Emily Genauer

Emily Genauer (July 19, 1911 – August 23, 2002) was an American art critic for the New York World, the New York Herald Tribune, and Newsday. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1974.

Champion of Modern Art

Born on Staten Island in 1911, delicatessen-owning father was an amateur sculptor. After studying at Hunter College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism,^[1] she went to work as a writer for the New York World, eventually becoming a critic in the 1930s. After she married Frederick Gash, she retained her maiden name as her byline.

She was instrumental in introducing modern artist to her readers, championing Marc Chagall, Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso. She quit the newspaper (which had become the New York World-Telegram after a merger) in 1949, during the Cold War hysteria that was gripping America, when owner Roy W. Howard complained that she was promoting left-wing artists like Pablo Picasso. She was hired by the paper-of-record of the Eastern Republican Establishment, the New York Herald Tribune, where she was the art critic through 1967, through the paper's demise after it merged with two other New York dailies. She then went to work for Newsday, which syndicated her work.^[2]

Genauer also wrote books and served on the National Council on the Humanities from 1966 to 1970.

References