Henry McBride (art critic)

Henry McBride (July 25, 1867 – March 31, 1962) was an American art critic known for his support of modern artists, both European and American, in the first half of the twentieth century. As a writer during the 1920s for the newspaper The New York Sun and the avant-garde magazine The Dial, McBride became one of the most influential supporters of modern art in his time. He also wrote for Creative Art (1928-1932) and Art News (1950-1959). Living to be ninety-five, McBride was born in the era of Winslow Homer and the Hudson River School and lived to see the rise of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and the New York School.

McBride was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, to Quaker parents. He studied art in New York City at the Artist-Artisan Institute and later took night classes at the Art Students League of New York. He started the art department of The Educational Alliance and directed the Trenton School of Industrial Arts in New Jersey for five years. 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.

McBride came to art criticism late in life, but his timing was excellent. 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, 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. Initially, his prospects for advancement did not look good. The instructions he was given were blunt: "Don't be highbrow." That was the province of his boss. But during his first winter on the job, Swift had a falling-out with the newspaper's publisher and, as McBride wrote, he was happily obliged "to shift my brow into high." 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. McBride worked for the Sun for the next thirty-six years. Let go at the age of eighty-three when the newspaper merged with another, less arts-conscious newspaper, he promptly started writing a monthly column with Art News.

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