To the Editors:
I feel sure that I am not alone in having been disturbed by Deborah Solomon’s review of Eleanor Munro’s book Memoir of a Modernist’s Daughter in the September issue of The New Criterion. What could it have been about this delightful book to have caused such venom? I shall comment, however, only on that part in which Miss Solomon says that Art News, under Alfred Frankfurter’s direction, was “notoriously hostile to the Abstract Expressionists” before the late 1940s. It is perfectly true that Frankfurter was not the first to have championed them, but Miss Munro did not say he was the first. It must be remembered, also, that in the 1940s there were few opportunities to see their work. I myself was writing for Art News beginning in December 1949. By then the gallery scene was beginning to change, and the work of the Abstract Expressionists—a term not then in use—was finding its way into galleries. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say, as Miss Munro says, that under Frankfurter’s direction Art News “became a catapult lifting the Abstract Expressionists to fame.” Milton Brown said as much to me in the mid-1950s. Specifically, what he said was that Art News by then had become the Wall Street Journalof the New York avant-garde. And we should not overlook the attention the magazine paid to other phases of art history. Frankfurter had contacts with collectors, scholars, and museum directors throughout the world. He