Hilton Kramer

His passion was High Modernism, but if Hilton Kramer had been a work of art, it would have been Uccello’s 15th century painting of St. George slaying the dragon. Kramer, who died March 27 at 84, would have been St. George, the virtuous warrior. The dragon would have been whole precincts of American culture as they developed in the 1960s and afterward. In his years as the New York Times’ combative art critic and then as a founder of the truculent arts review the New Criterion, Kramer scorned a world refashioned by postmodernism, accusing it of subverting the integrity of high culture through commercialism, triviality and political correctness. Like most polemicists, he could be as narrow and predictable on the page as the people he targeted, but in person he was funny and charming. You could tell he enjoyed tilting his lance at the philistines.