Hilton Kramer, 84, Harpswell, died March 27 of heart failure after developing a rare blood disease. He had lived in Damariscotta with his wife Esta.
Mr. Kramer was born on March 25, 1928 in Cape Ann, Mass. As a boy he gravitated toward the local artists’ colony and spent long hours in Boston’s art museums. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English at Syracuse University in 1950, he studied literature and philosophy at Columbia, the New School for Social Research and Harvard. He also studied at the Indiana University School of Letters.
He was published in the Partisan Review in 1953. Mr. Kramer was hired as managing editor of the monthly magazine Arts in 1955. He became chief editor in 1961. He also wrote art criticism for The New Republic and the Nation.
He married the former Esta Teich in 1964. She is his only immediate survivor.
Mr. Kramer became art-news editor of The New York Times in 1965 and in 1973 he became with newspaper’s chief art critic. In 1982 he left The Times to edit The New Criterion. From 1993 to 1997 he wrote a column in The New York Post.
Many of his essays on art and politics were republished in four collections, “The Age of the Avent Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956-1972” (1973); “The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture, 1972-1984” (1985); “The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War” (1999); and “The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005” (2006).
He wrote on everything from novels and poetry to dance and philosophy, but it was as an art critic that he was best known.
