By Hilton Kramer 12/20/04 12:00am

Stylish Premodern Chase, Coeval of the Avant-Garde

It has come as a surprise to me to be reminded that the career of the American painter William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) actually overlapped with the emergence of the modernist movement in this country. I’d always thought of Chase-to the extent that I thought about him at all-as belonging to an earlier, premodern period. Yet Read More

By Hilton Kramer 4/02/01 12:00am

Germans Had Beethoven, but Could They Paint?

It has long been one of the paradoxes of cultural life in the English-speaking world that while 19th-century German music, the music of Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Mendelsohn et al., has dominated the repertory of our concert halls and the recording of classical music, German painting of the same period has remained–until recently, anyway–an isolated Read More