Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go…

Brooks Atkinson

Justin Brooks Atkinson (November 28, 1894 – January 14, 1984) was an American theatre critic. He worked for The New York Times from 1925 to 1960. In his obituary, the Times called him “the most important reviewer of his time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Atkinson

The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings…

Henri-Frederic Amiel

Henri Frédéric Amiel (28 September 1821 – 11 May 1881) was a Swiss philosopher, poet and critic.

Born in Geneva in 1821, he was descended from a Huguenot family driven to Switzerland by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

After losing his parents at an early age, Amiel travelled widely, became intimate with the intellectual leaders of Europe, and made a special study of German philosophy in Berlin. In 1849 he was appointed professor of aesthetics at the academy of Geneva, and in 1854 became professor of moral philosophy. These appointments, conferred by the democratic party, deprived him of the support of the aristocratic party, which comprised nearly all the culture of the city.

This isolation inspired the one book by which Amiel is still known, the Journal Intime (“Private Journal”), which, published after his death, obtained a European reputation. It was translated into English by Mary A. Ward at the instigation of Mark Pattison.

Although second-rate as regards productive power, Amiel’s mind was of no inferior quality, and his Journal gained a sympathy that the author had failed to obtain in his life. In addition to the Journal, he produced several volumes of poetry and wrote studies on Erasmus, Madame de Stael and other writers. He died in Geneva.

The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings…

Henri-Frederic Amiel

Henri Frédéric Amiel (28 September 1821 – 11 May 1881) was a Swiss philosopher, poet and critic.

Born in Geneva in 1821, he was descended from a Huguenot family driven to Switzerland by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

After losing his parents at an early age, Amiel travelled widely, became intimate with the intellectual leaders of Europe, and made a special study of German philosophy in Berlin. In 1849 he was appointed professor of aesthetics at the academy of Geneva, and in 1854 became professor of moral philosophy. These appointments, conferred by the democratic party, deprived him of the support of the aristocratic party, which comprised nearly all the culture of the city.

This isolation inspired the one book by which Amiel is still known, the Journal Intime (“Private Journal”), which, published after his death, obtained a European reputation. It was translated into English by Mary A. Ward at the instigation of Mark Pattison.

Although second-rate as regards productive power, Amiel’s mind was of no inferior quality, and his Journal gained a sympathy that the author had failed to obtain in his life. In addition to the Journal, he produced several volumes of poetry and wrote studies on Erasmus, Madame de Stael and other writers. He died in Geneva.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri-Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Amiel

Just as our taste in lovers is far more revealing than our choice of friends, the object of an artist’s obsession can open up doors to their soul that might otherwise remain shut tight.

Vince Aletti

Vince Aletti (born 1945) is an American music journalist and photography critic.

Vince Aletti was the first person to write about disco (in a piece published in Rolling Stone in 1973), writing a weekly column about disco for the music trade magazine Record World(1974-1979) and reporting about early clubs like David Mancuso’s Loft for The Village Voice in the late 1970s and 1980s.

In 1979 and 1980, Aletti also worked as the A&R man for Ray Caviano’s RFC Records. He was a senior editor at The Village Voice for nearly 20 years until leaving in early 2005.

In 1998, Aletti was the curator of a highly praised survey exhibition of art and photography called Male, which was followed up in 1999 by Female, both at Wessel + O’Connor Gallery in New York. In conjunction with those shows, he was the co-editor of the Fall 1999 “Male/Female” issue of Aperture, featuring his interview with Madonna, which was later anthologized in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing (2000).

In 2000, he was the co-curator of an exhibition called Settings & Players: Theatrical Ambiguity in American Photography at London’s White Cube 2 gallery, and the following year he organized a show of Steven Klein’s fashion work for the Museé de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Aletti was one of the two featured writers of The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century (2001).

In 2005, Aletti wrote moving tributes to Helen Gee and Richard Avedon for the Village Voice, in addition to his weekly reviews of New York museum and gallery exhibitions. Aletti is especially attuned to new developments in the New York City art world and his writing combines a journalistic sensibility and an understated critical grammar.

These days, Vince Aletti reviews photography exhibitions for The New Yorker’s “Goings on About Town” section.

Art is the sex of the imagination.

George Jean Nathan

George Jean Nathan (February 14 1882 – April 8 1958) was an American drama critic and editor.Nathan was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He graduated from Cornell University in 1904, where he was a member of the Quill and Dagger society.
Noted for the erudition and cynicism of his reviews, Nathan was an early champion of Eugene O’Neill. Together with H.L. Mencken, he co-edited the magazine The Smart Set from 1914 and co-founded The American Mercury in 1924. He was also a founder and an editor (1932–35) of the American Spectator, and after 1943 he wrote a syndicated column for the New York Journal-American.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Jean_Nathan

There may be a history of modern art and a history of traditional art, but there can be no history of postmodern art, for the radically contemporary can never be delimited by any single historical reading.

