By Roger Kimball

Hilton Kramer, who died Tuesday age 84, was a fiery ornament on the nation’s cultural landscape for more than four decades.

The hallmarks of Kramer’s criticism were clarity of expression, aesthetic discrimination and forthright independence. Forthrightness has never been a popular commodity; in an age of political correctness, it is especially unfashionable. Being unfashionable never troubled Kramer. He was fond of quoting William Dean Howells’s observation that the problem for a critic was not making enemies, but keeping them.

It did not please Hilton Kramer to make enemies. But he knew that the job of a cultural critic was to tell the truth and that the truth is often unpalatable.

He loved telling the story of attending a dinner at the Whitney Museum. He was seated next to the film director Woody Allen, who asked whether he ever felt embarrassed when he met socially artists whom he had criticized. No, Kramer replied, they’re they ones who made the bad art: I just described it. Mr. Allen, he recalled, lapsed into gloomy silence. It was only on his way home that Kramer recalled writing a highly critical piece about “The Front,” a P.C. movie about the Hollywood blacklist in which Mr. Allen acted.

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  art, art criticism, Hilton Kramer, Hilton Kramer: An art critic dedicated to truth, however unfashionable