Items25The creator’s order
- 1
John RuskinBorn 8 Feb 1819Ruskin's great instruction was simply to look harder. Modern Painters defended Turner by describing real skies, clouds and water so exactly that readers went outside to check, and The Stones of Venice reads Gothic carving as evidence of the freedom of the masons who made it. His The Elements of…0i - 2
Kenneth ClarkBorn 13 Jul 1903Clark's television series Civilisation, broadcast by the BBC in 1969, walked viewers through buildings and paintings and showed them where to look, at a carved capital or a gesture in a fresco, in a way no one had done on screen before. Its confident view of a Western canon now looks narrow, and…0i - 3
Pauline KaelBorn 19 Jun 1919Kael wrote about films as they feel in the moment of watching, in fast, conversational prose, and that made readers trust their own pleasure and boredom. Her 1967 review of Bonnie and Clyde for The New Yorker, which explained why its violence and comedy unsettled audiences, helped rescue the film…0i - 4
Ada Louise HuxtableBorn 14 Mar 1921Huxtable became the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper when The New York Times appointed her in 1963, and in 1970 she won the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism. She wrote for people walking past buildings, not architects: her columns explained why the demolition of the…0i - 5
John BergerBorn 5 Nov 1926Ways of Seeing, Berger's four-part BBC series of 1972 and the book made with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb and Richard Hollis, changed what viewers notice in a painting: who owns it, who is looking at whom, how a nude differs from a naked person, and how oil painting's love of possessions…0i - 6
Kenneth TynanBorn 2 Apr 1927Tynan's reviews in The Observer from 1954 made readers see performances in physical detail: how an actor moved, paused or held a stage. His 1956 review of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which said he could not love anyone who did not wish to see it, helped turn a divisive play into a landmark,…0i - 7
Wendy BeckettSister Wendy, a Carmelite nun who had lived largely in solitude, became an unlikely BBC star in the 1990s with series such as Sister Wendy's Grand Tour and The Story of Painting. Her method was simple and contagious: stand close, describe exactly what is there, the turn of a wrist, a patch of…0i - 8
Ian NairnBorn 24 Aug 1930Nairn taught readers to notice ordinary places. His 1955 special issue of the Architectural Review, Outrage, coined the word subtopia for the bland sprawl of car parks, wires and signs swallowing British towns, and his guides Nairn's London and Nairn's Towns describe pubs, railway arches and back…0 - 9
Susan SontagBorn 16 Jan 1933Sontag changed how readers look at photographs. On Photography, the essays she published in The New York Review of Books from 1973, asks what happens when we collect images of the world instead of experiencing it, and how a photograph of suffering can move us or numb us; Regarding the Pain of…0i - 10
Arlene CroceDance vanishes the moment it ends, and Croce, The New Yorker's dance critic from 1973 to 1996, made it stay on the page. Her reviews of George Balanchine's ballets and of choreographers from Twyla Tharp to Paul Taylor describe steps, phrasing and musical timing so precisely that readers who had…0
