Embraced and Inhabited Modernism, Dies at 88
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Dore Ashton, an fine art historian and critic who wrote some of the primeval and most insightful histories of Abstract Expressionism and the leading painters of the New York School, died on Monday in the Bronx. She was 88.
Her expiry was confirmed by her daughter Paris Marina Devereaux.
Ms. Ashton was closely involved in the small world of artists who were discovering a new pictorial language in the years after World War 2, both every bit a friend of Philip Guston, Mark Rothko and others and as a reviewer for numerous publications, including Art International, The Fine art Bulletin and The New York Times.
She recorded the scene, and she inhabited it. She fabricated a bespeak of visiting artists in their studios, drinking with them at their favorite haunts and talking philosophy and aesthetics into the wee hours in downtown cafes.
In a clear, pithy style, Ms. Ashton wrote both sweeping histories and intimate studies devoted to individual artists. Her books "The Unknown Shore: A View of Contemporary Art" (1962) and "The New York Schoolhouse: A Cultural Reckoning" (1973) made the example for Abstruse Expressionism equally the pre-eminent postwar art movement and placed its disparate members into a coherent philosophical frame.
In "A Joseph Cornell Album" (1974), "Yes, but …: A Disquisitional Written report of Philip Guston" (1976) and "Near Rothko" (1983), she sensitively adjusted her arroyo to the artists in question. The elusive Cornell inspired a volume that relied on inference and sympathy. Hilton Kramer, in a review for The Times, called it "non a piece of work of art history, simply an affectionate reconstruction of the aesthetic universe in which her bailiwick lived and worked."
Guston, an creative person whom she knew well and well-nigh whom she had written on dozens of occasions, elicited a series of penetrating, analytic chapters. For Rothko, with whom she had spent many an evening discussing existential questions, she constructed a philosophical and cultural biography.
"The forcefulness of Ashton's book lies in the rigor with which she attempts to discover and articulate the intellectual crosscurrents that influenced not only Rothko, but also the other artists of the New York School," the art consultant Oliver Banks wrote in The Washington Mail.
She was specially convincing, he added, in discussing "Rothko's early political radicalism, his training under Max Weber, his ambiguous relationships to the Surrealists and his kinship with artists such every bit Milton Avery and Clyfford Still."
In 1963 the Higher Art Association gave Ms. Ashton and the architecture critic Lewis Mumford the first Frank Jewett Mather Awards for distinguished arts journalism.
Dore Ashton was born Dorothea Shapiro on May 21, 1928, in Newark, where her father, Ralph Shapiro, was a doctor, and her female parent, the former Sylvia Smith, was a reporter for The Newark News. She took the surname Ashton from her mother's 2d husband.
Dore (pronounced DOR-ee), as she was known, attended Sabbatum art classes as a kid and, in her teens, studied painting with Moses Soyer at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.
After earning a available'due south degree in literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1949, she traveled to Paris, where she enrolled in the atelier of Fernand Léger. On returning to New York, she took a course with the High german art theorist Rudolf Arnheim at the New Schoolhouse.
Her programme to study comparative literature at Yale failed to take into account the department's requirement that entering students know Latin and Greek. Instead, she accepted a scholarship to study art history at Harvard, where she earned a master's degree in 1950.
In 1953 she married the Latvian-born abstract painter Adja Yunkers. The union concluded in divorce. Her second husband, Matti Megged, died in 2003. In improver to her daughter Paris, she is survived by another daughter, Sasha Alexandra Yunkers, and a grandson.
After leaving Harvard, Ms. Ashton began writing reviews for Fine art Assimilate, which presently hired her as an acquaintance editor. In making her gallery rounds, she struck up an acquaintance with Howard Devree, the art news editor of The Times, who in 1955 offered her a job as a reviewer.
A tireless champion of new art, Ms. Ashton ran afoul of John Canaday, a staunch anti-Modernist who became the newspaper's art news editor and primary critic in 1959. In a baking memo, he accused her of writing to an artistic clique and cheerleading for it.
"Her answer, placed on Canaday's desk on Monday morning, was a diatribe, reviling her dominate with references to Zenocrates and Zola, and throwing back at him his own published words," Sophy Burnham wrote in "The Fine art Oversupply" (1973).
A biting fight ensued, and Ms. Ashton left the newspaper in November 1960. Enlisting the support of beau critics, including Harold Rosenberg, Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg, she succeeded in putting the matter before the International Association of Art Critics, which censured Mr. Canaday for "infringing basic principles of freedom of criticism."
Subsequently leaving The Times, Ms. Ashton, who lived in Manhattan, taught art history at the School of Visual Arts, Cooper Union and the New School, while generating a stream of articles, exhibition catalogs, monographs and biographies.
Her many works also include "A Reading of Modern Art" (1969), "A Legend of Modern Fine art" (1980), "American Fine art Since 1945" (1982) and "Noguchi East and West" (1992). Many of her essays were collected in "Out of the Whirlwind: Three Decades of Arts Commentary" (1987), edited past Donald Kuspit.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/arts/design/dore-ashton-art-critic-who-embraced-and-inhabited-modernism-dies-at-88.html
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