Henry McBride (art critic)
Among the students in his drawing classes were men who went on to make a considerable reputation, including Samuel Halpert, Jacob Epstein, and Abraham Walkowitz.
Hired in 1913, at forty-five, as a second-string writer under New York Sun critic Samuel Swift, McBride found employment on a newspaper known for its strong writers and enthusiastic coverage of the arts,[2] and he began covering the New York art scene in the year of the famous Armory Show, America's first large-scale introduction to European modernism.
He was made responsible for covering all of the major exhibitions in the city's museums and principal galleries in one of the most exciting cultural periods in New York history.
He was a success from the start of his new career; Vanity Fair listed him in its 1915 honor roll of "eight established critics" only two years after the appearance of his first weekly column.
[4] He aligned himself with the avant garde against the status quo and made fun of indignant, conservative art lovers who found Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Precisionism, and the other new movements beyond their understanding.
He felt he saw a great deal of originality at 291, the advanced gallery run by Alfred Stieglitz which often exhibited work that left other critics puzzled or indignant.
He helped to promote the Thomas Eakins revival at the time of the Metropolitan Museum's 1916 retrospective and shared his love of folk art with his readers.
He met Gertrude Stein on a trip to Paris in 1913 and became an admirer of both her collection and her adventurous writing, and he saw Marcel Duchamp not as the threatening figure many did in World War I-era New York but as a liberating, comic spirit.
His coverage of the opening of the Stein-Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts in Hartford in 1934 was lengthy and appreciative, and he participated in the series of lectures sponsored by Katherine Dreier and the Societe Anonyme, aimed at promoting an understanding of modernism to the general public.
Reviewing an exhibition that contained the first Florine Stettheimer painting he had ever seen (he would become a great fan and close friend of the painter), he wrote admiringly and drolly about her whimsical picnic scene, La Fete a Duchamp.
He made reference to "Gertrude and Alice" in his columns, attended the midtown salon evenings at the Stettheimer apartment, and relished the company of Matisse, Duchamp, Stieglitz, O'Keeffe, and Peggy Bacon.
Her 1922 portrait, an affectionate satire (in the collection of the Smith College Museum of Art), shows McBride prissily seated on a plump cushion while keeping score at a tennis match (the critic as score-keeper?
