Karen Wilkin
Karen Wilkin is an independent curator and critic. The author of monographs on Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Giorgio Morandi, and Hans Hofmann, she has organized exhibitions of their work internationally. She is a Contributing Editor for Art for the Hudson Review and contributes regularly to the New Criterion and the Wall Street Journal. Ms. Wilkin teaches in the New York Studio School's M.F.A program.
Inventive and original painter. Inspired and inspiring teacher. Perceptive commentator on works of art. Connoisseur of wine, sunsets, and sunrises. Excellent cook. I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to remember when I first met the multi-talented Graham Nickson.
Artists made me an art critic—not a theorist, essayist, or reviewer; blogging hadn’t been invented when I started writing criticism, nor had the Internet, which probably defines my point of view, in many ways. I was working as a museum curator in Western Canada (a long story), visiting studios, responding to the work I saw, organizing shows, and writing catalogue essays.
In 1943, reviewing a group show of sculpture at Buchholz and Willard Galleries for The Nation, Clement Greenberg wrote that David Smith’s work “puts in the shade almost everything else.”
