Henry McBride

Background

Henry McBride was born on July 25, 1867 in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Education

Henry McBride attended local public schools. He found employment as a writer and illustrator of seed catalogs published by a local nursery. Having saved $200, he made his way to New York City in 1897. There he studied art under John Ward Stimson (an admirer of William Blake) at the Artists' and Artisans' Institute. McBride later transferred to the Art Students League. He taught himself French in order to pursue his career on summer sketching and walking tours in Europe.

Career

In 1900, McBride felt ready to teach art, and decided to make this contribution to the working class in particular. He therefore inaugurated the art department of the Educational Alliance in New York City. The following year he also accepted the post of director of the School of Industrial Arts at Trenton, N. J. , where Abraham Walkowitz, Samuel Halpert, Jo Davidson, and Jacob Epstein were among his students. Not until 1913 did McBride find his true vocation, art criticism of a dry, subhumorous, and subtle sort. This change in his career occurred, as he later recalled, when he "climbed the two flights of wooden stairs in the old Sun building" to join that newspaper's art department (previously dominated by the critic James Gibbons Huneker and now headed by Samuel Swift). The famous Armory Show of modern art took place in February 1913. Some of the exhibits, such as Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, scandalized the public and received a very bad press, but McBride's unsigned pieces about the exhibition were moderate and informative. Soon afterward Swift resigned from the paper and McBride took full command, having been made, as he put it, "responsible for the activities of about a hundred art galleries. "

He was to retain this "responsibility" in the New York art world for thirty-seven years. During and after World War I, McBride, a frequent visitor to Europe, was a brilliant apologist for the School of Paris. While continuing his weekly reviews for the Sun he also wrote art essays for the Dial (1920 - 1929) and Creative Art (1930 - 1932). Gertrude Stein, Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Gaston Lachaise, Jules Pascin, Virgil Thomson, Elie Nadelman, and Constantin Brancusi were among his most admired friends. McBride more than met this challenge. When the Sun merged with the World Telegram in 1950, McBride was not kept on. Alfred Frankfurter then hired him to write a monthly column for Art News. Until 1955, McBride added luster to that magazine, writing perceptively of such rising painters as Bradley Tomlin, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, as well as of such old friends as Duchamp and Jean Arp. Looked after by Max Miltzlaff, his companion for a quarter-century, McBride endured old age philosophically in his sun-filled apartment in New York City, where he died the undisputed dean of American art critics.

Achievements

• McBride is known for his support of modern artists, both European and American, in the first half of the twentieth century. He became one of the most influential supporters of modern art in his time.

Works

More photos

• book

  • An Eye on the Modern Century: Selected Letters of Henry McBride (Henry McBride Series in Modernism and Modernity)

    ( Henry McBride (1867–1962) became a towering figure in a...)

Views

Quotations: "It may be an unpleasant fact but it is a fact nonetheless, that fifty years hence but a scant half-dozen of our living artists will be remembered with interest and a contemporary critic's task is to be as right as possible about these. "

Personality

McBride was a discriminating appreciator and a deft communicator of all that seems lightest and rarest in modern art.

Connections

There is no exact information about his personal life.