Donald Kuspit

Donald Kuspit is an art critic and professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is a contributing editor at Artforum, Sculpture, and New Art Examiner magazines, the editor of Art Criticism, and the editor of a series on American Art and Art Criticism for Cambridge University Press. In 1997 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to Visual Arts from the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. He is a 1983 recipient of the College Art Association’s prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism. He has also been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. An author of numerous articles, exhibition reviews, and catalog essays, Kuspit has written more than twenty books, including Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries (2000); Idiosyncratic Identities: Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde (1996); Daniel Brush: Gold without Boundaries (with Ralph Esmerian and David Bennett, 1998); Reflections of Nature: Paintings by Joseph Raffael (with Amei Wallace, 1998); and Chihuly (1998). He lives in New York City.

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n1/gallery/kuspit_d/

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Henry Ellis
Henry Havelock Ellis (February 2, 1859 – July 8, 1939) was a British doctor, sexual psychologist and social reformer.

ELLIS, psychologist, critic and editor, was born on 2 February 1859 at Old Croydon, Surrey, England, the eldest child and only son of Edward Peppen Ellis (1827-1914), sea captain, and his wife Susannah (1830-1888), daughter of Captain John Wheatley. In 1866 his father took him in the Empress to Sydney. On his return and in the absence of his father Ellis assumed much family responsibility. The influence of his mother’s evangelical faith on him was reinforced by the preaching of Rev. John Erck of Merton, but his teacher at The Poplars, Tooting, interested him in wider aspects of religion and introduced him to nineteenth-century literature. On 19 April 1875 Ellis left in his father’s Surry for Sydney. On the voyage he read widely. He also began a journal which he continued erratically for four years, and consulted it in 1884 for Kanga Creek (London, 1922), a much-praised novelle based partly on his Australian life; he later used a few incidents in his clinical studies but not, he claimed, in his autobiography begun in 1899 and published as My Life in 1940.

 

Ellis decided to stay in New South Wales. He became a teacher at Fontlands, a private school in Burwood, but lacked qualifications and experience; his salary was reduced and he left at the end of the year. In 1876 he tutored the five children of a retired civil servant at Goonawarrie, near Carcoar. He found the work tolerable enough and revisited Sydney to matriculate at the University of Sydney, but did not proceed to an external course. Despite some material comfort it had been a dark year: he lost much of his faith but not his longing for spiritual assuredness. He retreated again to the country as sole assistant in a Grafton proprietory school. When the owner died, Ellis found himself ‘a boy of eighteen—headmaster of a grammar school’. The venture failed and in October he sold out cheaply. He had lodged at Grafton with an auctioneer, with whose daughter he fell in love. He was too reticent to mention the fact but the experience increased his understanding of human affection. On this theme, in his solitude and perplexity, he dwelt more and more.

 

Back in Sydney, Ellis determined to ‘go under the Council [of Education]’. He read hard at the Public Library but disliked his month of training at Fort Street Normal School, where ‘the great object is discipline’. He passed his examination and was posted to half-time schools at Sparkes and Junction Creeks, near Scone. He must have been an adequate teacher and, by his own account, was not unhappy. His commonplace books of 1878 reveal intensive reading and a larger interest in natural science. In particular he re-read Life in Nature by James Hinton, a physiologist and amateur philosopher, and consulted Ellis Hopkins’s edition of Hinton’s Life and Letters. Hinton’s exposition gave the questing Ellis a belief in the inherent righteousness of the search for artistic and scientific truth. The best avenue for his search, Ellis thought, was a medical and not a clerical career. He resolved to return to England and sailed in La Hogue in January 1879. On 27 February he confided in his diary: ‘These three years I have spent in Australia seem to me like those three during which Paul was in Arabia’. In 1881-89 while studying medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital, London, he began editing the ‘Mermaid’ series of dramatists and then the ‘Contemporary Science’ series. In 1897-1910 his six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex appeared; his other publications include Man and Woman (1894), Little Essays of Love and Virtue (1922) and Impressions and Comments, 3 volumes (1914-24). In 1891 he married Edith Oldham Lees, authoress.

 

Ellis never returned to Australia although he published a paper on ‘The Doctrines of the Freud School’ in Transactions of the Ninth Session, Sydney, 1911, of the Australasian Medical Congress. A photograph of Sparkes Creek, taken by his Australian friend Marjorie Ross, stood by his bedside in his last years. Ellis died without issue on 8 July 1939.

http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A040139b.htm