PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: criticism
German author
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era....
French dramatist
Molière was a French actor and playwright who became the greatest of all writers of French comedy. Although the sacred and secular authorities of 17th-century France often combined against him, the genius...
French author
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps the most important and...
English writer and artist
John Ruskin was an English critic of art, architecture, and society who was a gifted painter, a distinctive prose stylist, and an important example of the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a writer of polemical...
Irish dramatist and critic
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. (Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)...
French composer
Hector Berlioz was a French composer, critic, and conductor of the Romantic period, known largely for his Symphonie fantastique (1830), the choral symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839), and the dramatic piece...
French author
Stendhal was one of the most original and complex French writers of the first half of the 19th century, chiefly known for his works of fiction. His finest novels are Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red...
English novelist
Jane Austen was an English writer who first gave the novel its distinctly modern character through her treatment of ordinary people in everyday life. She published four novels during her lifetime: Sense...
British critic
Matthew Arnold was an English Victorian poet and literary and social critic, noted especially for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the “Barbarians” (the aristocracy), the...
French author
Émile Zola was a French novelist, critic, and political activist who was the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. He was noted for his theories of naturalism, which underlie his monumental...
Russian-born artist
Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue...
Italian sculptor
Lorenzo Ghiberti was an early Italian Renaissance sculptor, whose doors (Gates of Paradise; 1425–52) for the Baptistery of the cathedral of Florence are considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Italian...
British artist and author
William Morris was an English designer, craftsman, poet, and early socialist, whose designs for furniture, fabrics, stained glass, wallpaper, and other decorative arts generated the Arts and Crafts movement...
American author
Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian-born American novelist and critic and the foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian and English, and his best works, including Lolita (1955), feature...
American artist
James McNeill Whistler was an American-born artist noted for his paintings of nocturnal London, for his striking and stylistically advanced full-length portraits, and for his brilliant etchings and lithographs....
German composer and musician
Carl Maria von Weber was a German composer and opera director during the transition from Classical to Romantic music, noted especially for his operas Der Freischütz (1821; The Freeshooter, or, more colloquially,...
British painter
Joshua Reynolds was a portrait painter and aesthetician who dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century. Through his art and teaching, he attempted to lead British painting away...
French writer and statesman
André Malraux was a French novelist, art historian, and statesman who became an active supporter of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and, after de Gaulle was elected president in 1958, served for 10 years as France’s...
French composer
Jean-Philippe Rameau was a French composer of the late Baroque period, best known today for his harpsichord music, operas, and works in other theatrical genres but in his lifetime also famous as a music...
German dramatist
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for...
Korean artist, critic, philosopher, and poet
Lee Ufan is a Korean artist, critic, philosopher, and poet who was a prominent theorist and proponent of the Tokyo-based movement of young artists from the late 1960s through the early ’70s known as Mono-ha...
American artist and collector
Katherine Dreier was an American art collector, artist, and writer who took it as her mission to promote the understanding and appreciation of modern art and the work of living artists, including Paul...
American critic
Clement Greenberg was an American art critic who advocated a formalist aesthetic. He is best known as an early champion of Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg was born to parents of Lithuanian Jewish descent....
American artist
Elaine de Kooning was an American painter, teacher, and art critic who is perhaps best known for her portraits. A precocious young artist with a competitive streak that found an outlet in sports, Elaine...
German art historian
Johann Winckelmann was a German archaeologist and art historian whose writings directed popular taste toward classical art, particularly that of ancient Greece, and influenced not only Western painting...
Chinese artist
Mi Fu was a scholar, poet, calligrapher, and painter who was a dominant figure in Chinese art. Of his extensive writings—poetry, essays on the history of aesthetics, and criticism of painting—a considerable...
British artist and writer
Wyndham Lewis was an English artist and writer who founded the Vorticist movement, which sought to relate art and literature to the industrial process. About 1893 Lewis moved to London with his mother...
American author
David Mamet is an American playwright, director, and screenwriter noted for his often desperate working-class characters and for his distinctive, colloquial, and frequently profane dialogue. Mamet began...
