Grace Glueck, who broke new ground by making the art world a distinct beat at The New York Times, and who helped bring an important sex- discrimination lawsuit against the paper, died on Saturday at her home on the Upper West Side. She was over the age of 100.
Susan Freudenheim confirmed that her stepmother had died.
Ms. Glueck invented the art beat at the newspaper and inspired other newsrooms to make it a journalistic standard with her articles.
Her news articles, interviews and profiles were a staple of the paper's coverage of the visual arts in New York during the 1960's and 70's, a fertile and tumultuous period in which she began uncovering fissures in the glamorous white.
Ms. Glueck was the mother of us all and applied the techniques of political investigative journalism to the little-examined art world.
In a phone interview last year, Barbara Isenberg said that the arts took off in the 1960s because of a lot of money. Grace was the premier writer covering the news and other people began to write in the 70s and 80s.
Ms Glueck was inspired to help initiate a 1974 lawsuit against the paper, accusing it of chronic underpayment and under-promotion of women. When she first started working for the paper, she had experienced it.
Ms. Glueck graduated from New York University with a degree in English. Women in the newsroom were called "skirts" and "Gals" by newspapermen. The man who interviewed her wrote "attractive brunette" on her evaluation. A senior editor told her that she shouldn't try out for a writer's job because she should get married.
She said that she was not allowed to train as a reporter because she was a woman.
After two years as a clerical worker, Ms. Glueck found a job as a picture researcher at The New York Times Book Review and held it for eleven years.
In 1963, she found an image of a nymphet by Balthus to accompany a review of a book. The paper's Sunday editor asked to meet Ms. Glueck after seeing the pair.
She said that he brushes his hands over her lips and said, "You have too much lipstick on."
She was asked by Mr. Markel to write a Sunday art column called "Art People."
It was looked down on by serious artists and critics, but in the end they found it to be a source of news.
Hard reporting was included in the column. She said it was something she wanted to make. The arts editors were interested in it.
Ms. Glueck split her time between the Sunday section of the Times headquarters on West 43rd Street in Manhattan and the daily news operation on the third floor when she started the art people column.
She said she was going to cover the art world from a news perspective. I've never written a news story.
The New York arts patron, collector and former president of MoMA said that Ms. Glueck was unafraid to speak her mind or report the truth. She shaped the art world in New York as well.
The art world was changing quickly. The loft movement opened up SoHo, inflating the scale of painting itself and real estate values in that once-industrial Manhattan neighborhood. The record prices at the auction houses raised questions. Pop Art and the new waves of Op Art demanded column inches in the newspapers. The museums were being transformed by corporate funding. Congress established the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1960's.
Ms. Glueck was a frequent visitor to the galleries and artists' studios. Drawing on her literary education, she wrote "naturalistically", setting an artist in the habitat of a gallery or studio in verbal portraits that were friendly in their intimate details.
There were flashes of what Ms. Isenberg called a wicked sense of humor in her pieces. In her 1992 book, "The Girls in the Balcony," the Times reporter wrote that she bleeds when she writes.
Ms. Glueck said that he looked like a figure from Art History and that he had brushed over his longish hair. She quoted him as saying that it was the problem with artists now. We used to want to be pariahs. There are country houses, two cars, three divorces and five children. An artist has to make a lot of paintings to pay for that.
In one of her profiles of female artists, Ms. Glueck quotes Georgia O'Keeffe as saying it would be terrible if she got a double chin.
Ms. Glueck said she might not have taken the same view of them if she had known them all her life.
Art reviews were added to her work. She was inquisitive, asked questions, got inside the minds of artists, and wrote about their intentions instead of her own reactions, according to Philip Pearlstein.
Ms. Glueck wrote about what The Times had missed. According to Elizabeth Baker, a former editor of Art in America, Grace brought new life to the art pages of the Times.
Ms. Glueck had an issue with how The Times treated women, and in 1969 she read between the lines that women were conspicuously absent. She pointed out that there were no women in the note.
A class-action lawsuit against The Times was filed in 1974 by female employees who accused the company of sex discrimination. There would have been no lawsuit if it weren't for Grace, according to the financial reporter who filed the lawsuit.
The Newspaper Guild, the union that represented nonmanagement employees, had a newsroom women's caucus formed in 1972. The "attractive brunette" remark from Ms. Glueck became proof. Affirmative action plan for women demanded by caucus
Ms. Glueck was promoted to cultural news editor as the caucus gained strength. John Canaday, then The Times's chief art critic, wrote of her in the paper's in-house newsletter, Times Talk, that she objects to having attention called to her beautiful ankles and long eyelashes.
He said that Grace could dig out a story with the help of a construction crew and a dentist.
Ms. Glueck quit her job as editor and returned to her bike and art beat.
Both sides claimed victory in the court settlement. The Times did not make any changes to its affirmative-action program. The company agreed to place more women in jobs ranging from entry level to top management and to create annuities to cover the costs of delayed career advancement.
Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Center for Oral History Research at Columbia University, said that the sex discrimination lawsuit was the most important in American journalism.
Grace Glueck was the daughter of Ernest and Mignon Glueck. Rockville Centre is a suburb on Long Island. Her mother was a newspaper writer. After high school, Ms. Glueck went to New York University, where she worked as an editor. She received her degree in 1948.
Her husband was a business and financial reporter. He passed away in January. Ms. Glueck was also survived by her stepdaughter, Ms. Freudenheim.
In 1991, Ms. Glueck retired from The Times and wrote a book with a former Times arts editor. A book about New York depicted by artists was written by her.
She returned to The Times through the early 2010s after writing for The New York Observer for a short time.
She acknowledged ruefully that before she became involved in the lawsuit, she had become inordinately wedded to the paper, and that tying her identity to it so closely had exacted a price.
She said she enjoyed working that hard. It became my entire life, as it did for many people. It is unfortunate that I couldn't imagine a different existence. I didn't say anything. No one took it seriously, including me.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
