Harold Rosenberg

Born in Brooklyn, Harold Rosenberg, art critic for The New Yorker from 1967 until his death, was himself a lifelong New Yorker. Although he began his career publishing criticism in the many Marxist journals of the 1930s, Rosenberg gradually became dissatisfied with the strictures of Marxist art theory. In the 1950s and 1960s, Rosenberg was a major proponent of abstract expressionism, championing the independence and creativity of artists such as Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky. Influenced by French existentialism and ontology, Rosenberg’s art criticism remained more popular and widely accessible than that of many of his contemporaries.