American poet, scholar, and critic
Adrienne Rich was an American poet, scholar, teacher, and critic whose many volumes of poetry trace a stylistic transformation from formal, well-crafted but imitative poetry to a more personal and powerful...
French painter
Paul Sérusier was a French Post-Impressionist painter and theorist who was instrumental in the formation of the short-lived, but highly influential, late 19th-century art movement known as the Nabis. The...
American author
Harlan Ellison was an American writer of short stories, novels, essays, and television and film scripts. Though he eschewed genre categorization himself, his work was most frequently labeled science fiction....
British writer
Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter whose work is marked by verbal brilliance, ingenious action, and structural dexterity. Stoppard’s father was working in Singapore in the...
American art critic
Harold Rosenberg was an American art critic known for championing the work of such painters as Jackson Pollock. He coined the term Action painting to describe the work of American Abstract Expressionists....
American orientalist and art critic
Ernest F. Fenollosa was an American Orientalist and educator who made a significant contribution to the preservation of traditional art in Japan. Fenollosa studied philosophy and sociology at Harvard,...
Nigerian-born art curator
Okwui Enwezor was a Nigerian-born poet, art critic, art historian, and curator who helped bring global attention to African art. Enwezor was raised in Enugu in eastern Nigeria. In the early 1980s he relocated...
British musician and historian
Charles Burney was an organist, composer, and the foremost music historian of his time in England. After attending Chester Free School (1739–42), Burney returned to Shrewsbury, assisted his half-brother,...
Cuban author
José Lezama Lima was a Cuban experimental poet, novelist, and essayist whose baroque writing style and eclectic erudition profoundly influenced other Caribbean and Latin American writers. Lezama’s father,...
American writer
Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius whose Paris home was a salon for the leading artists and writers of the period between World Wars I and II. Stein spent...
American composer
Gunther Schuller was an American composer, performer, conductor, teacher, and writer noted for his wide range of activity in both jazz and classical music and for his works embracing both jazz and advanced...
English author
John Evelyn was an English country gentleman, author of some 30 books on the fine arts, forestry, and religious topics. His Diary, kept all his life, is considered an invaluable source of information on...
German composer
Paul Hindemith was one of the principal German composers of the first half of the 20th century and a leading musical theorist. He sought to revitalize tonality—the traditional harmonic system that was...
Australian art critic and television personality
Robert Hughes was an Australian art critic and television personality known for his informed and highly opinionated criticism and his accessible and succinct writing style. After graduating (1956) from...
French composer
Camille Saint-Saëns was a composer chiefly remembered for his symphonic poems—the first of that genre to be written by a Frenchman—and for his opera Samson et Dalila. Saint-Saëns was notable for his pioneering...
American curator and art critic
Lawrence Alloway was an English-born American curator and art critic who wrote widely on a variety of popular art topics. He is credited with coining the now-common term Pop art, although its meaning came...
American editor and writer
Jeannette Leonard Gilder was an American editor and writer, a prolific and influential figure in popular journalism, particularly in the arts, in the latter half of the 19th century. Gilder grew up in...
Italian musician
Guido d’Arezzo was a medieval music theorist whose principles served as a foundation for modern Western musical notation. Educated at the Benedictine abbey at Pomposa, Guido evidently made use of the music...
American composer
Milton Babbitt was an American composer and theorist known as a leading proponent of total serialism—i.e., musical composition based on prior arrangements not only of all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale...
Italian artist and author
Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, architect, and writer who is best known for his important biographies of Italian Renaissance artists. When still a child, Vasari was the pupil of Guglielmo de Marcillat,...
English author
Walter Pater was an English critic, essayist, and humanist whose advocacy of “art for art’s sake” became a cardinal doctrine of the movement known as Aestheticism. Pater was educated at King’s School,...
French author
Yves Bonnefoy was perhaps the most important French poet of the latter half of the 20th century. Bonnefoy was also a respected critic, scholar, and translator. Bonnefoy’s father was a railroad employee,...