PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: criticism
German author
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era. Goethe...
French dramatist
Molière, French actor and playwright, the greatest of all writers of French comedy. Although the sacred and secular authorities of 17th-century France often combined against him, the genius of Molière...
English writer and artist
John Ruskin, English critic of art, architecture, and society who was a gifted painter, a distinctive prose stylist, and an important example of the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a writer of polemical prose...
French author
Charles Baudelaire, French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps the most important and influential...
Irish dramatist and critic
George Bernard Shaw, Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. (Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)...
French composer
Hector Berlioz, French composer, critic, and conductor of the Romantic period, known largely for his Symphonie fantastique (1830), the choral symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839), and the dramatic piece La...
French author
Émile Zola, French novelist, critic, and political activist who was the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. He was noted for his theories of naturalism, which underlie his monumental...
French author
Stendhal, one of the most original and complex French writers of the first half of the 19th century, chiefly known for his works of fiction. His finest novels are Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and...
English novelist
Jane Austen, English writer who first gave the novel its distinctly modern character through her treatment of ordinary people in everyday life. She published four novels during her lifetime: Sense and...
British critic
Matthew Arnold, English Victorian poet and literary and social critic, noted especially for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the “Barbarians” (the aristocracy), the “Philistines”...
Russian-born artist
Wassily Kandinsky, Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter...
Italian sculptor
Lorenzo Ghiberti, early Italian Renaissance sculptor, whose doors (Gates of Paradise; 1425–52) for the Baptistery of the cathedral of Florence are considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Italian...
British artist and author
William Morris, English designer, craftsman, poet, and early socialist, whose designs for furniture, fabrics, stained glass, wallpaper, and other decorative arts generated the Arts and Crafts movement...
American artist
James McNeill Whistler, American-born artist noted for his paintings of nocturnal London, for his striking and stylistically advanced full-length portraits, and for his brilliant etchings and lithographs....
German composer and musician
Carl Maria von Weber, German composer and opera director during the transition from Classical to Romantic music, noted especially for his operas Der Freischütz (1821; The Freeshooter, or, more colloquially,...
British painter
Joshua Reynolds, portrait painter and aesthetician who dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century. Through his art and teaching, he attempted to lead British painting away from...
American author
Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-born American novelist and critic, the foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian and English, and his best works, including Lolita (1955), feature stylish,...
French writer and statesman
André Malraux, French novelist, art historian, and statesman who became an active supporter of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and, after de Gaulle was elected president in 1958, served for 10 years as France’s...
French composer
Jean-Philippe Rameau, French composer of the late Baroque period, best known today for his harpsichord music, operas, and works in other theatrical genres but in his lifetime also famous as a music theorist....
German dramatist
Bertolt Brecht, German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for leftist...
Korean artist, critic, philosopher, and poet
Lee Ufan, Korean artist, critic, philosopher, and poet who was a prominent theorist and proponent of the Tokyo-based movement of young artists from the late 1960s through the early ’70s known as Mono-ha...
American critic
Clement Greenberg, American art critic who advocated a formalist aesthetic. He is best known as an early champion of Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg was born to parents of Lithuanian Jewish descent....
Chinese artist
Mi Fu, scholar, poet, calligrapher, and painter who was a dominant figure in Chinese art. Of his extensive writings—poetry, essays on the history of aesthetics, and criticism of painting—a considerable...
German art historian
Johann Winckelmann, German archaeologist and art historian whose writings directed popular taste toward classical art, particularly that of ancient Greece, and influenced not only Western painting and...
British artist and writer
Wyndham Lewis, English artist and writer who founded the Vorticist movement, which sought to relate art and literature to the industrial process. About 1893 Lewis moved to London with his mother after...
American artist
Elaine de Kooning, American painter, teacher, and art critic who is perhaps best known for her portraits. A precocious young artist with a competitive streak that found an outlet in sports, she graduated...
French painter
Paul Sérusier, French Post-Impressionist painter and theorist who was instrumental in the formation of the short-lived, but highly influential, late 19th-century art movement known as the Nabis. The group...
American writer
Gertrude Stein, avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius whose Paris home was a salon for the leading artists and writers of the period between World Wars I and II. Stein spent her...
American film critic
Roger Ebert, American film critic, perhaps the best known of his profession, who became the first person to receive a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism (1975). Ebert’s journalism career began at the Champaign-Urbana...
American author
David Mamet, American playwright, director, and screenwriter noted for his often desperate working-class characters and for his distinctive, colloquial, and frequently profane dialogue. Mamet began writing...
American author
Harlan Ellison, American writer of short stories, novels, essays, and television and film scripts. Though he eschewed genre categorization himself, his work was most frequently labeled science fiction....
American orientalist and art critic
Ernest F. Fenollosa, American Orientalist and educator who made a significant contribution to the preservation of traditional art in Japan. Fenollosa studied philosophy and sociology at Harvard, graduating...
Italian artist and author
Giorgio Vasari, Italian painter, architect, and writer who is best known for his important biographies of Italian Renaissance artists. When still a child, Vasari was the pupil of Guglielmo de Marcillat,...
American art critic
Harold Rosenberg, American art critic known for championing the work of such painters as Jackson Pollock. He coined the term Action painting to describe the work of American Abstract Expressionists. Rosenberg...
German composer
Paul Hindemith, one of the principal German composers of the first half of the 20th century and a leading musical theorist. He sought to revitalize tonality—the traditional harmonic system that was being...
British musician and historian
Charles Burney, organist, composer, and the foremost music historian of his time in England. After attending Chester Free School (1739–42), Burney returned to Shrewsbury, assisted his half-brother, a church...
American poet, scholar, and critic
Adrienne Rich, American poet, scholar, teacher, and critic whose many volumes of poetry trace a stylistic transformation from formal, well-crafted but imitative poetry to a more personal and powerful style....
French composer
Camille Saint-Saëns, composer chiefly remembered for his symphonic poems—the first of that genre to be written by a Frenchman—and for his opera Samson et Dalila. Saint-Saëns was notable for his pioneering...
Cuban author
José Lezama Lima, Cuban experimental poet, novelist, and essayist whose baroque writing style and eclectic erudition profoundly influenced other Caribbean and Latin American writers. Lezama’s father, a...
American composer
Gunther Schuller, American composer, performer, conductor, teacher, and writer noted for his wide range of activity in both jazz and classical music and for his works embracing both jazz and advanced 12-tone...
English author
John Evelyn, English country gentleman, author of some 30 books on the fine arts, forestry, and religious topics. His Diary, kept all his life, is considered an invaluable source of information on the...
American composer
Milton Babbitt, American composer and theorist known as a leading proponent of total serialism—i.e., musical composition based on prior arrangements not only of all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale (as...
Australian art critic and television personality
Robert Hughes, Australian art critic and television personality known for his informed and highly opinionated criticism and his accessible and succinct writing style. After graduating (1956) from St. Ignatius...
American curator and art critic
Lawrence Alloway, English-born American curator and art critic who wrote widely on a variety of popular art topics. He is credited with coining the now-common term Pop art, although its meaning came to...
British writer
Tom Stoppard, Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter whose work is marked by verbal brilliance, ingenious action, and structural dexterity. Stoppard’s father was working in Singapore in the late...
American editor and writer
Jeannette Leonard Gilder, American editor and writer, a prolific and influential figure in popular journalism, particularly in the arts, in the latter half of the 19th century. Gilder grew up in Flushing,...
American artist and critic
Donald Judd, American artist and critic associated with Minimalism. Credited as Minimalism’s principal spokesman, Judd wrote what is considered to be one of the most significant texts of the movement,...
Italian musician
Guido d’Arezzo, medieval music theorist whose principles served as a foundation for modern Western musical notation. Educated at the Benedictine abbey at Pomposa, Guido evidently made use of the music...
English painter and writer
Edward Lear, English landscape painter who is more widely known as the writer of an original kind of nonsense verse and as the popularizer of the limerick. His true genius is apparent in his nonsense poems,...
British author and producer
Harley Granville-Barker, English dramatist, producer, and critic whose repertoire seasons and Shakespeare criticism profoundly influenced 20th-century theatre. Barker began his stage training at 13 years...